Changing Lifestyles : A New Mood in Medellin : Violent city is learning to live more peacefully.

Jose Albeiro Espinosa spent more than two years in a trance killing people in Medellin.

He shot them from bicycles, motorcycles and cars. He killed them as a gang member and hired assassin.

“We were blind,” he recalls, “on cocaine, pills or marijuana, without thought or compassion. We would kill one, two, three, four people and then realize the next day what we had done. Then we would keep killing, because we knew someone was going to come for revenge.”

Today, Espinosa, 26, is in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down, the survivor of four assassination attempts. His brother and sister have been killed. And 110 “friends” from his neighborhood are dead, warriors and victims of bloody street battles.

But Espinosa is no longer involved in drugs or violence. He talks about a course in human values that he is taking, and about his job selling clothes. He talks about his need for a good wheelchair and about peace.

Espinosa, like the city where he learned to “kill or be killed,” is learning to live again.

Medellin, Colombia’s industrial center with a population of about 1.6 million and 6,892 homicides last year, is one of the world’s most violent cities. It is the birthplace of slain drug kingpin Pablo Escobar and his Medellin cocaine cartel, the home of hundreds of former assassins who killed judges, police and presidential candidates for drug traffickers in the 1980s and early 1990s.

But today, it is also the site of an extraordinary movement of recovery. Since the death of Escobar in a rooftop shootout with police nearly a year ago, hundreds of people involved in violence in the city have stepped forward to make peace.

About 650 members of militias--illegal vigilante groups that cropped up in poor areas to combat drug trafficking and crime--signed agreements in May to stop terrorizing their neighborhoods. Many are now cooperating with police as neighborhood watchmen and clean-up crews.

Former assassins are participating in vocational training and psychological group-therapy programs. Former gang members are building wells, parks and nurseries.

There are still violent men and boys in Medellin, some still working the drug trade, others involved in radical political movements. But many sections of the city have changed sharply.

In Barrio Antioquia, two years of gang warfare claimed the lives of 220 people between the ages of 12 and 16. Then two of the most violent gangs celebrated a peace pact with rum and a pig roast. Local merchants chipped in to help the gang members buy food, clothes and medicines. The city government offered free medical service and jobs. The constant shootouts, which had made the neighborhood impassable, are now gone, replaced with concerns about work, study and the refurbishing of the local sports park.

“There are many people working in non-governmental organizations in the barrios, or trying to help people there to start up family businesses,” said Jorge Mario Aristizabal, a businessman whose construction firm, Conconcreto, is subsidizing tuition and transport for former gang members who want to go back to school. “There is a strong awareness that we have a serious social problem and that we must help find a solution.”

Aristizabal traces the crisis back to the early 1980s, when drug trafficking arrived in the poor neighborhoods of Medellin. It was an era when a 15-year-old, modeling himself on Escobar, could make $1,000 for an assassination and buy his shoes, his motorcycle and his respect. Many young people preferred the easy money of drug trafficking and violence to the low salaries of legitimate work.

But Medellin’s problems also have deeper roots. Between 1951 and 1973, peasant families fleeing political violence and poverty in the countryside invaded the hillsides around Medellin, tripling the city’s size. The new arrivals, with their country ways, became the labor force of the richer people. They felt increasingly isolated, without opportunities for education or good jobs and their children became frustrated.

The culture that resulted was a mixture of the new and the old: the absolute willingness to kill to get ahead mixed with the cult of the Virgin Mary and dedication to the family matriarch. Today, hired assassins still flock to the sanctuary of the Virgin Maria Auxiliadora outside Medellin to pray. They offer watches, chains and money to the Virgin. They ask for good luck and well-being for their mothers.

“Two cities were created,” Colombian journalist Antonio Morales Riveira wrote in his book “Censored File,” “and in the upper floor were born the kids of today, the third generation of violence, whose reference points since birth have been bullets.”

Faber, at 17, understands those references instinctively. He killed someone for the first time at age 12. Two members of a rival gang came gunning for him. He escaped, and the next day he returned shooting.

“I knew that if I didn’t kill them, they would kill me,” he said.”The best way of defending yourself in a poor neighborhood, even if you’re not born violent, is by attacking.”

Today, Faber is learning to deal with people in nonviolent ways and is free from his steady diet of narcotics. He longs to become a therapist.

“I don’t use drugs, I don’t rob and I don’t kill anymore,” he said. “I consider myself a totally sober and positive person.”

Faber credits his new life to a therapeutic community run by the Presencia Colombo Suiza, a non-governmental organization dedicated to helping young people from troubled backgrounds re-integrate into society. Sponsored by private Swiss donors and Colombian institutions, Colombo Suiza has become a psychological lifeline for about 1,600 youths.

Each day, members of the organization’s 28-person team of sociologists, social workers and psychologists descend into the Villa Cafe barrio and La Iguana, a neighborhood of broken wooden houses and choked, dusty streets where daily shootouts once claimed many lives. The organization runs a nursery, a kindergarten and restaurant there.

The children it reaches find new lives at the group’s two urban centers and farm. They find comfort in group discussions and psychological counseling.

“I used to be very withdrawn,” said Alex Fernando Arango, 16, whose father was forced into a car by a group of men and executed five years ago. “Now I participate in the community. I help to organize youth groups, theater and dances.”

But 15 years of drug trafficking and violence have not been eliminated.

Drug trafficking, always Medellin’s worst plague, continues to thrive. Many former Medellin cartel members are now working with the less violent Cali cartel, authorities say, and many traffickers continue to operate drug-processing laboratories near the city.

Despite the official cessation of hostilities, more than 40 of the 650 militia members who signed peace agreements with the government in May have been slain since then by unknown assailants.

Many say Medellin will have to create employment and educational opportunities for the poor if things are to change.

Juan Guillermo Sepulveda, a peace adviser to Medellin’s mayor, emphasized the importance of understanding and social justice in closing the gap between “the two cities,” between those who feel part of the system and those who do not.

“We have passed laws mistakenly thinking that we are living in a society that is a product of consensus. . . .” he told a group of entrepreneurs at a seminar not far from Medellin’s teeming, red-brick slums. “But those terms are relative. The concept of justice varies five minutes from here.”