Paramilitary violence in Colombia

 

In 2010, I photographically re-enacted the death of the victims of the massacres committed by paramilitary groups,  basing the images on testimony collected by Human Rights Watch in Colombia. These images were printed with the lith print photographic process, to convey the sinister quality of the events depicted.

 

Today, Colombia has one of the higest statistics on displacement and human rights violations in the world. The paramilitaries are considered to be responsible for 70 of political murders and disappearances.The Afro-Colombians , indigenous people, peasants and human right defenders have been number one priority. These ethnic groups have been oppressed to force them to abandon their territories. More than two thousand massacres have been denounced in the last decade.They are also associated with several o major drug lords and monopolies. Politicians, people from the army and the police have been found guilty of association with paramilitarism. 

 

In the photographs of this book, the bodies of the assassinated are marked by tags that read, Made in Colombia.This tag symbolizes death as a product consumed by society. Sometimes the tag is blank, difficult to read or is not present in the portrait. Death is a powerful element of cultural imagery and in its final meaning it is a mass product like an object. My tableaux of deaths signify an ongoing struggle against an illness in Colombian society that has not cure.To preview the book click here.