Murals have long been a preferred way for Latin American artists to voice their political opinions, and right now in Colombia, Colombia is seeing an increase in the populist form of artistic expression, according to The Associated Press.

The number of murals have grown out of a tragic situation.

In 2011, police shot and killed a graffiti artist named Diego Felipe Becerra as he was painting his trademark Felix the Cat. Gustavo Petro, the mayor of Bogota, responded to the artist’s death by decriminalizing graffiti paintings, and he went so far as to offer several public buildings as canvases for muralists.

Since the mayor’s initiative, street art has exploded all across the Colombian capital city.

The AP estimates there are now more than 5,000 large paintings on the walls or the sides of buildings in Bogota. The increase in mural art is positively affecting tourism, as visitors to the city are signing up for guided bicycle graffiti tours.

And non-muralists, such as Justin Bieber, are even getting in on the action.

In 2013, the pop star, living up to his increasingly compulsive tour behavior, rushed over (with the help of police escorts) to mark up a wall after a concert.

Bogota is handling graffiti in a decidedly different manner than its fellow Latin American countries.

Buenos Aires, Argentina, raised penalties for street art which it considers to be a form of vandalism in 2014.

And this month in Lima, the capital of Peru, the mayor ordered city workers to cover up several murals by graffiti artists.

But Bogota seems to be fervently embracing the art form.

The city has recently commissioned an eight-story-high depiction of the late Colombian novelist and Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Nicolas Castro, a 21-year-old artist working on the mural that will end up costing Bogota about $10,000, says that the art form is "a way to socially change the perspective of the city and give a present to people."

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