An intimate portrait of Colombian adolescents’ first steps into the drug trade

Today, Medellín, Colombia, is widely recognized as a model of urban innovation following its stark homicide drop. Yet behind this transformation lies a far more complex reality of persisting violence affecting the city’s most precarized youth.

We Are the Nobodies offers an immersive ethnographic look into the hidden world of adolescents working at the bottom of the drug economy in Medellín and its surrounding region. Drawing on a decade of research, Elena Butti challenges simplistic understandings of gangs and organized crime as forms of “youth violence,” proposing instead that we read them as violence against youth. She reveals how these adolescents are recruited with promises of respect, economic returns, and upward mobility. In reality, however, these youth perform the most dangerous work, enjoy little upward mobility, and often become addicted to the very drugs they sell. Akin to gig workers, they are paid per task, lack any belonging to the organization, and can easily be dismissed, replaced, or killed the moment they become inconvenient.

Offering an engaging, accessible, and comprehensive look into the invisible workforce sustaining Colombia’s drug economy, We Are the Nobodies reveals what it means to live—and die—at the bottom of a precarized global illegal market.