Colombia has spent decades conducting a cultural operation without a name and almost without awareness. The child of a poor family imitates the rich, the rich adopts the codes of the narco, the narco hires architects to build mansions that mimic colonial haciendas. None of these three figures is transgressing the system; all are obeying it with a fidelity that embarrasses those who prefer not to see it. What is called the “traqueto aesthetic” (the visual, sonic and behavioural signs of the narco in Colombia) is not an aberration of Colombian capitalism but its most honest expression, the one that cannot afford the hypocritical refinements of the classes that arrived before it. The problem is not the traqueto. The problem is the mirror.
Class as Permanent Performance
In Colombia, belonging to a social class was never a stable condition; it was always a performance requiring daily maintenance through signals legible to others. This fragility has concrete historical roots. A land tenure structure that concentrated rural wealth before a state capable of redistributing it existed was followed by a truncated industrialisation that produced neither a solid working class nor an autonomous industrial bourgeoisie. What remained was a highly stratified society, yet profoundly uncertain of its own hierarchies, in which money was never sufficient to purchase distinction and distinction was never sufficient to guarantee money.
The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called habitus (incorporated dispositions that orient social practices without conscious calculation) the set of gestures, tastes and ways of moving through the world that a person acquires according to their class position. In Colombia, that habitus never fully crystallised because class boundaries were always more permeable and more violent than in the capitalist trajectories considered normal. Mobility existed, upward and downward, but it was never predictable nor meritocratic; it depended on who one knew, what colour the money was and when one needed to run.
When drug trafficking entered the Colombian economy in large volumes from the mid-1970s, it did not create a new social class but disrupted existing hierarchies at a pace the Church, the public university and professional merit could not absorb. A family that had spent three generations building a modest patrimony watched a neighbour accumulate ten times as much in four years. That neighbour bought without delay an imported car, a country estate, designer clothes and a private school for the children. The scandal was not that these symbols were acquired by illegal means; the scandal was that the illegal means worked better than the legal ones. The system never said so aloud, but it demonstrated it for four uninterrupted decades.
The Aesthetics of Ascent
The expression “traqueto aesthetic” requires clarification. The term traqueto is Colombian popular slang for someone who obtains money through drug trafficking or organised crime, carrying a connotation that mixes admiration, contempt and fear depending on who uses it. The aesthetic attributed to this figure includes flashy jewellery, designer clothing or high-quality imitations, architecture combining colonial references with gleaming industrial materials, modified high-end vehicles and a musical preference ranging from electronic vallenato to reggaeton. What makes this aesthetic analytically interesting is not its eccentricity but its coherence; it is a system of signs designed to communicate that one has arrived.
That message is precisely what capitalism promises to those who obey its rules. The difference between the executive arriving at an event in a German saloon car and the traqueto arriving in an armoured SUV with chrome rims is not one of aspiration but of trajectory. Both want to be seen; both have organised their expenditure around the perception of others; both understand wealth as a spectacle for producing effects of power. The difference is that the executive modulates ostentation according to the codes of the class he has accessed, whereas the traqueto operates with the only ones available at the time of his ascent, those of popular desire without institutional mediation. One has decorum. The other has money. Both have exactly the same logic.
According to the National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE), Colombia’s Gini coefficient (a measure of income inequality on a scale of 0 to 1, where 1 equals absolute inequality) stood at 0.548 in 2023, placing it continuously among the five highest in Latin America since 1990.
Mimicry as Rational Response
Social climbing, understood here as the desire to adopt the codes, habits and appearances of a class superior to one’s own, is neither a moral pathology nor a character flaw. It is a perfectly rational adaptive response in a society where real social mobility (sustained, intergenerational advancement measured in income, education and opportunity) is statistically exceptional. In a system that promises rewards for individual effort yet structurally blocks the channels of ascent for the majority, mimicry functions as a symbolic substitute.
If I cannot belong to the middle class, I can appear to; if I cannot appear to in every respect, I can be so in some; if I cannot be so in any, I can at least aspire to it and organise my life around that aspiration. The aspirational subject is not a dreamer; they are someone who has correctly read the system and concluded that appearance is all the system genuinely rewards. This conclusion is not a diagnostic error. It is the correct diagnosis of a system that rewards appearance before anything else.
This rationality has a cost rarely examined. The worker who devotes a disproportionate share of their income to maintaining status signals (clothes, phone, neighbourhood, school) is not being irrational; they are being perfectly rational within a system that uses those signals as access credentials. The employer who selects by personal presentation, the bank that lends according to the applicant’s address, the landlord who rejects tenants based on the phone they carry, all operate within a grammar of appearance that turns class mimicry from a luxury into a survival investment. Peripheral capitalism does not produce inequality alone; it produces an economy of appearances that distributes that cost onto the excluded themselves.
When the Middle Class Adopted the Code
The mechanism does not work in one direction only. The most revealing reversal occurred when the middle and upper segments of Colombian society began absorbing elements of the traqueto aesthetic into their own systems of consumption and representation. The spread of reggaeton through affluent circles, the Colombian fashion industry’s deliberate recovery of narco excess iconography as ironic aesthetic reference, the tourism that turned the El Poblado neighbourhood in Medellín into a narco chic destination, with hotels reproducing the chromatic palette of traqueto architecture and cartel house tours sold as cultural experience, all of this speaks to a specific operation.
The class that holds the power to name the legitimate decided that the codes of narco ascent could be reappropriated (consumed consciously and at a distance) without this endangering its own status. The original traqueto has no such privilege; their aesthetic continues to be judged vulgar. The middle class that adopts it ironically turns it into cool. This operation is not harmless; it is the most sophisticated form through which class distinction reproduces itself in a society that believes it has transcended its own hierarchies.
This asymmetry is the central mechanism of class distinction in its most sophisticated phase. The capacity to appropriate another’s codes without being contaminated by their position is precisely what defines class privilege in a society where symbols circulate freely but resources remain profoundly unequal. What this cycle of mimicry produces is a semiotic confusion of enormous political utility. When cultural class codes become interchangeable, when there is no longer an aesthetic belonging unambiguously to those at the top, the perception of social distance diminishes. The distance does not disappear; the perception does. And that, for those who administer inequality from above, is a net gain.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) calculated in its report “A Broken Social Elevator?” (2018) that in Colombia approximately nine generations are needed for descendants of a family in the bottom 10 per cent of income to reach the national average, against a mean of four and a half generations across OECD member countries.
The Power That Needs No Display
The Colombian public debate on the traqueto aesthetic has spent decades focused on the traqueto, on its excesses, its vulgarity, what it says about the country’s morality. Nobody poses the question pointing in the opposite direction. What the phenomenon reveals is not the moral corruption of those who adopted these signs but the failure of the legitimate system to offer a representation of success that was both aspirational and plausible for the majority. The executive, the upper-middle-class professional, demand a trajectory that the majority knows is not available to it. The traqueto demands money. And money, unlike inherited educational or social capital, is in appearance democratic.
Colombian peripheral capitalism produces neither a working class conscious of its position nor a national bourgeoisie with a historical project. It produces aspirational subjects trapped in an economy of appearances in which the distance between what one is and what one appears to be constitutes the primary expenditure of daily life. The aesthetics of power circulates from hand to hand; power itself does not. The traqueto has spent decades telling us what the system wants us to want. That it also tells us what we are is the part we prefer not to look at…
G.S.
Sources
- National Quality of Life Survey 2023, Poverty and Inequality Indicators (DANE)
- OECD, “A Broken Social Elevator? How to Promote Social Mobility” (2018)
- Omar Rincón, Narco.estética y narco.cultura en Narco.lombia (Nueva Sociedad, 2009)
- Álvaro Camacho Guizado, Droga y sociedad en Colombia (CEREC / CIDSE, 1988)
- Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Routledge, 1984)
- Óscar Guarín Martínez, “La estética de los primos: notas sobre la cultura traqueta”, Razón Pública, 2011
