Since the very first days of his presidential campaign, Donald Trump has vilified Mexicans, calling them drug dealers and rapists on national TV. Sadly, the exploitation of Latinos as criminals on-screen has not only become tiresome at this point, it’s also downright irresponsible in this political climate. It’s the same reason why Sean Penn couldn’t resist writing a 10,000-word profile on him for Rolling Stone he knew it would go viral. Most audiences knew who El Chapo is because he dominated headlines last year. But most likely Univision jumped on the opportunity to showcase a problematic Latino character because of the ratings potential that comes with an already built-in viewership. Maybe it wanted to avoid the issue raised with Narcos, in which the story of Colombia’s drug war was told primarily through the eyes of an American DEA agent. It’s confusing why a network like Univision, which caters to Hispanics in the United States, would choose to be the first to tackle El Chapo on TV. But those two characters are fictional El Chapo is not. “But the next moment you could be feeling uncomfortable about having done so.” It’s the same feeling fans had when they wanted Walter White to succeed as a meth kingpin, and it’s why they could forgive Tony Soprano for whacking one of his family members. “At some points, like in the first episode, it can happen that you feel you’re rooting for him,” explained showrunner Aguirre Zegarra. There’s a scene in which El Chapo orders one of his henchmen to massacre a group of tunnel diggers, but then it’s followed by a montage of him at a funeral for his dead father, which softens the blow. It’s no wonder small talk so quickly turned to blow. There have been documentaries ( Sins of My Father), telenovelas ( El Patrón del Mal), movies ( Escobar: Paradise Lost), and hundreds of books all about Colombia’s most infamous criminal. And that’s not even counting the absurd number of takes that have been based solely on the scourge of our history: Escobar. A few film examples off the top of my head include Blow, Collateral Damage, Romancing the Stone, Bedazzled, Clear and Present Danger, and later, Colombiana. In the ’90s and early aughts, a large number of movies featured Colombian drug dealers. I don’t really blame most people outside of Colombia for thinking this way. When I was a student at NYU, a fellow Colombian friend was frequently teased that his father’s coffee export business was simply a front for his drug empire-hilarious.
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Within my first week at a new high school in Barcelona, Spain, my classmates jokingly asked if I could ship some high-quality cocaine from back home. It was a trend that followed me throughout most of my life, even after I left the country at 15. As someone who primarily grew up in Colombia, I can’t tell you how common it was for people to bring up Pablo Escobar within five minutes of learning where I was from.