Three things that changed forever after Pablo Escobar

[Akrapovic]

On a roof in Medellin, in 1993, the body was obese and bloody of the great Colombian cocaine boss as a trophy of good over evil. But the legend and influence of Pablo Escobar complete 25 years and nobody ventures an end.

Cursed with fervor, accepted with shame but never ignored, the baron of drugs, which left thousands of victims, became a cultural phenomenon that crosses and passes through Colombia.

Its trace can be traced in the language of the neighborhood, in art and entertainment. And although drug trafficking continued without him (Colombia is still the world's largest producer of cocaine and the United States its main client), several things changed forever after Escobar.

The narcogender

A genius of evil, a po[CENSORED]r villain, a collective identity ... phrases and adjectives abound to describe Escobar, but perhaps nothing explains his influence better than a prefix: narco.

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With Escobar, its use became po[CENSORED]r. Narco-soap, narco-politics, narcomúsica and "la sicaresca" (stories of hit men like those hired by the drug trafficker in Medellín neighborhoods) emerged.

First of all, Pablo is a "narrative idol, a life like his is better than the movies, literature and television that we imagine," says Omar Rincón, academic and researcher of narcoculture at the University of Los Andes. .

Fernando Botero immortalized him in oils, the Nobel Gabriel García Márquez did it in "News of a kidnapping" and even Netflix takes advantage of him in his series Narcos. From the wife to the son, to the brother and his most famous lover, they have written their memoirs with the capo. Also the policemen who fought him.

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All Colombians - and not a few Americans - have something to say about Pablo. It is "Colombia brand, it makes us proud, it makes us laugh, it gives us shame and shame, it gave us an international identity", adds Rincón.

The "Da Vinci del crimen," as one of its victims called it, former Vice President Francisco Santos, kidnapped by the Medellín cartel, was merged with the Colombian's imaginary.

Hypersecurity

An inspection at the entrance to a shopping center, a policeman armed as a soldier, shopping with fear ... Only between September and December 1989, the Medellin Cartel that Escobar led until his death, detonated one hundred car bombs.

An airplane, a hotel, a newspaper, a pharmacy, a street. Any space could be the target of the boss's obsession with dynamite in his war against the state and its rivals. Not less than 3,000 deaths are endorsed to their terror account.

Fear took hold of daily life and a quarter of a century later, many of the protocols adopted since then to protect themselves from their excessive fury persist.

"The security companies began to provide dogs and electronic means to detect explosives in cars, entering a shopping center was almost more inconvenient than entering a military barracks," retired Colonel Carlos Alfonso Velásquez, told AFP. He led the persecution against the Cali Cartel, Escobar's enemies in drug trafficking.

So powerful was the enemy, that the police and the army had to leave the institutional suspicions and "reach the first levels of cooperation," evokes the reserve general of the Jairo Delgado police.

Twenty-five years ago, 90,000 people worked in private security. Today around 250,000, according to the superintendency that regulates the sector. The escorts are part of the landscape. Private security ended up becoming fashionable, experts agree.

The extravagance

A plane embedded in the portal of a farm, hippos and giraffes brought from the United States and Africa, cars and weapons tuned, noise parties with models operated. The extravagant taste of Escobar - who began his criminal life as a petty thief and smuggler of merchandise - did not just settle in the mafia.

Even the "motels where people are going to make love keep that aesthetic 'traqueta' (of narco) that permeated in the 80s," says Fabián Sanabria, an anthropologist and researcher at the National University.

Pablo Escobar embodied a unique way of promotion and "social revenge for the poor", who gave "houses, taxis, jobs, money, jewelry, party, music, sex," completes Rincón. It was the pawn that became a patron at the point of wit and violence.

Today, moving in a 4X4 truck, wearing the shirt open to the third button, putting on a gold chain, having a 90-60-90 woman next to it, with dyed and operated hair, are associated with a sudden bonanza.

According to Sanabria, this aesthetic is in the reigns, the soccer players and among those who "ascend vertiginously and pass over the law".
"As Colombia had García Márquez, he also had Pablo Escobar and we have to accept the one and the other," he says.