Jewellery, luxury cars, bodyguards, breast implants, bloodshed and now hippos: Pablo Escobar and his acolytes have imposed a kitsch and macho aesthetic in Colombia that has survived the big drug barons and now goes far beyond the borders of the country.
Drug trafficking has generated a veritable parallel culture summed up by a simple prefix: narco-music, narco-literature, narco-aesthetics… “NarColombia”, ironically sums up Omar Rincon, one of the researchers who has worked and written the most on the phenomenon.
Despite official campaigns to cleanse the image of the country, and the taboo still inspired by the murderous madness of Escobar, the influence of drug trafficking in popular culture is felt everywhere, in language, in architecture or still in entertainment.
“It is not a problem of illegality and it is not a Colombian evil either. Drug trafficking is pure and hard capitalism”, deciphers Mr. Rincon.
“I consume therefore I exist. There is nothing better to express capitalist taste and ethics than drug trafficking”, he explains to AFP.
Drug trafficking in Colombia has shaped an aesthetic “ostentatious, exaggerated, grandiloquent”, even frankly “bad taste” for others, describe Omar Rincon and the anthropologists gathered around the project https://narcolombia.club/.
Drug lord Pablo Escobar single-handedly embodies a unique trajectory of rise and social revenge, in one of the most unequal countries in Latin America.
“No boobs, no paradise”: in 2005, the writer Gustavo Bolivar, now a senator for the left-wing majority, created a scandal with his provocatively titled novel.
The success of the story, adapted for television, of these poor women who increase the size of their breasts at the tip of the scalpel to please the mafiosos has conquered the public in many countries.
Narco-culture “is always told in a masculine tone, in the exhibition of virility, of consumption (…) it could never have a feminist aesthetic, of empowerment of women or liberation of their bodies” , remarks the researcher.
However, for the narcos and their henchmen, devotees of the Catholic religion, the maternal figure is sacred.
In Medellin, drug traffickers adopted as their patroness in the 1980s the Virgin of Sabaneta, known as the “Virgin of the Sicarios” (hired killers). A culture well documented by academics and in literature.
“But, along with reclaiming the figure of the mother, the macho side and the utilitarian view of women is also displayed. The female is a sexual object to be exhibited, which can be (and is) bought”, writes Catalina Duque in a thesis published in 2012.
From the death of Escobar in December 1993, killed in his flight by the police, begins the construction of a legend as popular as it is unhealthy, a myth still maintained by an incalculable number of books, films, series and music which recall the terror and the fascination inspired by this sinister figure.
An unusual legacy that is making headlines today, his famous hippopotamuses illegally introduced into the private zoo of his “finca” (farm) continued to reproduce after his disappearance, proliferating in an arm of the Magdalena river.
The painter and sculptor from Medellin Fernando Botero immortalized his memory, the Colombian Nobel Prize for Literature Gabriel Garcia Marquez talks about it in “Diary of an abduction”. And of course Netflix, which since its cult series, “Narcos”, continues to surf on the phenomenon, fueling the myth all over the planet.
From his wife to his son, passing by his brother, his sister, his mistresses and the police officers who fought him, all wrote their memories with the drug godfather. All Colombians have their say on Pablo Escobar, both ashamed but also, unconsciously no doubt, national pride.
“There is not a moment when Pablo Escobar cannot be the idol of evil, good and everything we dream of. I think Pablo Escobar is the Colombian Che Guevara, the Colombian pop star, he is our mark for the world”, concludes Omar Rincon.
05/03/2023 07:50:52 – Bogotá (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
