The Rise of Narco Tourism

New Yorker Magazine - The Afterlife of Pablo Escobar

This is an excellent example of online journalism - but it is not an easy read, I had to read it in several sittings. Here is a quote:

Omar Rincón, the media-studies professor, once wrote, “We live the culture of drug trafficking, in aesthetics, values, and references. We are a nation that took on the narco idea that anything goes if it will get you out of poverty: some tits, a weapon, corruption, trafficking coca, being a guerrilla or a paramilitary fighter, or being in government.” He was careful to note that the narco aesthetic was not merely bad taste. It was a way of life “among the dispossessed communities that look to modernity and have found in money the only way to exist in the world.”