This is the sound of traffic in Bogota, the capital of Columbia.

It's pretty chaotic.

Horse carts, right beside BMWs, bikes and pedestrians and buses all competing for the

same patch of pavement. But as bad as traffic is now, it used to be worse.

That's Margarita Martinez. She's a journalist and filmmaker.

Because you wouldn't have an assurance that it was red, no one was going to let you

walk, but maybe they felt like they just could, you know, kept driving.

You know, the traffic lights didn't mean anything. It was just like a suggestion, not really

something that would be enforced. Back then, they didn't even exist rules. So we can

say it was the jungle.

In the early 1990s, Bogota was one of the most dangerous cities around. Its homicide rate

was triple that of New York's and traffic fatalities were also very common with a rate

more than four times of New York's. But in 1994, Bogota voted in a new mayor, a most

unusual mayor. His name was Antonis Mokas. How unusual was he? Well, Mokas had previously

served as president of Bogota's National University, but he resigned after an incident

in which he moond a group of unruly students. Still, in a city as chaotic as Bogota, maybe

he was just the kind of mayor they needed.

It felt free to be a little bit outside of the normal behavior.

That's Mokas. He wound up serving two terms as mayor, from 1995 to 1997, and again from

2001 to 2003. He did all kinds of things that weren't quite normal behavior. He gave tens

of thousands of citizens a placebo vaccine against violence. He preached the evils of graffiti

by dressing up as a character he called super-citizen in a spandex suit. He encouraged people

...