Pablo Escobar collectibles cause sticky situation

A pirated sticker book featuring characters from this summer’s Pablo Escobar soap opera has hit Colombian bookstores, to the dismay of the series’ producers.

The album, as described in the online magazine Confidencial Colombia, allows Escobar aficionados to collect laminated cutouts of characters from “Escobar: The Boss of Evil,” the soap opera about Colombia’s most infamous drug lord that broke TV viewership records earlier this summer.

Caracol TV produced the series but did not authorize the album and is consulting with its legal department to halt the book’s circulation, a network spokesperson told Confidencial Colombia.

This sort of booklet “is nothing new,” sociologist Fabian Sanabaria said in the article. “Other societies have created albums about very bad people. After World War II, you could find albums about Nazism and the life of Hitler. Similar works exist about Stalin and Tito. They exist for remembrance.”

The album appears to cost about fifteen cents, and is difficult to find in Bogota, but supposedly very popular in Medellin and Cali, Confidencial Colombia wrote.

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