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MEDELLÍN, COLOMBIA — Behind the Instagram-worthy sunsets, rooftop bars, and digital nomad cafés of Colombia's second-largest city lies a crisis that Mayor Federico Gutiérrez and local authorities have been accused of systematically downplaying: Medellín has become the deadliest city on earth for foreign tourists.

Over the past two years, at least 61 foreign tourists died in Medellín in 2024 alone, with 39 of those classified as violent deaths. By April 2025, another 17 foreign nationals had perished in the metropolitan area. Since 2022, over 80 foreigners have died under suspicious circumstances — many linked to dating apps, nightlife encounters, and the weaponized use of scopolamine, a powerful drug known locally as "Devil's Breath."

No other city in the world comes close to these numbers when it comes to tourist fatalities. While cities like Cancún, Cape Town, and Bangkok have all faced scrutiny over tourist safety, none have produced a body count anywhere near what Medellín has documented in just 24 months. And experts warn the real toll is almost certainly far higher than what official records reflect.

A Foreign Tourist Dying Every Single Week

Newsweek reported in mid-2024 that a foreign tourist was dying in Medellín approximately every single week. Channel 4 News's investigation found that locals believe the real figure could be much higher than the 80-plus officially documented deaths since 2022.

The numbers have climbed sharply year over year. In 2022, an estimated 22 foreigners died. That number jumped 41 percent to at least 31 in 2023, including 8 Americans killed in just November and December of that year. Then came 2024's staggering toll of 61 deaths — roughly one foreign tourist death every six days.

Foreign tourist deaths in Medellín have surged dramatically since 2022, with 2024 marking the deadliest year on record.

Americans Are the Primary Targets

U.S. citizens constitute the single largest group of foreign victims. In 2025 alone, 8 of the 17 documented foreign deaths were Americans. Other nationalities affected include citizens of the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Mexico, Turkey, South Korea, Italy, France, Spain, Canada, Ireland, and Israel. The breadth of nationalities underscores that any foreigner visiting Medellín is a potential target — but Americans, who make up the largest share of the city's tourist population, bear the heaviest losses.

Americans account for 47% of foreign deaths in Medellín in early 2025, but victims come from at least a dozen countries.

The Dating App Death Trap

The most common — and most chilling — pattern involves organized criminal networks using dating apps like Tinder, Bumble, and Grindr to lure male tourists into deadly encounters. Medellín's lead prosecutor, Yiri Milena Amado Sanchez, confirmed to the Associated Press that most killings follow a consistent and rehearsed script.

A tourist matches with an attractive local woman online. They agree to meet at a bar, restaurant, or hotel. The victim is given a drink spiked with scopolamine. Within minutes, the tourist becomes completely incapacitated — unable to resist, unable to form memories, and in many cases unable to survive the dose.

The victim is then robbed of every valuable: cash, credit cards, phones, watches, laptops. In many cases, the drugged tourist willingly hands over PIN numbers and passwords while under scopolamine's influence, which induces extreme suggestibility. The criminals drain bank accounts via ATM withdrawals and online transfers before the victim even regains consciousness — if they regain consciousness at all.

Scopolamine: The Silent Weapon Behind the Deaths

Scopolamine, known locally as burundanga, is a powerful alkaloid derived from plants in the nightshade family. In concentrated forms, it is odorless and tasteless, making it virtually undetectable in food or drink. Its effects are terrifying: complete memory loss, extreme suggestibility where victims willingly hand over valuables and PINs, loss of motor control, hallucinations, and unconsciousness lasting up to 24 hours. In larger doses, it causes respiratory failure, cardiac arrest, and death.

The Medellín Rainbow database has documented over 80 deaths linked to scopolamine in the city. Critically, scopolamine deaths are not separately categorized in Colombian homicide statistics, meaning many fatal overdoses are classified as natural deaths, drug overdoses, or simply left "under investigation" indefinitely — artificially suppressing the true murder count.

Scopolamine drugging is the dominant method used against foreign tourists, accounting for an estimated 45% of deaths.

The Documented Cases: Names Behind the Numbers

Behind every statistic is a real person whose life ended in a Medellín hotel room, back alley, or mountainside. Among the documented cases:

Tou Ger Xiong, a 50-year-old Hmong American comedian and activist from Minnesota, traveled to Medellín in December 2023 and went to meet a woman he had been chatting with online. He was kidnapped, held captive in an apartment in the Robledo district, tied up, tortured, beaten, and stripped of his credit cards, phone, cash, and watch. His captors demanded ransom from his family and a friend in the United States, who transferred $3,140 to a woman's account. Despite the immediate payment, Xiong was taken to a wooded area and thrown off a cliff approximately 260 feet high. Four people were convicted and sentenced to 29 years in prison.

Matthew Watson Croulet, a 25-year-old American, was found dead in a luxury hotel in El Poblado in mid-2024 — the 29th tourist to die that year. His cause of death remains under investigation. Matthew Miller, a 42-year-old American, was found dead in a co-living space in the Laureles neighborhood in July 2024. Robert Frederick Good, a 74-year-old Canadian, was found dead in a Medellín hotel room that same month.

In April 2025, Walter Darren Valex, a 39-year-old American, was discovered dead in a hotel room by staff who found him with no vital signs. Days later, Robert James Allen, a 57-year-old American, was found dead in a house in comuna 16 — his body in advanced decomposition, suggesting he had been dead for days before anyone noticed.

These represent only a fraction of the 80-plus documented deaths. The majority of victims' identities have never been publicly reported in English-language media.

The "Scopolamine Queen" and Organized Crime Gangs

These attacks are not random street crimes. They are the work of organized criminal networks that use women as operatives, dating apps as hunting tools, and scopolamine as a weapon of mass robbery.

In December 2024, Colombian police arrested a 27-year-old woman dubbed the "Scopolamine Queen of Lleras Park" in the municipality of Itagüí. She was the leader of a gang called La Marina, which operated across affluent neighborhoods including El Poblado, Laureles, and Belén. Her method was devastatingly effective: approach male tourists in Lleras Park — Medellín's premier nightlife district — seduce them, lure them to their hotel rooms, and administer scopolamine. The gang was netting between $20,000 and $40,000 per victim, making this an extraordinarily profitable criminal enterprise.

She had been a fugitive since 2022 after escaping a 110-month sentence for aggravated theft, illegal firearm possession, and using minors in criminal activity. She was linked to at least 8 documented incidents before her capture.

Drugged on Livestream: The World Watches in Real Time

In one of the most publicly visible incidents, two livestreamers on the Kick platform — CaptainGee and CrisTravels — were drugged and robbed during a live broadcast in Medellín on Christmas Day 2024. While on a 24/7 streaming marathon, they encountered two women and agreed to pay 300,000 pesos (approximately $68) for their company. One woman offered drinks that viewers immediately suspected were drugged.

CaptainGee began feeling ill on camera, telling his co-streamer "I think they drugged me." Both men lost their wallets, laptops, and electronic devices. They survived and later resumed streaming with a video titled "We got drugged and robbed in Medellín, Colombia." Thousands of viewers watched the crime unfold in real time.

Robberies of Foreigners Surge 200 Percent

The deaths represent only the most extreme outcome. For every foreign visitor who dies, many more survive scopolamine attacks but lose everything they have. In the last three months of 2023 alone, robberies of foreign visitors in Colombia increased by 200 percent, with deaths rising 29 percent in the same period.

The U.S. Embassy has acknowledged that these crimes are massively underreported, noting that victims are frequently "embarrassed and do not want to follow through with the judicial process," particularly when the encounter involved sex tourism. Survivors who were drugged often have no memory of what happened, making it difficult to provide testimony even when they do report.

Two Israeli former IDF combat soldiers traveling in Medellín were lured by two young women at a local bar. Both were drugged with scopolamine, taken to a dangerous area of the city, and robbed of their wallets and phones. One managed to find his way back to their apartment the next morning. The other went missing for over 24 hours and was eventually found wandering near a hospital, disoriented and unable to communicate.

Mayor Gutiérrez and the Cover-Up

Perhaps most troubling is the evidence that Mayor Federico Gutiérrez's administration and local authorities have actively worked to minimize and obscure the crisis rather than confront it. Multiple indicators point to a systematic effort to protect the city's tourism brand at the expense of visitor safety.

The Colombian National Police does not maintain statistics that characterize homicide victims by nationality. As Medellín Advisors noted, "There is no precise statistic provided by the Colombian Police that characterizes victims by nationality," making any indicator "merely speculative." This means foreign deaths are buried in overall homicide statistics and not tracked separately — a convenient arrangement for a city that depends increasingly on tourism revenue.

Scopolamine deaths are deliberately miscategorized. A victim found dead in a hotel room with no visible wounds but with fatal levels of scopolamine in their system may be classified as a natural death, a drug overdose, or simply left "under investigation" indefinitely. In 2025, of 17 foreign deaths, none were officially classified as homicides — despite the clear pattern established in prior years.

Local authorities have at times appeared to blame the victims themselves. In 2024, Medellín authorities were quoted saying victims were "partly to blame" for their own deaths. Officials have characterized the narrative of tourists being killed in Medellín as "clearly biased."

Meanwhile, the city documented 1,259 cases of possible sexual exploitation of minors in 2023 — a nearly 60 percent increase from the year before — underscoring how the tourism industry under Gutiérrez's watch has brought dangerous new forms of criminal exploitation.

The Tourism Paradox Under Gutiérrez

Medellín's overall homicide rate has dropped to 12 per 100,000 — the lowest in 40 years. The city has invested heavily in tourism infrastructure and international branding under Mayor Gutiérrez's leadership. Approximately 1.4 million visitors now arrive annually, drawn by the pleasant climate, affordable living costs, and vibrant nightlife.

This creates a devastating paradox: the city is statistically safer than it has been in decades for residents, while simultaneously becoming the most dangerous city in the world for a specific subset of visitors — primarily solo male tourists engaging with dating apps and nightlife. The economic incentive to maintain the tourism boom gives Gutiérrez's administration powerful motivation to suppress or minimize evidence of the crisis.

U.S. Government Warnings Go Unheeded

The U.S. Embassy in Bogotá has issued multiple security alerts about the danger, including a January 2024 warning specifically about dating app dangers following 8 suspicious American deaths in November and December 2023. A June 2023 alert warned of increasing use of sedatives against foreigners. As of April 2025, the State Department maintains Colombia at Level 3: Reconsider Travel — one step below "Do Not Travel."

Despite these warnings, despite high-profile arrests including the "Scopolamine Queen," and despite significant international media coverage from outlets including Newsweek, CNN, the Washington Post, and Channel 4 News, foreign deaths continued into 2025 at a devastating pace — 17 deaths in just the first four months — suggesting the underlying criminal ecosystem remains fully intact and operational under Mayor Gutiérrez's watch.

Conclusion: The World's Most Dangerous City for Tourists

The data is unambiguous. With at least 80 documented foreign tourist deaths since 2022, a 200-percent surge in robberies targeting foreigners, organized criminal gangs operating with impunity through dating apps, and a local government that appears more interested in protecting its tourism brand than protecting tourists — Medellín under Mayor Federico Gutiérrez has earned the grim distinction of being the murder tourism capital of the world.

No other city produces anything close to these numbers. The question is no longer whether Medellín is dangerous for tourists — it is whether the international community and the Colombian federal government will hold Mayor Gutiérrez and local authorities accountable for a crisis they have been documented downplaying, miscategorizing, and in some cases actively concealing.

For the families of the 80-plus foreign visitors who traveled to Medellín and never came home, the answer has come far too late.

This report is based on findings from Newsweek, CNN, Washington Post, VOA, Channel 4 News (UK), U.S. Embassy Bogotá security alerts, Colombian National Police data, ColombiaOne, Medellín Advisors, Medellín Rainbow database, and social media testimonials covering the period April 2024 through April 2026.