Colombia in popular culture

The depiction of Colombia in popular culture, especially the portrayal of

Failings in the background research and the reproduction of the country are very common in films depicting Colombia. Some of these mistakes include showing

Some examples of fictional Colombian settings are:

Fraser portrayed a Colombian druglord

Depp portrayed an American with ties to Pablo Escobar

Schwarzenegger portrayed a man that fought the Colombian rebels

Saldana portrayed a Colombian woman fighting drug traffickers

Norris portrayed a Colonel fighting Colombian drug lords

Diesel portrayed a man fighting a Colombian drug lord

Blunt portrayed a DEA agent working alongside a former Colombian drug lord

Benicio del Toro portrayed Pablo Escobar

Al Pacino portrayed a man that fought a Colombian gang

• Bedazzled: The Devil makes Brendan Fraser´s character a Colombian Drug Lord, loosely resembling Pablo Escobar. Most of the Spanish phrases are at times very hard to make out, and with a lot of grammar and pronunciation mistakes. Traditional Spanish music is heard in the background, not Colombian. Beginning with the butler, almost everyone speaks with a clear Spanish accent and slang, and certain elements belong to the Spanish culture, like the "Bota bag", the traditional leather bag in the shape of a boot, used to drink alcoholic beverages. Medellín is depicted as a tropical jungle.
• Peruvian folk songs are heard in the background including "Mi Llamita". Filming locations were actually in Puerto Rico
  .
• smuggler George Jung. It is based on the real-life stories of George Jung, Pablo Escobar, Carlos Lehder, and the Medellín Cartel
  .
• Luis Donaldo Colosio, and a portrait of Mexican statesman Miguel Lerdo de Tejada
  .
• Chivas, two popular teams from Mexico
  which are mistakenly set in Colombia.
• Zoe Saldana) is a Colombian who had her parents killed in Bogotá by a drug lord (Beto Benites) and his partner (Jordi Mollà) when she was nine years old. She goes to her criminal uncle (Cliff Curtis) in Chicago and is trained as an assassin to try to get revenge. Filming was done in Mexico, Chicago, New Orleans and France and the use of the Cattleya
  orchid was depicted in the film.
• Colombian drug lord, gets paid in cocaine
  instead of cash. Again, the accent and slang words used by the 'Colombian' drug lord are Mexican.
• Andean cordilleras and has an average temperature of 58 °F all year long and has an altitude of 8,530 feet (2,600 m). Filming locations were actually in California
  .
• Bruce Almighty: In the morning, Bruce Nolan (Jim Carrey) states "I'd better manifest some coffee", and uses his god powers to conjure fictional Colombian coffee icon character Juan Valdez who pours him a cup of coffee while stating his enjoyment for fresh grown coffee in the hills of Colombia.
• Delta Force 2: The Colombian Connection: Colonel Scott McCoy (Chuck Norris) fights against Colombian drug lord Ramon Cota (Billy Drago), the richest drug kingpin in the world, who controls the cocaine industry with an iron fist. Filming locations were actually in the Philippines.
• motion picture directed by Mike Newell. Based on the novel of the same name by Gabriel García Márquez, it tells the story of a love triangle between Fermina Daza (played by Giovanna Mezzogiorno) and her two suitors, Florentino Ariza (Javier Bardem) and Doctor Juvenal Urbino (Benjamin Bratt
  ), which spans 50 years, from 1880 to 1930. It was filmed in Colombian locations.
• South American drug dealer. Filming locations were actually in Miami
  .
• Sulphur crested cockatoos. Filming locations were actually in Xalapa
  , Mexico.
• extreme sports enthusiast, which is dropped in a cocaine-producing area of rural Colombia, where Xander is captured, tied, gagged and tortured by Colombian drug lord "El Jefe" (Danny Trejo). Filming locations were actually in California
  .
• arid desert, quite different from the jungle backdrop used to describe the smuggler's airplane. Filming locations were actually in the Dominican Republic
  .
• Green Ice: 1981 film. American electronics expert O'Neal is visiting Latin America and gets recruited into a scheme to steal emeralds from a Colombian consortium. Filming locations were actually in Mexico.
• Scarface: 1983 film, depicts a Colombian gangster dismembering another gangster with a chainsaw to extract information.
• nation's coffee crop. Webster's scheme is thwarted when Superman neutralizes the hurricane and saves the harvest. In the movie, Colombia is located in the Southern Hemisphere
  , being actually located in the north hemisphere most of its territory. There are no hurricanes in Colombia.
• Sicario a 2015 film starring Emily Blunt and Benicio del Toro where Del Toro portrays a former Mexican prosecutor, seeking revenge for the killing of his family. He is referred to by the Mexican cartels as "Medellín," a reference to the Colombian "sicarios," (assassins) who were often dispatched to Mexico by the Colombian cartels to shift the balance of power, when Colombia was the drug-smuggling epicenter in the 70's/80's. Mexico was at that time competing with Colombia, for prominence in the drug trade. At one point in the film, he tells Emily Blunt's character that he "[comes from] Colombia," which may allude to him seeking refuge there and training to be an assassin, after his family was killed and he fled Mexico.

Depictions of Colombia in Colombian films

See also: List of Colombian films

The mainstream of

hit men

stories, and films with a high content of poverty and human misery. Criticism of this type of film-making argued that these films did not treat their subject with profoundness, instead taking a superficial approach to the issues.^[3] Some examples are:

• Medellin Cartel
• evicted
  from their house.
• solvent abuse. Loosely based on The Little Match Girl
  .
• Medellin Cartel
  , with the subsequent murder rampage.
• Academy Award
  for this role.
• Medellin
  .

Documentary

• The True Story of Killing Pablo: 2003 documentary made by
  The History Channel that reviews in detail the final events that led the National Police of Colombia to the killing of Pablo Escobar and the opinion of the ones behind the operation.^[4]
• Black Coffee: 2005 Canadian documentary film examining the complicated history of coffee
  and detailing its political, social and economic influence from the past to the present day.
• Miami, Florida in the 1970s and 1980s. main characters are drug lord Pablo Escobar and Griselda Blanco
  , an infamous crime family matriarch.
• Sins of My Father: 2009 Argentine documentary film about Pablo Escobar from the inside perspective of his son

Colombia in television

Foreign

• Sofia Vergara and Rico Rodriguez respectively, are Colombians and in contact with their culture and costumes. Vergara represents a woman who comes from a small village in Colombia that is the murder capital of the country.^[5] Vergara has brought Colombian culture to life in the television show and has helped ensure that the writers are accurate when it comes to presenting the culture on television. Modern Family tries to be as accurate as possible when it comes to Colombian culture, down to how people would dress at a party.^[6]
  Rico Rodriguez portrays Vergara's Colombian son, Manny, in Modern Family.
• National Geographic Channel
  in 2007.
• Narcos: Brazilian actor Wagner Moura portrays Colombian Pablo Escobar in Netflix's 2015 series Narcos, which was filmed in Colombia.^[7] Narcos depicts how police officers and politicians worldwide dealt with Pablo Escobar, the famous drug lord from Colombia who changed history. Although the filming was done in Colombia, the actors in the show were not all Colombian. Paulina Gaitan who is Mexican portrays Escobar's wife in the show, Luis Guzman who is Puerto Rican portrays Escobar's partner, and Brazilian Andre Mattos plays the role of Escobar's rival. Although the show has been very popular among the American audience, it is not as popular among Colombians due to the poor attempt at Colombian accents.^[8]
• Sofia Vergara, and Ariadna Gutiérrez^[9]
• Colombian coffee
  commercials.
• psychoactive toads which becomes a drug fanaticism in the local schools. In the beginning of the Family Guy episode "Barely legal", Adam West
  sends all the Quahog police to Cartagena, Colombia.
• The Simpsons: In the episode "Mobile Homer", Marge, influenced by a "Wifetime TV" movie about when a wealthy man without insurance dies and whose widow and children are forced to live on the streets, decides to save money by buying imitation brands of cereal and coffee; a coffee can is shown with the Juan Valdez (a sad Valdez) logo with a phrase on it: ..."Colombian shame".

Colombian television

Television in Colombia consists mostly of soap operas which are known in most countries of Latin America, the most famous and the one that had biggest reception by international audience was Yo Soy Betty, La Fea, which starred Ana Maria Orozco as Beatriz Aurora "Betty" Pinzon Solano and Jorge Enrique Abello as Armando Mendoza Saenz. The story was set in Bogota, Colombia and revolved around the relationship between the two main characters. The soap opera originally premiered in Colombia on October 25, 1999, but was later adapted from half-hour episodes to full-hour episodes that were shows in the United States. Yo Soy Betty, La Fea was adapted and remade in over 50 countries in many different languages including English, Japanese, and Chinese. The soap opera inspired the very popular American hit Ugly Betty.^[10]

Lately, there has been a rise in shows that portray drug dealing which have been controversial in the country because the characters are law breakers who are glorified; some examples are:

• El Cartel de los Sapos ("The Cartel of the Snitches
  ". Also publicly known as simply "El Cartel".): Depicts the whereabouts of a cartel of drug lords and their relations with a corrupted government.
• narcotrafficking
  family during a wide span of time.
• prostitutes
  under the service to powerful drug lords.
• El Capo

Books

• Jack Ryan universe. In the novel, Jack Ryan is thrown into the position of CIA Acting Deputy Director (Intelligence) in a war against the Medellín Cartel based in Colombia
  .
• United States government and the Colombian government to stop illegal activities committed by Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar and his subordinates, written by Mark Bowden
  .
• My Colombian Death: 2008 book by Matthew Thompson relating his 2006 experiences in Colombia, when he roamed the country spending time at carnivals and with gang members and cocaine dealers, ran with bulls, played the explosive drinking game of tejo and met Salvatore Mancuso, the then-head of the right-wing paramilitary United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a US-designated terrorist organisation^[11]
• Killing Peace: Colombia's Conflict and the Failure of U.S. Intervention: 2002 book by Garry Leech documents the four-decade armed conflict in Colombia.
• Out of Captivity, subtitled Surviving 1967 Days in the Colombian Jungle: 2009 book written by
  FARC
  , a narco-terrorist organization, who accused them of being members of the CIA after their plane crashed in a mountainous region.
• Drug trafficking and Capitalism: a contemporary paradox: 2008 book by Eliana Herrera Vega (English translation)^[12] The book explains the actual drug problem as a communicational paradox between major social systems.
• America's Other War: Terrorizing Colombia (
  ISBN 978-1842775479) by Doug Stokes, examines US intervention in Colombia and argues that it has primarily been driven by a desire to secure a stable supply of oil
  and to pacify threats to US economic and political interests.
• Dying Words: Colombian Journalists and the Cocaine Warlords: 1990 book by Coke Newell
• marijuana
  smuggler hiding out in the mountains of Colombia with his dog, High Pockets.
• Rey de Noches, a fantasy book, has a nation named Emeraldsia. The name is a reference towards Colombia's rich quality of
  Emeralds. The history mentioned is corresponding to the real life era of the union between Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Panama known as Gran Colombia. As well as its culture history.^[13][14][15]
• Magical Disinformation: (ISBN 978-0648966913) A spy novel by Lachlan Page which depicts a British spy fabricating intelligence reports to remain close to his love interest in Colombia.[16]

Comics, anime and manga

• Colombian Coffee-growers Federation sued artist Mike Peters for linking Colombian coffee to human rights abuse.^[19]
• Bullseye character deals with Colombian cocaine
  smugglers.
• Black Lagoon: In the episode 9, "Maid to Kill", appear Roberta and the Lovelace Family who are from South America; Roberta dispatches the majority of the cartel members, and Garcia is shocked at her combat prowess. Revy inadvertently reveals the Lagoon Company's presence during the firefight, and is knocked unconscious when Roberta fires a 40 mm grenade at her. Garcia asks the Lagoon Company to take him with them, and they manage to escape. One of the cartel members identifies Roberta as a former FARC guerrilla with a large bounty on her head. In the coming third season, Black Lagoon: Roberta's Blood Trail is presuming that the characters are in Colombia and Venezuela.
• Excel Saga: In episode 19 ("Menchi's Great adventure"), Menchi and a young rich girl go to Colombia and drink coffee
• Hellsing: In OVA 7, is told that Bernadotte's Great Father died in Colombia

Video games

• The fictional country of Boa in Haze is loosely based in Colombia
• In the video game
  Grand Theft Auto Vice City the airport is named after Pablo Escobar
  ("Escobar International").
• In the video game Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception an early part of the game takes place in Cartagena.
• In
  Conflict: Global Storm
  , the first act of the game begins in Colombia.
• In Hitman: Codename 47 the agent 47 complete contracts for killing cocaine trafficker Pablo Belisario Ochoa in Colombia through a staged drug raid, among other murderers.

Others

• Cuban artist Tania Bruguera in 2009 set a controversial performance in the National University of Colombia (Bogota branch), consisting in consumption of cocaine^[20] provided by the artist to the attendants.^[21][22]

Consequences

As consequence of the negative depiction of Colombia and the Colombian people, Colombians are often subject of prejudice and discrimination in several countries.^[23] Some examples include:

• Colombians are among the main targets of
  paramedics have reportedly refused to provide care to Colombian victims of such events.^[26] Police have been reported to refuse received complaints of the victims.^[25]
• "We don't sell to Colombians" signs are common in Ecuadorian stores^{[citation needed]}. Lynching and necklacing of Colombian people have been reported in Ecuador.^[27] Police and media are accused of creating the image that every delinquent band has Colombian leaders. Police reportedly refuse to file a police report for crimes against Colombians.^[28] Colombian children are often rejected from schools, and "preventive" battering of unrelated Colombians in the vicinity of a crime scene has been reported.^[29]
• Colombian
  luggages, clothing and personal items and Illegal retention in the airports without food or basic facilities have been reported^[30]

See also

• Popular culture

References

1. ^ "05 sommer ch 3" (PDF). ethnicstudies.ucsd.edu. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2005-05-15. Retrieved 2017-05-18.
2. ^ Jenkins, Simon (February 2, 2007). "Passion alone won't rescue Colombia from its narco-economy stigma". The Guardian. London. Retrieved April 30, 2010.
3. Universidade Estacio de Sa
   , Accessed 26 August 2007.
4. ^ "The True Story Of Killing Pablo DVD". Archived from the original on 2012-02-24. Retrieved 2009-12-15.
5. ^ "Sofia Vergara as Gloria | Modern Family". ABC. Retrieved 2015-12-04.
6. ^ "Sofia Vergara Reveals How She Changed 'Modern Family'". The Huffington Post. 23 October 2014. Retrieved 2015-12-04.
7. ISSN 1091-2339
   . Retrieved 2015-12-04.
8. ^ Bogotá, Sibylla Brodzinsky in (17 September 2015). "Narcos is a hit for Netflix but iffy accents grate on Colombian ears". the Guardian. Retrieved 2015-12-04.
9. ^ "'RuPaul's Drag Race' episode 6 recap: Which queen won Snatch Game?". Mic. 29 April 2017.
10. ^ "Ugly is the New Beautiful: Colombia's "Yo soy Betty, la fea"". www.jerriblank.com. Retrieved 2015-12-04.
11. ^ "Country Reports on Terrorism". Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism. 30 April 2007. Retrieved 2007-07-15. US State Department list of terrorist organisations.
12. ^ "TRAFIC DE DROGUES ET CAPITALISME - Un paradoxe contemporain, Eliana Herrera-Vega - livre, ebook, epub". Editions-harmattan.fr. 2015-05-22. Retrieved 2017-05-18.
13. ^ Torres, Sean (5 July 2012). "Rey de Noches". Lulu Press – via Amazon.
14. ^ Rey de Noches by Sean Torres on iBooks. 26 November 2012. {{cite book}}: |website= ignored (help)
15. ^ Noble, Barnes &. "Rey de Noches". Barnes & Noble.
16. ^ "Trip Fiction - Magical Disinformation".
17. ^ Peters, Mike (January 2, 2009). "Mother Goose and Grimm". Grimmy, Inc. Archived from the original (GIF) on February 24, 2010. Retrieved January 9, 2009.
18. ^ ^{a b} "Colombian coffee growers to sue over US cartoon". Associated Press. January 8, 2009.
19. ^ "Colombians find redemption in coffee". BBC News. January 9, 2009. Retrieved January 9, 2009.
20. ^ Leon, Pablo (2009-08-28). "Centre For The Aesthetic Revolution: Tania Bruguera's Controversial Performance In Colombia". Centrefortheaestheticrevolution.blogspot.com. Retrieved 2017-05-18.
21. ^ "Tania Bruguera, que sirvió cocaína en un performance, suele hacer montajes polémicos". Archived from the original on 2013-01-23. Retrieved 2009-09-16.
22. ^ "La Empericada De Tania Bruguera". YouTube. 2009-08-27. Archived from the original on 2021-12-21. Retrieved 2017-05-18.
23. ^ *(Spanish) Narcotráfico: un pretexto para la discriminación de los migrantes colombianos y de otras nacionalidades Colombia, Documentos De La Red
    ISSN 1900-639X
    , 2007 vol:2 fasc: 1 págs: 74 - 92 Autores: WILLIAM MEJIA OCHOA,
24. ^ "Xenofobia contra los colombianos en España, especial de Séptimo día y toda la programación del Canal Caracol". Archived from the original on 2009-05-29. Retrieved 2009-09-24.
25. ^ ^{a b} Ricardo Abdahllah (2009-06-18). "Dura golpiza a colombiano en París". Elespectador.Com (in Spanish). Retrieved 2017-05-18.
26. ^ "Otro aberrante caso de xenofobia contra un colombiano". Archived from the original on 2009-07-22. Retrieved 2009-09-24.
27. ^ Tiempo, Casa Editorial El (12 November 2007). "Los brotes de xenofobia en Ecuador contra colombianos toman tintes preocupantes". El Tiempo.
28. ^ "Ecuador: xenofobia contra colombianos y peruanos". Archived from the original on 2011-07-06. Retrieved 2009-09-24.
29. ^ "HOY (Quito) Ecuador: xenofobia contra colombianos". Ecuadorinmediato.com. Archived from the original on 2011-07-10. Retrieved 2009-09-24.
30. ISBN 9788474266382
    .