A restaurant in France has come under fire over a mural of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar.
The artwork in question depicts the smiling founder of the defunct Medellín cartel making a hand salute on a wall at Le Populo, an eatery in Marseille.
Andrea Petro, the daughter of Colombian President Gustavo Petro who lives in France, criticized the mural’s existence during a recent visit to the restaurant.
She posted an image of it on her Instagram Stories and asked for the controversial painting to be taken down.
“Out of respect for the Colombian community, we ask that this painting be removed, which we find offensive and degrading,” read Andrea Petro’s caption.
DailyMail.com has reached out to Andrea Petro and Le Populo for comment.
A mural of Pablo Escobar, the infamous founder of the Medellín cartel, covers a wall at Le Populo, a restaurant in Marseille, France. Andrea Petro, the daughter of Colombian President Gustavo Petro, slammed the restaurant on social media over the painting, calling it “insulting and degrading” to Colombians around the world.
Andrea Petro says a mural of Pablo Escobar at a restaurant in Marseilles, France is not representative of the Colombian community and has called for it to be removed immediately.
Her call for action comes after President Petro delivered a speech at the summit for a new global finance pact in Paris in June, criticizing the adoration shown to Escobar by people in Colombia and around the world after his death in December 1993.
“Colombia is not only known for Pablo Escobar, who now has to cancel those types of projections on television that don’t talk about us,” he said. “Pablo Escobar is not the son of the Colombian people, he is the son of the Colombian oligarchy that generated and built him.”
Escobar has been portrayed in series such as Netflix’s Narcos, ‘Pablo Escobar: El Patrón del Mar’ (Pablo Escobar: The Drug Lord) which first aired on the Colombian television network Caracol before being picked up by Telemundo and several other series.
Despite the president’s insistence on keeping drug-related shows off the screens, Caracol decided to rebroadcast the series as part of its weeknight primetime program.
Andrea Petro took to Instagram Stories this week to share the image of a Pablo Escobar mural at Le Populo, a restaurant in Marseille, France, and wants the eatery to remove it. “Out of respect for the Colombian community, we ask that this painting be removed, which we find offensive and degrading,” she wrote
Andrea Petro is the daughter of Colombian President Gustavo Petro. She currently lives in France
Andrea Petro (center front) with her mother (second row left), father and Colombian President Gustavo Petro (second row right) and her family
Known as the ‘King of Cocaine’, Escobar amassed a fortune estimated at $30 billion.
He set up the first cocaine smuggling operations with shipments originating in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru, then smuggled into Colombia before coming to the United States.
At one point in the 1980s, the Medellín cartel was smuggling an average of 70 to 80 tons of cocaine into the United States each month.
Struggling with a role in Colombian politics, he was elected to the House of Representatives in 1982 as a member of the Liberal Party, but was forced to resign after the Minister of Justice, Rodrigo Lara, accused him of drug trafficking has.
Escobar sought revenge by assassinating Lara in a motorcycle drive-by shooting in 1984. He then had presidential candidate Luis Galan assassinated in 1989 after Galan’s campaign promise to extradite him to the United States.
By 1991, Escobar’s fight against authorities trying to shut down his illegal business had left 6,349 people dead. He reached an agreement to surrender himself to the authorities after President César Gaviria promised him that he would not be extradited.
Escobar was imprisoned in La Catedral (The Cathedral), a prison he built for himself and henchmen, but escaped in 1992 when the government tried to transfer to another prison.