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When your name is Escobar
It happened again yesterday. I had been invited to give a lecture on Impact Management at a business school in Geneva, Switzerland, where I live. After the session, one of the students approached me and, with a roguish smile, asked me if I was related to Pablo Escobar. “Here we go again,” I thought. In the thirty years that I’ve been living outside of my home country, Colombia, I have heard this question more often than I care to count.
No one in Colombia would ask this because the last name Escobar is quite common, like Davis or Parker in the UK or the USA. Outside the country though, the question is raised by all kinds of people. I recall a Swiss Ambassador in Geneva asking me if I was related to the mafia boss. In Washington, the question came from a journalist to whom I was teaching Spanish, as a student job. He was preparing to travel to Panama to interview Noriega, “Are you related to Pablo?” he asked. I remember responding, “If I were, I wouldn’t need to work.” The list of people putting the question goes on and on: friends, professors, neighbours, colleagues, even my dermatologist, and of course, the incarcerated students I teach in my volunteer work. Prisoners find it hilarious, especially those detained on charges of drug trafficking: their English teacher’s name is Escobar. Mischievous curiosity respects no barriers of social class, nor educational level, and I would say gender too, but…
