Student Mateo Martinez has started a petition to change the name of Escobar, the new bar on campus. After all the media attention last week and a lot of reactions from the community, the café is still not thinking of a name change.
When you ask the manager, Escobar stands for a combination of espresso, coffee and bar; but when you ask Colombian student Mateo Martinez, it stands for Pablo Escobar, Colombia’s most notorious drug lord who murdered thousands of people. “Even if Escobar didn’t kill a relative, his actions still affected everyone,” Martinez says. “For example, my grandparents lost a lot of land and money during the war.” Last week we wrote an article about the reactions of the Latin American community to the name. Something changed: you can’t rate the Escobar café on Facebook and all the reviews, good or bad, are deleted. The name didn’t change and Martinez started a petition on Thursday.
“It is disrespectful,” he states. “The manager of the bar is just ignoring us. He is waiting for it to pass, and will keep the name.” Delta tried to talk to the management of the Escobar, but they were not willing to respond. “If we want to talk, we will call you back. Until then you can quote us from the AD,” the spokesman said.
‘On an international campus with a lot of students from Latin America, you can’t call your bar Escobar’
The Escobar at the TU Delft is not the first bar with this name. In Arnhem, Amsterdam and Breskens, a small village in the province of Zeeland, there are bars and restaurants called Escobar. On their Facebook pages you won’t find comments about the name at all. “I think people kind of accept it when they visit Amsterdam and see a bar with that name,” says Martinez. “But on an international campus with a lot of students from Latin America, you can’t call your bar that. A bar in Amsterdam can be hard to change, but a bar on campus, where the TU has more control? We are doing our best.”
The petition is open until Friday. When it closes, Martinez will show the results to the manager of the Escobar and talk to him again. Besides that, Latitud will organise some events to create awareness about Colombia. This can be an information evening about Narcos, or a documentary about Colombia’s nature. The latter will be shown on Thursday 7 December in the Common Room at the complexes at the Professor Schermerhornstraat.
Roos van Tongeren / Redacteur
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