Acceso usuarios
Daniel Hernández Guzmán
In recent years, the figure of Pablo Escobar, the late Colombian drug trafficker, has been increasingly appropriated by public imagination through different media and by different audiences. Memes, sticker albums, shirts are but some of the ways in which Escobar has been reincarnated as a jest, as a brand, or as a revolutionary act. He has returned to take part in a Colombian as well as a global imaginary in a way unprecedented since his death in Medellín in 1993. This new Escobar transcend Colombia's borders. Today, landmarks such as the show Narcos (2015), a successful American production by Netflix, have established the image of the drug trafficker as a "War on Drugs" icon. Nevertheless, Escobar's mediatic and international turn appears within a narrative that has its own tradition and is based on a history that links drug production and drug trafficking to contemporary Latin America, and Colombia in particular. Trying to find the link between the local and the global use of Escobar's figure is fundamental to understanding the moral narrative of the War on Drugs, wherein drugs and the people-and things-who produce and commercialize them are portrayed as the public enemy.
In this paper, I will trace the origins of Escobar's mediatic boom to the death of one the hippos kept in his personal zoo. The animal's death, sixteen years after Escobar's, put the spotlight back on the capo, providing a new scheme of discourse that enables the reinvention and renewed existence of his figure. I argue that looking at the narratives surrounding Escobar's rise and death through the hippo's death evinces both the narrative apparatus that frames the War on Drugs in Colombia and possible ways to disarticulate it. The War on Drugs narrative has made drug traffickers such as Escobar and the coca leaf, from which cocaine comes, into monstrous figures. Returning the figure of the monster to its animal condition, namely through the presence of the hippo, allows for a better understanding of how media and art play a central role in the politics of the war against drug trafficking. Using Escobar's figure, this paper traces how media and art have evolved to construct and deconstruct discourses on drug trafficking from Ronald and Nancy Reagan's "just say no" campaign to the most recent narco-series media boom.
