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Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari is visiting South Africa this week to promote ties between Africa's two largest economies.

The trip comes at a time when relations have deteriorated following a rise in attacks on foreigners in South African cities, including against Nigerians.

In response, hundreds of Nigerians have left South Africa fearful of the violence and Mr Buhari is expected to address a meeting of some of those still living in the country.

So how common are attacks against migrants and are they on the rise?

Attacks against foreigners

The South African government does not collect data on attacks or threats against foreign nationals.

However, the African Centre for Migration & Society (ACMS) has monitored these attacks across South Africa since 1994. Its Xenowatch tracker collates media reports as well as information from activists, victims and observers.

Violent attacks peaked in 2008 and again in 2015.

Data for 2019 (to late September) already shows that the number of attacks is approaching the level of 2015.

In 2008, there was a wave of attacks across the country against refugees and migrants - more than 60 people were reported to have been killed and thousands displaced.

In 2015, there were outbreaks of violence against non-South Africans, mostly in the cities of Durban and Johannesburg, which led to the deployment of the army to deter further unrest.

In March, the government launched an initiative to raise public awareness and improve access to services for victims of discrimination.

Human rights groups welcomed it, but said that the government needed to publicly recognise attacks on foreigners as xenophobic.

In a statement published in October 2018, South Africa's main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, blamed the governing ANC party for a "scourge of xenophobic violence".

Where are the migrants from?

About 70% of foreigners in South Africa come from neighbouring Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Lesotho.

The remaining 30% is made up of people from Malawi, UK, Namibia, eSwatini, previously known as Swaziland, India and other countries.

There are an estimated 3.6 million migrants in the country, a spokesperson for South Africa's national statistics body told the BBC, out of an overall population of well over 50 million.

How do different regions compare?

Gauteng province, which includes South Africa's largest city Johannesburg and the capital Pretoria, has the highest rate of violence against foreign nationals, followed by the Western Cape, according to the ACMS. KwaZulu-Natal, where Durban is situated, is third.

Attacks have mainly taken place in large cities, but they have also been reported in smaller towns and rural areas.

The violence is often triggered by local disputes, with migrants being accused of taking jobs away from South Africans.

Foreign-run shops have been looted and destroyed.

The country has experienced poor economic performance, with officially recorded unemployment at more than 27% at the end of last year.

And more widely, the country has one of the highest murder rates in the world.

"The causes are poverty and has its roots in apartheid," says Sharon Ekambaram, who runs the refugee and migrant rights programme for Lawyers for Human Rights.

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South Africa: How common are xenophobic attacks?

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Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari is visiting South Africa this week to promote ties between Africa's two largest economies. The trip comes at a time when relations have deteriorated following a rise in attacks on foreigners in South African cities, including against Nigerians.

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https://search.proquest.com/docview/1776517112?accountid=16946

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In Colombia, a drug lord's posthumous celebrity brings profits and controversy.

When Roberto Escobar was the head accountant for the Medellín cartel, in the nineteen-eighties, he handled billions of dollars a year-so much cash that he sometimes resorted to stuffing it in plastic bags and burying it in the countryside. Known as El Osito, or Little Bear, he was the older brother of the narcotrafficker Pablo Escobar, who was then among the richest men in the world, responsible for a drug-smuggling empire that extended from Colombia to a dozen other countries. Although Roberto was never as extravagant as his brother, he was accustomed to flying on private jets, and sent his children to a Swiss boarding school. Once, during an extended hike through the forest to elude capture, he threw a briefcase containing a hundred thousand dollars into a river, because it was heavy.

These days, Roberto Escobar, having served fourteen years in prison, earns money by leading tourists around one of his family's former safe houses. The house, a bungalow of white painted brick, can be reached by a gated driveway off a steep mountain road, roughly halfway between the Envigado plateau, where Pablo Escobar grew up, and the middle-class neighborhood in Medellín where he was gunned down by Colombian police, in 1993. One recent morning, a group of visitors from the United States and Europe arrived in a chauffeured van-part of a growing influx of narcoturistas, who come to see the places where Pablo Escobar lived and worked. Roberto, seventy-one, still looked like an accountant; he wore khakis, a blue short-sleeved shirt, and thick-rimmed spectacles. While he was in prison, a letter bomb delivered to his cell exploded, leaving him blind in his right eye and deaf in his right ear. His damaged eye was a milky blue, and he periodically squirted drops of medicine into it.

Roberto was a gruff tour guide, hustling guests from room to room, but his visitors seemed too awestruck to complain. An exterior wall was speckled with ragged bullet holes, the result of a kidnapping attempt. Inside, a Jet Ski-supposedly one that Roger Moore used in a James Bond film-sat near a photograph of Escobar driving it across bright-blue water. Beneath a writing desk in the living room, Escobar lifted a plank to reveal a hidden compartment. "We could fit two million dollars there," he said, then peremptorily dropped the plank. In the dining room, he pointed to an oil painting of a brown stallion, a racehorse named Earthquake. Angrily, he recounted how enemies had stolen the horse from him and returned it castrated. Shaking his head, he said, "No act of violence is justified."

In 2014, Roberto founded a holding company, Escobar, Inc., to license the family name. But he is a minor player in a growing industry. An increasing number of people who knew Pablo Escobar-employees, relatives, and enemies-are trying to sell versions of his epic life and death, encouraging a cottage industry of books, television shows, and documentaries. Along with the narcotours that operate out of Medellín, there are souvenir venders selling Escobar baseball caps, ashtrays, mugs, and key rings; Escobar T-shirts are displayed next to soccer jerseys and Pope Francis memorabilia.

In the past few years, Hollywood has examined his story in a series of films: " Escobar: Paradise Lost" (Benicio Del Toro; innocent surfer drawn into drug web), " The Infiltrator" (Bryan Cranston; double agent), "Loving Pablo" (Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem; clandestine romance with kingpin), and " American Made" (Tom Cruise; pilot turns Escobar crony turns informant). The depiction most responsible for the tourist boom is the Netflix series "Narcos," in which the Brazilian actor Wagner Moura plays Escobar as both psychopath and doting family man-a Latin American Tony Soprano. Netflix does not disclose viewership numbers, but the audience for the show, which will launch its fourth season this year, has been estimated at three million. In 2016, Escobar, Inc., sent a letter to Netflix, demanding reparations for appropriating the family story; in a subsequent interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Roberto said that if he wasn't paid a billion dollars he would "close their little show." (Escobar and Netflix declined to comment on the possibility of a settlement.)

No one disputes that Pablo Escobar was a murderer, a torturer, and a kidnapper. But he was loved by many in Medellín, and, increasingly, he is an object of fascination abroad. At his zenith, he was the most notorious outlaw on the planet, with control of some eighty per cent of the cocaine entering the U.S. and of a fortune estimated at three billion dollars. In many respects, he remains Colombia's most famous citizen, a charismatic entrepreneur of boundless ambition who delighted in his Robin Hood image, even as he killed thousands of people to subvert the government. In Colombia, his legacy touches nearly everyone, but few people agree on whether his story should be seen as entertainment or as a cautionary tale.

At the end of the tour, Roberto posed for selfies with visitors and autographed photos of Escobar, along with copies of his memoir, a slim volume titled "My Brother Pablo." ("My mother still recalls that, from the time he was a little boy, Pablo used to tell her, 'I want to be a lawyer and have a good car.' ") The tourists handed payments to a group of wolfish young men who served as Roberto's assistants. Before I left, I asked him why his brother continued to inspire people around the world. "It's because Pablo helped the poorest people of this country," he replied. It was a kind of catechism; he did not explain further. When I asked if his brother was a good man, he shrugged and said, "To me he was."

In the old city center of Medellín is a street of funeral parlors. On a bright morning, I went there to meet Jesús Correa, an employee at one of the funeral homes and one of the first people to appreciate the mythic quality of Escobar's life.

Correa, an amiable man of sixty-three, was bald and corpulent, and dressed in a gray suit, a pink shirt, and a burgundy tie. He took me for a walk, and, two blocks from the funeral home, we came to an open-air café, painted bright yellow and orange, where men sat drinking beer and watching soccer on television. "Here is where it all began," Correa said. In the early seventies, the café was called Las Dos Tortugas-the Two Turtles-and it was a favored meeting place for robbers and smugglers. A dropout from Medellín's Universidad Autónoma, Escobar had gone into business selling stolen tombstones and contraband American cigarettes. He began hanging out with the crowd at Las Dos Tortugas, coming and going on a Lambretta motorbike. Colombia's drug trade was flourishing, although in those days it was mostly marijuana, which the locals called marimba. Escobar found his niche as the U.S. cocaine market began to take off.

Correa ran his own hustle out of the funeral home, which was owned by a friend: he bought contraband French perfume from a contact in Panama, then sold it in Medellín. One day, one of Escobar's pistoleros-low-level shooters-summoned him to Las Dos Tortugas and asked if he could get Cartier and Chanel. When Correa assured him he could, the pistolero gave him an order. After that, the gangsters started buying perfume for their girlfriends, and Correa became known as El Perfumero.

Correa took pleasure in associating with men who had monikers like Filth and Spider. The cartel's sicarios, or hit men, operated out of an oil-change shop not far from the funeral home; a group of more than a hundred gathered there to plot killings, kidnappings, and bombings. Some were policemen, who came to change out of their uniforms and then attack their colleagues. Correa was fascinated, and gradually he became a welcome visitor. "Why did I do it?" he said. "Out of prurient interest, I think, pure and simple. As a boy, I read a book about the Untouchables of Eliot Ness, and I was magnetized by the Chicago gangsters of the time-Al Capone, Pretty Boy Floyd, John Dillinger, Machine Gun Kelly. With the criminals I was getting to know here, I thought, One day I'll write a book. My friends warned me that I would be dead within six months."

One day, he recalled, some Escobar men began discussing a murder they were planning. "I got up, as if to leave the room, but one of them said, 'Stay. We trust you.' I stayed." Correa realized that he had crossed a line. "I'm a big reader of World War Two histories," he said. "And something I've always noticed is that, for those who were in the concentration camps, a moment comes when they became accustomed to everything going on around them." Correa waved to the streets around us. "I mean, I suffered over what was happening, the violence. But the morbid curiosity-you know, it was like Alka-Seltzer. I felt something here, inside me." Correa made an itching motion with his fingers around his stomach, and smiled.

When Escobar began to establish himself as a public figure, in the early eighties, he found other people willing to tell his story without judgment. In April, 1983, the weekly magazine Semana published an article titled "Un Robin Hood Paisa." ( Paisa is the local term for the people of Antioquia province, which contains Medellín.) Semana described Escobar as a politically ambitious and civic-minded thirty-three-year-old businessman who owned an immense private ranch and a fleet of helicopters and airplanes. The magazine evaded questions about the origin of Escobar's fortune, saying only that it was "the subject of widespread speculation."

Escobar had recently mounted a campaign for Congress, in which he spent freely in Medellín's poorer neighborhoods. He had initially tried to join a branch of Colombia's mainstream Liberal Party, led by a popular young politician named Luis Carlos Galán, but he was thwarted when Galán denounced him as a mafioso. Escobar, undaunted, joined a different branch of the Party, with the help of a powerful, corrupt senator named Alberto Santofimio.

Escobar made it to Congress, and began working to build a political constituency in and around Medellín. "His civic vocation seems to know no limits," Semana gushed. "His civic works include entire neighborhoods, football fields, lighting systems, reforestation programs, donations of tractors, bulldozers, etc. At the moment he is moving forward with a program to build a thousand homes on a giant lot he owns. He bought it with the idea of building a neighborhood to relocate hundreds of poor families from the slums of Medellín, and he's already given jobs to some in his construction firm."

For anyone looking, though, the real reasons for Escobar's interest in politics were clear. "His main political preoccupation right now is the extradition of Colombians," Semana said. "For him, this treaty, whereby Colombians who reside in their own country but who have issues in the United States can be handed over to the authorities of that country, constitutes 'a violation of national sovereignty.' "

His electoral ambitions did not go very far. He was soon denounced as a gangster by Colombia's justice minister, Rodrigo Lara Bonilla. Escobar fought back, falsely accusing the minister of being in the pocket of narcos. But then an influential newspaper editor named Guillermo Cano dug up an old news story showing that Escobar had been arrested, seven years before, for the possession of thirty-nine pounds of cocaine. Escobar was ejected from Congress, and the F.B.I. began investigating him. He went underground, and a long hunt began.

In March, 1984, Colombian and American agents raided the cartel's headquarters. Known as Tranquilandia, it was a huge complex that contained at least seven laboratories, various airstrips, and more than a billion dollars' worth of cocaine. A month later, Escobar had his revenge, when two of his men, riding a motorbike, ambushed Lara Bonilla's car in Bogotá, killing him instantly.

Escobar spent seven years as a fugitive, but his concern was less the Colombian justice system than the United States Drug Enforcement Administration. To force the state to withdraw from its extradition treaty with the U.S., he and his partners offered bounties on judges and prosecutors, in warnings that were signed "The Extraditables." The cartel's sicarios killed thousands of people, including more than two hundred and fifty policemen in Medellín. In 1986, his men murdered Cano, and they machine-gunned his old political enemy Luis Carlos Galán at a Presidential-campaign appearance in 1989. Many civilians were also killed, including the hundred and seven passengers and crew of an Avianca plane that Escobar had ordered blown up, in 1989, because he believed-wrongly, it turned out-that another uncoöperative politician was on board. To force the government to negotiate, he abducted prominent Colombians, many of them journalists, including the daughter of a former President. Escobar's guiding principle was plata o plomo, meaning silver or lead-either you took his money or you got a bullet.

Another Netflix series, the sixty-part "Surviving Escobar," is based on a memoir by Jhon Jairo (Popeye) Velásquez, one of Escobar's top sicarios. Since completing a twenty-three-year prison sentence, in 2014, Popeye has taken advantage of Escobar's resurgent glamour. In addition to the Netflix series, he has a YouTube show, "Repentant Popeye," in which he films himself telling stories from the old days, commenting on the news, insulting his enemies ("despicable rats!"), and haranguing soccer managers who don't meet his expectations. Despite the show's name, Popeye doesn't seem very repentant. He frequently expresses admiration for Escobar, whom he calls El Patrón, and cheerfully acknowledges his crimes; he admits to having murdered more than two hundred and fifty people, including several leading politicians, and to having helped orchestrate the killings of some three thousand more. For the many Colombians who are ashamed to be associated with Escobar's memory, Popeye's brazenness is infuriating. His fans love it. The YouTube show has some six hundred thousand subscribers, mostly young, right-wing men.

I met Popeye at his apartment, on the top floor of a newly built red brick tower, in a gentrifying neighborhood of Medellín. A slim, youthful man in his mid-fifties, with short-cropped silver hair and a camera-ready smile, he wore jeans and a black T-shirt, and his neck and arms were tattooed. Both of his forearms bore the phrase "El General de la Mafia," surrounded by skeletons and death's heads.

The apartment had the feeling of a studio set. In the living room, a large window looked out on an adjacent apartment tower, and a camera on a tripod was placed near it. On the walls, an oil painting showed two cocks fighting against a black backdrop; another depicted an army of sperm breaking into eggs. Between them hung a number of masks, of the kind used in sadomasochistic rituals, including a replica of the one that Hannibal Lecter wore in " The Silence of the Lambs." Popeye explained that he liked them because they reminded him of death, and "death is part of life."

The narcoturistas are coming to Colombia in part because the country is experiencing unusual stability, after decades of vicious fighting. In 2016, the government, led by President Juan Manuel Santos, signed a peace treaty with the Marxist guerrilla army known as the FARC, ending a half-century insurgency. Popeye wanted no part of it. "There'll never be peace here in Colombia," he said. In his view, Santos was "a professional traitor," and the treaty threatened Colombia's integrity by allowing Communists to run for office.

Popeye was not opposed to violence. He was happy to acknowledge that Escobar, trying to cultivate allies to fight against rival criminal groups, had helped form a string of brutal right-wing paramilitaries; he spoke warmly of the former President Álvaro Uribe Vélez, who has frequently been accused of aiding the paramilitaries' work. (In a declassified 1991 Defense Intelligence document, Uribe also was named as a collaborator of Escobar's. Uribe denies the accusations. However, his brother is on trial for leading a terror group, and numerous associates of his have been imprisoned for similar crimes.) "We need an ultra-right-wing government here to stop Colombia from succumbing to Communism," Popeye declared. He gestured toward the mountains ringing Medellín-a stronghold of paramilitaries-and said, "There are already fifteen thousand armed men in these mountains. The day the FARC takes power, we'll become two hundred thousand, and, if we include the cities, altogether we'll be five hundred thousand. It'll be financed by industrialists, and the combustible ingredient to all of this will be cocaine." He saw himself as a key player in this future war, calling himself "the most experienced Colombian" in matters of violence.

He had killed innocent people, he said, and cut victims into pieces, but had done so because his enemies had done that to his people, too. Anyway, in those days it had been his job. He had been fighting what he thought was a war against a corrupt state and its extradition treaty with the United States. How did he sleep at night? By getting in bed, pulling up the covers, and closing his eyes. He didn't have time, he said, to andar con maricadas -to mess around with fairy shit.

Popeye complained that he had done his time and had helped prosecutors with investigations, but still the authorities interfered with his efforts to make a living, through his books and films. On his YouTube show, he claims that the police frequently stop him to ask questions about being involved in the cocaine trade. "Look around," he said. "I live simply. My apartment is nothing fancy, and my car is ordinary."

In December, 2016, he appeared in a video wielding a semi-automatic pistol and telling his followers, "Hello, warriors. I'm here in the streets of my beloved Medellín. I found my beautiful 9-millimetre Pietro Beretta. We're testing it-we're firing it. It's a doll, a beauty." Popeye complained that Medellín's mayor had made a fuss, despite the fact that it was a stunt gun. Popeye stood and retrieved the gun, and, holding it by the barrel, he handed it to me. It was heavy, and looked real. "See?" he said. Understanding that he meant to demonstrate that the gun was fake, I pointed the pistol at his cockfight painting and pulled the trigger. The apartment exploded with the bang. Popeye looked startled, and went to the door and opened it. The hallway was empty. "Where are the neighbors?" he said. "Not a soul. I could be murdered here and nobody would come." I told him that I didn't entirely blame his neighbors. Popeye laughed.

Before I left, Popeye took a moment to endorse his latest production: an Internet-only film called "X Sicario Professional," about a man who is released from prison and has to return to his city and take out the mafia don. He autographed a DVD copy for me. Knowing that I planned to see the mayor, he dedicated another to him, and asked me to give it to him on his behalf.

Since becoming mayor, in 2016, Federico Gutiérrez has waged a campaign to reject what he calls "the past"-the legacy of narcotrafficking and violence. At the peak of Escobar's rampage, Medellín was the murder capital of the world, with more than six thousand homicides in 1991. In the past two decades, it has transformed itself, with significant investments in public transport, including a cable car that links the hillside slums to the city center, and a revamped downtown, with a botanical garden, a concert area, and an interactive science museum for children. Many of the city's slums, called comunas, are still controlled by gangs, but security has improved; last year, there were five hundred and seventy-seven murders. For the Mayor, understandably, Popeye represents a public-relations problem.

Gutiérrez met me at his office downtown. A slender man of forty-three, he wears his hair long, in the manner of a soccer player, and favors jeans and dress shirts with the top button loose. Politically, he is right of center. Gutiérrez grimaced when I told him I had met Popeye, and said, "Everything we are doing today to fight against narcotrafficking is because of what they did in the eighties." He had grown up during the violence, and still marvelled at the turnaround. "This is no longer the city of Pablo Escobar," Gutiérrez declared. "This is the city Pablo Escobar tried, but failed, to destroy." When I gave Gutiérrez his dedicated copy of "X Sicario," he looked disgusted and handed it back to me, holding it with two fingers as if it were contagious. "I can't accept this," he said. "Seeing Popeye back on the street is an offense to society and to his victims. But these are the laws."

Last March, the American rapper Wiz Khalifa, in Medellín for a concert, visited Escobar's grave; later, he posted on Instagram images of himself smoking a joint at the tomb, along with the message "Smokin wit Pablo." Gutiérrez had gone on television to call the rapper a sinverguenza -a shameless ruffian-and to say that he should have brought flowers to Escobar's victims instead. Later, Wiz Khalifa posted an apology on Instagram, saying, "Didn't mean to offend anyone with my personal activities. . . . Peace and love." Still, Gutiérrez could barely contain himself at the memory. "We have to stop the narcoculture," he said. "Wiz Khalifa thought he could come here and make an apologia for crime but found out that he couldn't."

Gutiérrez told me that he and his team were fighting to reclaim Medellín's story. "If you don't tell your history yourself, others will tell it for you," he said. Soon he would be inaugurating a new exhibit at the city's Museum of Memory, "to show the victims' side of the story," Gutiérrez said. "We're not going to conceal the true history, but we don't want those who did so much harm to be able to show themselves off as heroes. The real heroes are their victims. We want to be a symbol of what happened-a city that collapsed but got to its feet again." When I mentioned that I had been on Roberto Escobar's tour, Gutiérrez blanched, and said, "We'll also do a tour-an official tour."

The unofficial tours frequently stop at the Monaco Building, an eight-story brutalist apartment tower of reinforced concrete, in the affluent Poblado district, that Escobar built for his family. In 1988, his rivals in the Cali drug cartel placed a powerful car bomb outside the Monaco; Escobar's mother, wife, and children were inside the tower, and though they sustained no serious injuries, they fled and did not return. Gutiérrez said that he planned to demolish the building and create a park in its place. He'd needed to win over the Medellín police, who had wanted to refurbish it as an intelligence headquarters. Gutiérrez told me that he was waiting for one last signature. When he got it, he said, he would invite me to watch the demolition.

In a gruesome scene from the first season of "Narcos," Escobar murders two trafficking partners, whom he suspects of withholding money. He kills the first one by beating him to death with a pool cue; when he is finished, his face and clothing spattered with blood, his men beat the other one to death. The story on which the scene is based is hardly less gruesome. According to Popeye's testimony, the two victims, Fernando Galeano and Gerardo Moncada, were shot, cut into pieces, and incinerated in a fire pit.

Both the imagined scene and the real killings took place in La Catedral, the prison where Escobar was held after striking a deal to turn himself in, in 1991. An unused drug-rehabilitation center that was renovated to house Escobar, La Catedral occupied a secluded spot on the forested edges of the Envigado plateau, with spectacular views of Medellín. In the deal, Escobar agreed to spend a few years there, in exchange for the government's commitment not to extradite him to the United States. The prison did little to restrain him; his sicarios served as guards, and he remained involved in the cocaine trade. The key intermediary for his surrender was Rafael García Herreros, an octogenarian priest who had previously accepted Escobar's gift of a "very beautiful hacienda" on behalf of his church, and had gone on television to insist that he had done nothing wrong. "When one fulfills the will of God, there is no corruption," he said.

The road to La Catedral is winding and steep, full of switchbacks and narrow bridges that hang over mountain streams. On the morning of my visit, clouds obscured the valley, and everything was damp. La Catedral, at the top, is now a charitable home for elderly people, run by a Benedictine abbot, Elkin Ramiro Vélez García. On the exterior wall, a billboard-size photograph shows the place as it was in Escobar's day; a picture of him, wearing a Russian fur hat, bears the caption "He who does not know his history is condemned to repeat it."

In the main plaza-a parklike area with naïve mosaic murals-several dozen residents warmed themselves in the morning sun. Others drank coffee in a cheerful mess hall, adorned with mounted bull's heads and old Coca-Cola advertisements. The visible remnants of the prison were set back, at the edges of the forest. There was what remained of Escobar's bedroom-a concrete pad, overgrown with jungle-and two guard towers. A large brick structure, once a video arcade for Escobar's men, had been repurposed as an administration building. The plaza had once been a soccer field, where Escobar played with his men.

Father Elkin, a clean-shaven man in his early fifties, wearing a black soutane and a large crucifix, waved me into his office next to the mess hall. He said that Escobar-Pablo, as he called him-had chosen the site for his prison because he knew it well: it was an area where he used to have people killed and their bodies disposed of. "He did many, many, many bad things here," Father Elkin said. "But he also did wonderful things." This was a tendentious view but not an uncommon one, especially in Escobar's early years. The Semana story had spoken of his "desire to be the country's number one benefactor." Old comrades told me that they were attracted by his professed commitment to building a "Medellín without slums." Popeye insisted that Escobar "was really a socialist-he just had a different kind of socialism in mind, where everyone would have his own little car, his own little house." He had paid for the construction of a neighborhood that became known as Barrio Pablo Escobar: five hundred houses and several soccer fields.

After he was pushed out of Congress, though, his largesse became a more direct exchange of money for influence. His bribes went to police officers and judges, but also to residents of the comunas. Father Elkin recalled that once, on a soccer field in a nearby community called El Dorado, he'd watched Escobar hand out money to the poor. "He did many things for those who were helped by no one else, and he did so always in the company of the Church. The priest would go to see Pablo and always leave with his briefcase full. Was this evil? We would have to define evil to decide that." He raised his voice, as if speaking from the pulpit: "The Church has also done bad, bad things in the name of God! It will be God who judges us."

Father Elkin said that Popeye-"a very good friend of mine"-came frequently to La Catedral, bringing tourists and a crew of bodyguards. Most of the narcotours were "pure silliness," he said. "The guides tell the tourists anything that comes into their heads. For instance, I made an outdoor oven to incinerate the diapers of the old folks. Then I found out the guides were telling their tourists that it was where Pablo burned people!" He shook his head. "Popeye, on the other hand, tells his tourists the truth. For example, he talks about the asado de los Moncada"-the Moncada barbecue. When Escobar's men burned the bodies of Moncada and Galeano, they arranged to have a barbecue the same evening, to disguise the smoke and the smell.

The killings, it turned out, helped dislodge Escobar from his comfortable imprisonment. When the visitors did not return from La Catedral, rumors spread that Escobar had killed them. A few weeks later, in July, 1992, the government attempted to move Escobar to a more secure facility, and he escaped in the process. For more than a year, he was pursued by a coalition of his enemies: the D.E.A. and the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command; a Colombian police team called the Search Bloc; and a death squad of criminal rivals that called itself Los Pepes-short for People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar.

On December 2, 1993, police traced a phone call between Escobar and his son, Juan Pablo, to a safe house in the Los Pinos neighborhood of Medellín. Colombian special forces swooped in. Escobar was killed at the house, felled by three bullets as he stood on its red tiled roof. He was bearded and barefoot, in jeans; a photograph circulated of him lying face down, his belly spilling out of a blue polo shirt. The Colombian artist Fernando Botero, noted for his fleshy, whimsical portrayals of people and animals, reimagined the scene in a heroic oil painting. "The Death of Pablo Escobar" shows him standing on the rooftop with gun in hand, while bullets whiz around him, like insects pestering a giant. It hangs in the Museo de Antioquia, in downtown Medellín.

It is an item of faith among Escobar's family members that he killed himself before the authorities could get to him. Father Elkin wasn't even convinced that Escobar had really died. "If you ask me whether Pablo is dead, I would say I don't believe he is," he said. "He was a sagacious, astute man." He waved his arms around, as if to suggest that Escobar could be anywhere, still in hiding. He said that Popeye had told him that there were still bodies buried around La Catedral, in graves dug on his orders. (Popeye denies this.) Some of the elderly residents believed that La Catedral was haunted, Father Elkin said. They had seen and heard things. "Ghosts?" I asked. "Not ghosts-spirits," he clarified. They had appeared to him, too. Sometimes they tapped him on the shoulder.

In Medellín's Montesacro cemetery, I found a fresh bouquet of pastel-colored flowers in a vase next to Escobar's tomb. The family plot is situated in a prominent spot next to the chapel, and flanked by graceful cypresses. On a slab of black marble, gold script spelled out "Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria, December 1, 1949-December 2, 1993." El Patrón had turned forty-four the day before his death. His parents were buried alongside him, as was his bodyguard Limón, who was with him when he died.

Two young men stood quietly in front of Escobar's tomb, occasionally murmuring in French. At last, one of them walked to a marble bench opposite the tomb and sat in a pose of reverent contemplation. I was reminded of a YouTube video of Popeye paying homage to Escobar after he got out of prison. He knelt in front of the tomb, his eyes closed, like a choirboy about to receive the Sacrament.

Colombians have spent decades trying to reconcile the ecstatic remembrances of Escobar with the mayhem he produced. In 1993, the novelist Gabriel García Márquez began grappling with his legacy in "News of a Kidnapping." The book told the stories of the Colombians Escobar had abducted, as he tried to force the government to disallow his extradition. García Márquez described Escobar as a monstrous Pied Piper: "At the height of his splendor, people put up altars with his picture and lit candles to him in the slums of Medellín. It was believed he could perform miracles. No Colombian in history ever possessed or exercised a talent like his for shaping public opinion. And none had a greater power to corrupt. The most unsettling and dangerous aspect of his personality was his total inability to distinguish between good and evil."

After Escobar's death, the journalist Alonso Salazar set out to write a biography that would deflate the legend. In 2001, after several years of interviews with Escobar's relatives, friends, and enemies, he published "The Pablo Parable." Where García Márquez had suggested that Escobar had subjected Colombia to a kind of national hypnosis, Salazar suggested that he had merely been a conduit for the country's bigotry and violent impulses. "The Escobar story calls into question Colombia's entire society-its political and economic elites, and the armed forces-as to the coherence of our state and our capacity to build a nation where it is possible for everyone to live dignified lives," he wrote. "It's also a questioning of the international community, especially the United States, for its deceit in maintaining a war, the so-called war against drugs, which has . . . created criminality and destruction of life and nature that is beyond any precedent."

Salazar later entered politics, serving as mayor of Medellín from 2008 to 2011, and was involved in many of the city's recent reforms. One evening, I met him at his home to discuss Escobar's legacy. "There is a resurrection of Escobar," he lamented, and he wondered if he had been partly to blame. His book about Escobar had been adapted for a television series, "El Patrón del Mal," which began airing in 2012 and attracted obsessive fans across Latin America. "The series is balanced," he said. "It shows the victims, too, and the generals who fought Escobar. But I don't think that's what the public watched it for. They watched it to see Escobar."

When Salazar signed over the rights, he felt confident that the producers would not glamorize Escobar. One of them, Camilo Cano, was the son of the murdered newspaper editor; the other, Juana Uribe, was the daughter of a former Escobar hostage and a niece of a murdered politician. Still, the portrait of Escobar was ambivalent, and some viewers were offended. At a panel discussion in 2013, Uribe recalled, "A woman once asked me, 'Why did you portray Pablo Escobar as loving with his children?' And I told her, 'Because that's how psychopaths are: loving with their kids-and murderers.' And we need to understand that, if we're going to stop falling in love with psychopaths." She insisted that she had not wanted to make Escobar a hero. "Escobar kidnapped my mother, killed my uncle." But, she said, "a person that was able to do what Escobar did has also a normal face. And people have to learn that that's the way people are, they have two sides."

Uribe bemoaned the appeal of antiheroes: "People love bandits, no matter what we do." (As if to confirm her point, Popeye told me about his youthful fascination with "Scarface," in which Al Pacino plays a Cuban immigrant who becomes a cocaine kingpin. "That was the life we wanted to live!" he exclaimed.) But "El Patrón del Mal" made it clear that, in a profoundly unequal country, Escobar represented a form of economic mobility. "When there are no regular paths to get out of where you are, the bandit is the one who makes it-the one who can jump ahead," Uribe said. He also appealed to a perverse sense of patriotism. The oath of Los Extraditables-"Better a tomb in Colombia than a cell in the United States"-resonated with Latin Americans sensitive about Yankee intervention.

"El Patrón del Mal" joined a wave of narconovelas-soap operas featuring drug traffickers-that are notably less concerned with ethical implications. One of the first, "Without Tits, You Don't Get to Heaven," revolves around a young woman, Catalina, who tries to make her way out of poverty by becoming a prostitute for narcos, getting breast implants to make herself more desirable. Despite the hand-wringing of politicians and journalists, the shows have resonated with people who have little faith in the state. As the Fordham anthropologist O. Hugo Benavides has written, "Narconovelas set up an alternative moral political structure in which the state, government, politicians, law enforcement, bureaucrats, and soldiers are seldom portrayed as the good guys. The heroes are always either Lone Ranger types or misunderstood (and sometimes conflicted) drug dealers."

"Narcos" avoids questions of culpability by narrating everything from the American perspective: the protagonist is not Escobar but the D.E.A. agents pursuing him. During the first season, Omar Rincón, a professor of media studies at Bogotá's University of the Andes, wrote a scornful review. The show, he said, presented a discomfitingly American vision of Colombians, "something like what Trump thinks we are: the good ones are the gringos in the D.E.A. And the narcos are comic misfits and tasteless throwbacks." Even the accents weren't right, he complained. For Colombians, he said, it was impossible to identify with the narrative. "The story makes heroes of those that Latin Americans consider villains: the D.E.A. agents. Which, in addition to being silly, goes against reality. Gentlemen of Netflix: know that the villains are the ones in the D.E.A."

Escobar's death ended the second season of "Narcos," but the show has continued; the third season followed the Cali cartel, and the fourth has moved to Mexico, which is now even more afflicted by drug violence than Colombia is. In September, a location scout named Carlos Muñoz Portal was found shot dead in his car outside Mexico City. It was unclear whether Muñoz's murder was a coincidence or a drug cartel's warning not to film in its territory; in any case, Netflix announced its intention to proceed with the production. Roberto Escobar suggested a solution to the producers: hire hit men to provide security.

On the twentieth anniversary of Escobar's death, a group of mourners wearing white shirts gathered at his tomb. They were there to attend a "forgiveness Mass" arranged by his sister Luz María. After Escobar's death, his wife and children immigrated to Argentina, but Luz María stayed, and, in the coming years, she organized several Masses to reconcile the Escobars with victims and their families. This one was a success. She handed each of the mourners a symbolic seed-to help them "let forgiveness enter and grow in their hearts," she said. A teen-age girl left a note at Escobar's graveside: "I was told you did good things and bad things, but it doesn't matter now. Rest in peace."

One evening, I spoke to Luz María, in the food court of a luxury mall (near, as it happens, a restaurant where Popeye once arranged to have his own girlfriend murdered, on Pablo's orders). She told me, "I have a slogan I always try and tell the media: 'No to drugs, no to narcotrafficking, no to violence, and yes to forgiveness." In Colombia, which is nearly eighty per cent Catholic, the rhetoric of contrition can be potent. Father Elkin described Escobar as a profoundly devout man who was led astray by his ambitions. But when I asked Roberto Escobar whether he felt repentant for his crimes he said no. "It's not important to be repentant," he said. "I'm a believer." (After the letter bomb, he said, he'd experienced a particularly convincing vision of Christ.) Luz María told me that she still hoped Popeye would find his way. She had bumped into him after his release, offered him a blessing, and told him that God had given him a second chance. Father Elkin was more resigned about Popeye's prospects: "He comes to confess, and I take his confession. If he doesn't comply with his confession, that's his business."

In 2009, Escobar's son, Juan Pablo, appeared in a documentary called " Sins of My Father," in which he contacted victims of his father and apologized on behalf of his family. He has also reckoned with his father's memory in two memoirs, " Pablo Escobar: My Father," from 2014, and the untranslated "Pablo Escobar in Flagrante: The Things My Father Never Told Me," which was released in 2016. Just before Christmas, I had lunch with him in Guadalajara, Mexico, where he was promoting his latest book. Juan Pablo, who was sixteen years old when Escobar was killed, is now forty-one, a brooding, heavyset man with an unmistakable resemblance to his father; the image on the jacket of "In Flagrante" seamlessly melds their faces. He told me that he learned the truth about his family when he was seven, and Pablo Escobar told him bluntly, "I'm an outlaw." From then on, they had a morning ritual in which his father read the newspaper and pointed out murders that had been attributed to him. Juan Pablo recalled, "He'd say, 'I didn't do that one,' and then, 'I did that one.' "

In Argentina, Juan Pablo worked as an architect, but in recent years he has made a second career of rehabilitating the family's reputation. His new book offers a twenty-eight-point list of what he calls falsehoods propagated by "Narcos." ("My father did not personally kill the person who is called Colonel 'Carrillo' in the series.") Over lunch, Juan Pablo told me about his work as a speaker, in which Mexican officials hire him to warn youngsters about the dangers of a criminal life style. He also owns a clothing line, Escobar Henao, whose mission statement declares, "Our garments are banners of peace." (One T-shirt includes the family name and the phrase "Enough will never be enough.") Alonso Salazar, the journalist and politician, told me, "He's very clever, and clearly he's been pondering the opportunities offered by this resurrection. He's living off the image of the father but realizes that he needs to be critical." At the restaurant, Juan Pablo excused himself to speak briefly with a producer about a movie project.

Before the family fled Colombia, Juan Pablo opened a phone book and selected a new name, Sebastián Marroquín, which he maintained until 1999, when an Argentine police investigation into allegations of money-laundering revealed his identity. (He was held for six weeks, then released for lack of evidence.) When I asked which name he preferred, he shrugged and said it didn't matter. He would always be Pablo Escobar's son. "I live with permanent suspicion-I was born guilty," he complained. He noted bitterly that the United States government had refused him a visa for twenty-four years. "I want to be recognized as an individual," he said. "I know about everything my father did, and I will go to each and every one of the families of his victims to ask forgiveness. But I'm not legally culpable. My personal slogan is 'I inherited a mountain of shit. So what am I supposed to do with it?' "

Alonso Salazar told me that Pablo Escobar's legacy had profoundly altered political and social life. "Narcotrafficking came along and just overwhelmed everything," he said. "Escobar débuted the instruments of terror, and afterward everyone used them."

The Medellín cartel's ascent coincided with the collapse of Communism in Europe, which in turn helped end most of the socialist revolution in the hemisphere. After Escobar, the idea of rebellion based on ideology was largely supplanted by the remorseless pursuit of profit and power. In places along his supply chain-including Mexico and in Central America-the remnants of his operation have grown into insurgent gangs, and states have succumbed to corruption and internal conflict.

Escobar's cartel died with him, but, despite a U.S.-assisted war on narcotrafficking that has cost thousands of lives and more than nine billion dollars, international consumption has spread enormously, and the drug economy remains strong; last year, the United Nations reported that Colombia was the world's largest producer of cocaine. Five of the world's most dangerous cities are in Latin America, with much of the violence linked to the drug trade.

Father Elkin suggested that Escobar's greatest legacy was his story. "The country likes to say that it has forgotten Pablo Escobar, but it's not true," he told me. "Today's youth still see narcotrafficking as a way to make quick money. Society doesn't change, really. And those with the greatest responsibility for this-excuse me-are those in the media, with their television series and their books."

Omar Rincón, the media-studies professor, once wrote, "We live the culture of drug trafficking, in aesthetics, values, and references. We are a nation that took on the narco idea that anything goes if it will get you out of poverty: some tits, a weapon, corruption, trafficking coca, being a guerrilla or a paramilitary fighter, or being in government." He was careful to note that the narco aesthetic was not merely bad taste. It was a way of life "among the dispossessed communities that look to modernity and have found in money the only way to exist in the world."

For a generation of traffickers, Escobar left behind a model of success: build support among the disenfranchised by providing them with money and power they would not otherwise have; in return, they will be your loyalists, your spies, and your gunmen. For the middle class, use your wealth to corrupt policemen, generals, judges, and politicians.

The criminals who emulate him are no less ruthless, but they have learned not to seek political power, or much recognition. The Oficina de Envigado-the closest successor to the Medellín cartel-was run, until recently, by Juan Carlos Mesa, alias Tom, a shadowy figure who almost never appeared in public. Colombian special forces pursued him for years, without success. Then, in early December, police raided Tom's fiftieth-birthday celebration. (They were tipped off to the party by informants, who noticed unusually generous purchases of twenty-one-year-old Chivas.) There were some fifteen guests at the party, and, to the authorities' surprise, Popeye was among them. Despite an unconvincing alibi-he just happened to be in the area, handing out copies of his memoir, and had stumbled upon the party-Popeye was released, for lack of evidence. Even so, the incident triggered calls for him to be returned to prison, including one from Colombia's President, Juan Manuel Santos.

Popeye's response was characteristically defiant. He fired off a flurry of tweets, saying, "It isn't a crime to go to a party," and calling his opponents "miserable rats." In a subsequent tweet, he sent a warning: "If I have to go to prison, I'll go. Very soon I will again be attacking this damned government."

At the height of Escobar's power, he built himself a paradise: La Hacienda Nápoles, a seven-thousand-acre estate three hours from Medellín. Escobar spent years converting the property from an isolated wilderness to a refuge, with paved roads, artificial lakes, and a private zoo stocked with zebras, hippopotamuses, and giraffes, as well as a series of life-size dinosaur sculptures. Guests had the use of swimming pools, a party house, stables, a bullring, a vintage-car collection, and a fleet of speedboats. In a characteristic flourish, Escobar adorned the arch over the entrance with a single-engine Piper Cub, a replica of the airplane that had carried his first load of coke to the United States.

After Escobar's death, the compound was abandoned, its structures ransacked by memento seekers and by treasure hunters pursuing rumors that Escobar had hidden millions of dollars in cash on the property. After being repossessed by the state, Hacienda Nápoles was reopened in 2007, as a theme park with a zoo, a water park, and several family-friendly hotels. Escobar's hippopotamuses are a main attraction. The herd, which began with three females and a male bought from a California zoo, is now believed to contain as many as fifty, making it the largest herd living freely outside Africa. As the estate fell into disrepair, several of them wandered off and found new habitat. One of the hippos was discovered in the nearby town of Doradal. As it lumbered down the street, children dodged around it, shrieking; the locals joked about making the hippo a mascot. Several family groups have migrated into the nearby Magdalena River system. Colombian authorities suggested a hunt to cull the hippos before they upset the local ecosystem or become a danger to humans, but after a public outcry the matter was dropped.

I visited the Hacienda Nápoles one day with Edgar Jiménez, who had been Escobar's personal photographer and a friend of his since grade school. "Pablo said I was the only photographer who could take his photo," Jiménez told me. "I did all their family events, like birthdays, weddings, and first Communions." Like everyone else, he cherished the stories. Once, he said, he was summoned to the hacienda to find Escobar hosting one of his cartel partners, the German-Colombian Carlos Lehder Rivas. An avid neo-Nazi and frequent cocaine user, Lehder had become unstable. After a soccer match that evening, he fatally shot one of Escobar's men; Lehder was jealous because his girlfriend was "making eyes" at the man. Escobar calmly asked Lehder to leave the next morning and, according to Jiménez, made sure that authorities knew his whereabouts. Soon after, Lehder became the first Colombian narcotrafficker to be extradited to the United States.

I asked Jiménez if he felt any qualms about his relationship with Escobar. "I wasn't in agreement with the violence," he said. "But I was just the photographer, remember? And it has to be understood that this violent relationship Pablo had with the state was the product of the rejection he felt by Colombian society. Everyone had profited from him, and later they had betrayed him."

At the entrance to Hacienda Nápoles, Jiménez was thrilled to see Escobar's plane still hanging over the gate, with a new paint job of black-and-white zebra stripes. Inside the compound, though, we found that Escobar's main house had been torn down, and his vintage-car collection had been torched, leaving a carport full of rusting hulks. But the outlines of the old swimming pool were still there, on the lawn. (In a video game that spun out of "Narcos," the pool provides a backdrop for a gun battle between Escobar and the D.E.A.) Where the clinic for Escobar's employees had been was a food court, overlooking a huge swimming pool with slides and fountains and bridges; in one section of the pool, a gigantic sculpture of an octopus spread its tentacles, and kids swam back and forth underneath. Jiménez was delighted, and said that he'd like to return with his grandson. Before we left, he asked for a brochure that listed package deals for family weekends. ♦

Juan Pablo Escobar appeared in the documentary "Sins of My Father." He did not create it.

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In Colombia, a drug lord's posthumous celebrity brings profits and controversy. When Roberto Escobar was the head accountant for the Medellín cartel, in the nineteen-eighties, he handled billions of dollars a year-so much cash that he sometimes resorted to stuffing it in plastic bags and burying it in the countryside.

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It may have started with a bat in a cave, but human activity set it loose.

By

Mr. Quammen is the author of "Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic."

A normally busy shopping district during the Chinese New Year holiday in Beijing. Credit... Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

The latest scary new virus that has captured the world's horrified attention, caused a lockdown of 56 million people in China, disrupted travel plans around the globe and sparked a run on medical masks from Wuhan, Hubei Province, to Bryan, Texas, is known provisionally as "nCoV-2019." It's a clunky moniker for a lurid threat.

The name, picked by the team of Chinese scientists who isolated and identified the virus, is short for "novel coronavirus of 2019." It reflects the fact that the virus was first recognized to have infected humans late last year - in a seafood and live-animal market in Wuhan - and that it belongs to the coronavirus family, a notorious group. The SARS epidemic of 2002-3, which infected 8,098 people worldwide, killing 774 of them, was caused by a coronavirus, and so was the MERS outbreak that began on the Arabian Peninsula in 2012 and still lingers (2,494 people infected and 858 deaths as of November).

Despite the new virus's name, though, and as the people who christened it well know, nCoV-2019 isn't as novel as you might think.

Something very much like it was found several years ago in a cave in Yunnan, a province roughly a thousand miles southwest of Wuhan, by a team of perspicacious researchers, who noted its existence with concern. The fast spread of nCoV-2019 - more than 4,500 confirmed cases, including at least 106 deaths, as of Tuesday morning, and the figures will have risen by the time you read this - is startling but not unforeseeable. That the virus emerged from a nonhuman animal, probably a bat, and possibly after passing through another creature, may seem spooky, yet it is utterly unsurprising to scientists who study these things.

One such scientist is Zheng-Li Shi, of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a senior author of the draft paper (not yet peer reviewed and so far available only in preprint) that gave nCoV-2019 its identity and name. It was Ms. Shi and her collaborators who, back in 2005, showed that the SARS pathogen was a bat virus that had spilled over into people. Ms. Shi and colleagues have been tracing coronaviruses in bats since then, warning that some of them are uniquely suited to cause human pandemics.

In a 2017 paper, they set out how, after nearly five years of collecting fecal samples from bats in the Yunnan cave, they had found coronaviruses in multiple individuals of four different species of bats, including one called the intermediate horseshoe bat, because of the half-oval flap of skin protruding like a saucer around its nostrils. The genome of that virus, Ms. Shi and her colleagues have now announced, is 96 percent identical to the Wuhan virus that has recently been found in humans. And those two constitute a pair distinct from all other known coronaviruses, including the one that causes SARS. In this sense, nCoV-2019 is novel - and possibly even more dangerous to humans than the other coronaviruses.

I say "possibly" because so far, not only do we not know how dangerous it is, we can't know. Outbreaks of new viral diseases are like the steel balls in a pinball machine: You can slap your flippers at them, rock the machine on its legs and bonk the balls to the jittery rings, but where they end up dropping depends on 11 levels of chance as well as on anything you do. This is true with coronaviruses in particular: They mutate often while they replicate, and can evolve as quickly as a nightmare ghoul.

Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a private research organization based in New York that focuses on the connections between human and wildlife health, is one of Ms. Shi's longtime partners. "We've been raising the flag on these viruses for 15 years," he told me on Friday with calm frustration. "Ever since SARS." He was a co-author of the 2005 bats-and-SARS study, and again of the 2017 paper about the multiple SARS-like coronaviruses in the Yunnan cave.

Mr. Daszak told me that, during that second study, the field team took blood samples from a couple of thousand Yunnanese people, about 400 of whom lived near the cave. Roughly 3 percent of them carried antibodies against SARS-related coronaviruses.

"We don't know if they got sick. We don't know if they were exposed as children or adults," Mr. Daszak said. "But what it tells you is that these viruses are making the jump, repeatedly, from bats to humans." In other words, this Wuhan emergency is no novel event. It's part of a sequence of related contingencies that stretches back into the past and will stretch forward into the future, as long as current circumstances persist.

So when you're done worrying about this outbreak, worry about the next one. Or do something about the current circumstances.

Current circumstances include a perilous trade in wildlife for food, with supply chains stretching through Asia, Africa and to a lesser extent, the United States and elsewhere. That trade has now been outlawed in China, on a temporary basis; but it was outlawed also during SARS, then allowed to resume - with bats, civets, porcupines, turtles, bamboo rats, many kinds of birds and other animals piled together in markets such as the one in Wuhan.

Current circumstances also include 7.6 billion hungry humans: some of them impoverished and desperate for protein; some affluent and wasteful and empowered to travel every which way by airplane. These factors are unprecedented on planet Earth: We know from the fossil record, by absence of evidence, that no large-bodied animal has ever been nearly so abundant as humans are now, let alone so effective at arrogating resources. And one consequence of that abundance, that power, and the consequent ecological disturbances is increasing viral exchanges - first from animal to human, then from human to human, sometimes on a pandemic scale.

We invade tropical forests and other wild landscapes, which harbor so many species of animals and plants - and within those creatures, so many unknown viruses. We cut the trees; we kill the animals or cage them and send them to markets. We disrupt ecosystems, and we shake viruses loose from their natural hosts. When that happens, they need a new host. Often, we are it.

The list of such viruses emerging into humans sounds like a grim drumbeat: Machupo, Bolivia, 1961; Marburg, Germany, 1967; Ebola, Zaire and Sudan, 1976; H.I.V., recognized in New York and California, 1981; a form of Hanta (now known as Sin Nombre), southwestern United States, 1993; Hendra, Australia, 1994; bird flu, Hong Kong, 1997; Nipah, Malaysia, 1998; West Nile, New York, 1999; SARS, China, 2002-3; MERS, Saudi Arabia, 2012; Ebola again, West Africa, 2014. And that's just a selection. Now we have nCoV-2019, the latest thump on the drum.

Current circumstances also include bureaucrats who lie and conceal bad news, and elected officials who brag to the crowd about cutting forests to create jobs in the timber industry and agriculture or about cutting budgets for public health and research. The distance from Wuhan or the Amazon to Paris, Toronto or Washington is short for some viruses, measured in hours, given how well they can ride within airplane passengers. And if you think funding pandemic preparedness is expensive, wait until you see the final cost of nCoV-2019.

Fortunately, current circumstances also include brilliant, dedicated scientists and outbreak-response medical people - such as many at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, EcoHealth Alliance, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (C.D.C.), the Chinese C.D.C. and numerous other institutions. These are the people who go into bat caves, swamps and high-security containment laboratories, often risking their lives, to bring out bat feces and blood and other precious evidence to study genomic sequences and answer the key questions.

As the number of nCoV-2019 cases has increased, and the death toll along with it, one metric, the case fatality rate, has remained rather steady so far: at about or below 3 percent. As of Tuesday, less than three out of 100 confirmed cases had died. That's relatively good luck - worse than for most strains of influenza, better than for SARS.

This good luck may not last. Nobody knows where the pinball will go. Four days from today, the number of cases may be in the tens of thousands. Six months from today, Wuhan pneumonia may be receding into memory. Or not.

We are faced with two mortal challenges, in the short term and the long term. Short term: We must do everything we can, with intelligence, calm and a full commitment of resources, to contain and extinguish this nCoV-2019 outbreak before it becomes, as it could, a devastating global pandemic. Long term: We must remember, when the dust settles, that nCoV-2019 was not a novel event or a misfortune that befell us. It was - it is - part of a pattern of choices that we humans are making.

David Quammen is an author and journalist whose books include "Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic."

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Opinion | We Made the Coronavirus Epidemic

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It may have started with a bat in a cave, but human activity set it loose. By Mr. Quammen is the author of "Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic."

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How to Cultivate the Art of Serendipity - The New York Times

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What is a critique:

-        A critique is a type of creative writing that breaks down and evaluates a literary work in detail and summarizes the quality and integrity of the work. Critique is not criticism, while criticism focuses on the negative side of evaluation, critique focuses on a more positive or neutral side, it is not to criticize a writer, but rather evaluate him.

What does critique mean to research and its writing?

-        A critique research is the analyzation of the strengths and limitations of what the writer has produced in his writing, and critiquing research is a systematic process that evaluates the whole outlook of a research without showing a subjective opinion.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190408-how-catastrophes-can-change-the-path-of-humanity
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/03/19/is-it-finally-time-get-rid-sat-act-college-admissions-tests/

https://academic.oup.com/applij/article/35/4/374/134070

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Bilal Abdul Jalil, Laith Tello, Alanood, Rowdha, Hamda

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Bilal Abdul Jalil, Laith Tello, Alanood, Rowdha, Hamda

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1. a critique is a piece of writing that gives a critical analysis of a book or article; include strengths and weaknesses of said writing, voice the critique in a unbiased and objective manner, and take into consideration rhetorical devices.

2. you cannot write a critique without conducting a thorough research
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Bilal
https://time.com/coral/
https://www.livescience.com/65958-florida-coral-reefs-nitrogen.html
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What is a critique?

A critique is a formal analysis and evaluation of text in terms of defining the strength and weaknesses.

What does critique mean to research and its writing?

A critique essay is related to identifying the strengths and weaknesses of a piece of research, therefore it helps less experienced researchers improve the way of understanding the form of disciplined and systematic study of writing a critique essay.

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Hoor alansari ,Montasir,Mohamed nassif, Humaid Al Ali

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Hoor alansari ,Montasir,Mohamed nassif, Humaid Al Ali

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What is a critique ?
A concise evaluation and assessment of something.

How does critique help with research and its writing?
Critiques help you identify all aspects of the thing that you're researching about which explains and analyze essays or writings.

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Naief Hijazi

A critique is a type of academic writing that aims to evaluate or analyze literally work or artwork. It’s purpose is to evaluate somebody’s work in order to increase the reader’s understanding of it. However, a critique analysis is subjective writing because it expresses the writer’s opinion or evaluation of a piece of work. Writing a crowd helps us to develop our knowledge and understanding of the work’s subject area.

How does critique help with research and its writing?

By conducting critical analysis, you as a writer become more understanding of research methods, in terms of selecting the right resources. As well as understanding which resources are reliable, unbiased and relevant to the topic being researched.

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What is a critique essay?

A critique is a comprehensive analysis and evaluation of a text, production, or performance; either one's own, or someone else's. (Nordquist, 2019)

How does critique help research of its writing?

A critique is a systematic way of objectively reviewing a piece of research to highlight both its strengths and weaknesses, and its applicability to practice.

- Ahmad Ali
- Tawfiq Amin
- Shooq
- Sara

https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-critique-composition-1689944

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A critical essay consists of: an introduction to the article's topic and author, and a body which includes an objective summary, and a detailed evaluation of the text, and finally a conclusion which wraps up points and offers recommendations

A critique essay can help researchers by introducing a different point of view, point out overlooked flaws as well as biases, and form a basis for a new argument.

https://www.citewrite.qut.edu.au/write/critique.jsp

Wonder Woman Propaganda:
https://newrepublic.com/article/143100/wonder-woman-propaganda

Get Out (P109): https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/aus-ebooks/reader.action?docID=5795785

Friends:
https://www.elle.com.au/culture/friends-sexist-homophobic-fat-shame-19177

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According to Oxford Dictionary, a critique is a detailed analysis and assessment of something, especially a literary, philosophical, or political theory. It is commonly understood as fault finding and negative judgment (2019, Wikipedia).

How does a critique help research and its writing?
- writing a critique on a work helps us to develop knowledge of the work’s subject area or related works. An understanding of the work’s purpose, intended audience, evidence of creative style (2016, Cite Write).

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A critique is a formal analysis and evaluation of a text. It is a systematic way of objectively reviewing a piece of research to highlight both its strengths and weaknesses. Knowing how to critique can aid researchers in avoiding common mistakes and logical fallacies.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2015/04/10/yes-the-ben-affleckjennifer-garner-daredevil-movie-is-still-terrible/#32f96bec30f7

https://www.elle.com.au/culture/friends-sexist-homophobic-fat-shame-19177

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A critique is a formal analysis and evaluation of different theories and creative works.

The essay starts of with a short summary of the work along with the reviewer's opinion on the topic. it doesn't have to always mention the flaws in the work; but also it points out the positives.
https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-critique-composition-1689944

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https://www.aus.edu/sites/default/files/Handbook%202019-2020-2.pdf

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A critique is a form of formal academic writing with a clear structure that consists of an introduction to the topic, a body paragraph and a comprehensive conclusion. This form of academic writing critically evaluates a piece of work through analyzing and summarizing.

Critique helps research in writing to give perspective on the topic and develop a deeper understanding of the topic.

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