Walking through any Colombian city, it is easy to come across souvenir shops with products dedicated to the drug lord. Pablo Escobarfrom t-shirts with his face on them to replicas of his identity card, but a bill seeks to put an end to that business and rid the country of the stigma of drug culture.
“The project has a fundamental purpose, which is to prohibit the sale, use, carrying or distribution of any ‘souvenir’, T-shirt, cap or article that exalts people convicted of a crime under the Colombian penal code,” Representative to the House Cristian Avendaño, of the Green Alliance Party and author of the initiative, explained to EFE.
Avendaño claims that these products are an “apology for crime” that exalts the figure of a person who left a history of “violence, death and destruction”“with thousands of victims, and yet many revere him as a hero.
With his project he hopes to replace Colombia’s image, “show the world that we have more positive things to tell than ‘the boss of evil’,” he says, referring to the title of one of the many television series about the drug lord, and replace him with athletes, academics, artists or the country’s great biodiversity.
One of the topics to be discussed is the ‘narco-novels’which sell a “distorted” image of what Colombia is because they tell one part of the story, and not exactly the positive one: “I don’t believe in banning these series, but I do believe in regulations that allow history to be told as it really was,” he adds.
Colombian identity
“I refuse to sell ourselves to the world as the country of cocaine, drug trafficking or prostitution”, adds the politician, who calls for a national identity and a country brand that represents the majority of society and makes Colombians feel proud.
To strengthen this positive image, the congressman adds, a debate is needed among unions, academics, politicians and citizens to determine what things best represent Colombia.
“I don’t know if it will be biodiversity, gastronomy or the ‘vueltiao’ hat, the idea is to open a participatory process in which we go out into the street to ask people How do they want us to sell Colombia to the world?“, he says.
This debate, the congressman believes, is an opportunity to show a Colombian identity detached from drug trafficking and the nefarious characters that represent it.
The initiative arose eight months ago in conversations with Avendaño’s team, without ignoring that “prohibiting clashes with freedom of expression,” and in which victims of the conflict and drug trafficking such as Nicolás Escobar, nephew of the capo of the extinct drug cartel, were heard. Medellin Cartelwho runs the drug-related museum and who told Avendaño that “it is a disgrace that he is a congressman.”
They also considered how to replace the economy of the sellers of the items they are trying to ban in order to replace the commercialization of the figure of Pablo Escobar with “other, more positive images of Colombia.”
Antiheroes
Psychologist Wilson López, a professor at the Universidad Javeriana, told EFE that the phenomenon of exaltation of figures related to drug trafficking derives from “taking advantage of misery” on their part.
“They become heroes because people don’t trust institutions”adds López, who recalls that Escobar, with drug trafficking money, invested in some poor neighborhoods of Medellín, something that “the institutions should have done.”
In this way, “the more fragile the vulnerability, the easier it is for these discourses to emerge,” says the expert, pointing out that Escobar, who was killed in a police operation in December 1993, was still a populist, proclaiming himself a representative of the people while earning millions of dollars from drug sales.
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– They launch collectible figures of drug traffickers such as El Chapo Guzmán, Ovidio and Pablo Escobar.
– Pablo Escobar “museum” seized, displaying items related to the drug lord.