Objective: A region within 9p21.3 has been consistently associated with risk of coronary heart disease, cardiovascular disease or atherosclerosis. Neighboring regions have associations with other chronic diseases including type 2 diabetes. Surprisingly, the 9p21.3 cardiovascular risk region has been repeatedly reported to lack association with conventional risk factors such as hypertension/blood pressure or hyperlipidemia/plasma lipoproteins, leading some authors to suggest that the locus might affect cardiovascular risk via a novel, still unknown alternative route (Holdt & Teupser 2012, 2013, McPherson 2013). We revisited the ‘missing hypertension’ enigma in the light of data from the population of Medellín, Colombia, which has mixed ancestral origins and has been characterized within the 1000 Genomes Project. Design and method: For a cohort of individuals in Medellín (n > 350) from whom we had obtained clinical and physiological data, we genotyped 65 SNPs from 9p21.3. Results: In the raw (uncorrected) associations of our selected 9p21.3 SNPs with physiological variables, the strongest were largely for variables or criteria representing blood pressure or hypertension. We found an island (∼ 21 kb) within the cardiovascular risk region containing seven genotyped SNPs that showed associations with mean blood pressure, and a modest but monotonic increase in this variable from homozygous minor-allele genotypes through heterozygous to major-allele homozygous. The increase corresponded to the rise in cardiovascular risk found for those 7 SNPs in other population studies, and was stronger in men. Homozygous individuals plotted versus age showed an upward shifted regression line for the major allele. Mixed ancestry (estimated via 30 AIMs) did not trivially explain the effect, despite strong variability in the alleles’ frequencies among continents. The 7 SNPs are located upstream of the CDKN2A gene, possibly in regulatory DNA. Conclusions: We could not confirm a reported lack of association between the 9p21.3 risk locus and blood pressure/hypertension in our cohort. Consistent footprints of hypertension in a population could suggest hypertension-related etiologies of cardiovascular risk rather than a novel route. Differences from other studies’ results might reflect different ways of obtaining mean blood pressure values, a chance observation, and/or differences among populations.