In 2008, a sticky advertisement by the Colombian government was repeated incessantly on the country's radio and television stations. "If you don't grow the bush that kills, many things in the countryside will change," the cartoon began, showing a small marijuana plant with vampire teeth and demon eyes. Without that bush, said a girl's voice, "the lead rains will stop" and "healthier crops will grow." “Coca, marijuana, poppies, they kill. Do not cultivate the plant that kills ”, ends the message. Two years later, the Supreme Court demanded that the State remove him from all the media after an indigenous woman sued, arguing that the coca plant “represents a mother figure and a consolation figure that is fundamental to her relations with the community". The propaganda was stigmatizing not only the plant,but a whole way of life.
It was a small legal victory in an ocean of manipulative advertising. Fifty years ago, President Richard Nixon officially declared that drugs were his country's “enemy number one”, and since then he has not only helped strengthen militarization and criminalization policies throughout Latin America, but also set in motion a machinery of propaganda that have stigmatized both plants and those who produce or consume them.
Just Say No
, said the famous advertisement for First Lady Nancy Reagan, which was echoed throughout the rest of the continent. "Do me a favor, enjoy life," said one from 1984, starring Diego Maradona, perhaps the most contradictory symbol for an anti-drug campaign: "And if they offer you drugs, just say no."
Fifty years later, the photographer Claudi Carreras has a visual counterproposal. “These plants have a double face”, says Carreras (Barcelona, 47 years old), curator of a new exhibition of more than 200 photos called 'Drugs-Politics-Violence' that has just opened at the Image Center of the City of Mexico. “A poppy field, actually, is probably one of the most beautiful fields there is, visually. What did we do so that from there what is seen is pain? How can we reverse that? ”He adds. In the exhibition, which will later be on the bars of the Bosque de Chapultepec, on the Paseo de la Reforma, 15 photographers from all over the continent, and a small group of illustrators, participate, hoping to give a change of perspective to this war against the drugs.
"We do not approach this work to blame anyone, but from the perspective of the destigmatization of the weakest people in the chain," adds Carreras. “We were very interested in showing what the reality is in, for example, the Colombian jungle, or who are the normal consumers in Argentina, because this is such an unequal war, that such powerful machinery is generated to end something as fragile as a plant".
The exhibition is not dedicated to images of drug traffickers or cartels.
"Those images are already on Netflix," says the curator.
Before presenting the photos, next to the reception of the exhibition, there is a mural with the type of images that Carreras does not want to reproduce: 500 covers of Mexican newspapers that show deaths in the streets or captured cartel leaders.
Rather, the exhibition is dedicated to those three plants that are not the ones that kill: Colombian coca, Mexican poppy, or Paraguayan marijuana.
Paraguay is the main marijuana producer in South America.
"Every year the governments of Mexico and Paraguay order the destruction of thousands of cultivated hectares," says the exhibition.
"Every time a plantation is burned or cut down, somewhere in these countries another four emerge."
/ Photo by Santiago Carneri
Since 2013 in Bolivia, the DEA policy has not been influenced and the coca growers' unions monitor the production and commercialization of the plant in local markets.
/ Photo Sara Aliaga
In the mountains of Guerrero in Mexico, some families grow more than half of the poppy plants in the country.
"They are not there selling heroin," says photographer César Rodríguez.
/ Photo César Rodríguez
"The flower with this red color represents, in some way, blood, violence, but also life, passion," says photographer Yael Martínez about the Guerrero poppy.
/ Red photo of Yael Martínez
Red photo of Yael Martínez: "The flower with this red color represents, in some way, blood, violence, but also life, passion," says photographer Yael Martínez about the Guerrero poppy.
"Several of these photographers are portraying realities but also trying to photograph an identity with the image," says Carreras. For example, the photos of the Mexican Yael Martínez in the mountains of Guerrero are intervened with tiny holes made with needles of different sizes, through which a red poppy-colored light passes through.
"It's like this flower is bursting in some way, generating a bang," says Martínez. “This outburst penetrates the whole question of the life of the indigenous communities. Although the native communities in Guerrero do not use the flower in an ancestral way, as happens with the coca leaf in other latitudes, we represent the fact that the cultivation of the poppy flower has come to change the social and political structure of the community. since the 70's ”. Since the 1980s, the profitability of the poppy has not had a strong competitor there - not corn, beans, or coffee - and despite its illegality, it has become the exclusive crop of entire families in some peasant areas of warrior.
The power of monoculture is something that the photographer Andrés Cardona also portrays in his work in the coca-growing region of El Guayabero, in the Colombian Amazon, where the Colombian currency is worth nothing and rather onions or a pack of beers are exchanged for pasta. Coke.
The land of “Coca Coin”, explains the photographer.
"There is no money in that area, there is no education, there is no health or it just seems that this was a different state," adds Cardona.
"The military forces are repressing the civilian population, coca base paste is produced and in addition to that, minors are recruited from the area who later end up assassinated by the State itself."
Colombia is the world's largest producer of cocaine and, at the end of 2020, 143,000 hectares were dedicated to the cultivation of coca. In Guayabero, a pound of onion is equivalent to 1.4 grams of coca base, in Colombian money it would be 3,000 pesos, in US dollar would be 0.83 usd. / Photo Andrés Cardona.
The criminalization of the plants translates into aerial spraying or militarization of these areas, but also in abusive penal reforms that led to the criminalization of thousands of people. According to a study by the Washington Office for Latin America (WOLA), between 1992 and 2007 incarceration increased more than 100% in seven Latin American countries. In the case of Argentina, in 1985 only 1% of the prison population was there for drug-related crimes. In 2000, they were already 27% of the total. In Mexico, in 2016, six out of ten people in prisons were imprisoned for drug offenses, and more than half of them for small amounts.
Claudi Carreres' exhibition includes a digital game called 'In my shoes', in which each person can see how long they would be in jail in different settings: in Colombia, a trans woman who tries to traffic a drug package through the airport can end with 8 to 12 years in jail;
an Argentine man who grows marijuana plants at home, from 4 to 15 years in prison if he cannot prove that he is not a trafficker.
"They say that jail is like the cemetery of the living," says Johis Alarcón, a photographer in the exhibition that portrays two women in Ecuador convicted of marijuana possession, one of them imprisoned during the pandemic after she lost her job.
"Beyond numbers and figures, there are lives and dreams both inside and outside of prison," says the photographer.
Iblunth (not her real name), has been jailed three times for micro-trafficking of marijuana.
"It is not her fault, because there are no better jobs," says her daughter.JOHIS ALARCON
If the war on drugs had a whole propaganda machine behind it that stigmatized producers or consumers, counter-propaganda is not easy.
What if marijuana was advertised as alcohol is advertised?
"We are the ones who smoke or cultivate," says another of the photographers in the exhibition, Gisela Volá, of an Argentine collective of three photographers called Sub Cooperativa, which presents a series in which an elderly couple is seen smoking marijuana , or a professional tie or a group of teenagers. One of them is the daughter of Volá. "From photojournalism and documentary, for a long time it was thought that stories were outside," adds the photographer. "I believe that this work is a great commitment: photographing my children is not something I do because it is easy for me, but rather it is to assume myself politically"
Inspired by Coca-Cola advertising from the 1990s, the three worked together with a film colourist to convey the same advertising pleasure as soda in marijuana, in order to destigmatize use.
“We are making a semiotic joke, thinking of the advertising as opposed to the clandestinity to which illegality forces,” says Volá.
"We are interested in showing that those who smoke can be people who are next to you and you didn't even suspect it," says Gisela Volá. | Photo Cooperativa Sub.
The Colombian company Coca Nasa produces cookies, sodas or rum with coca leaves.
/ Photo Charlie Cordero
The 4/20 sit-in in Mexico City was installed for months in front of the Senate for it to approve the legalization of marijuana in 2020, and they turned the space into a consumption-free zone.
/ Photo Alejandra Rajal
In the Los Yungas area of Bolivia, groups of Afro-Bolivian women harvest and collect the legal coca leaf for local consumption.
/ Photo of woman Jorge Panchoaga
In the Los Yungas area of Bolivia, groups of Afro-Bolivian women harvest and collect the legal coca leaf for local consumption.
/ Photo of woman Jorge Panchoaga
"Marijuana is much less stigmatized, so it is not difficult to find photos of people using it," says Claudi Carreras, the curator.
"But for cocaine and heroin, it does cost more to find images of consumption."
Carreras does not refer to photos of, for example, drug addicts in the streets injecting heroin, whose images are frequently seen in the media.
“We have criminalized the junkie on the street,” Carreras says.
“But we don't see the one who lives on Avenida Paulista in Brazil in the photo.
All our lives we have stigmatized them visually, and in that the media have a lot of responsibility ”.
The challenge for the future is to photograph what he calls 'enlightened consumption': heroin or coca users who do not have an addiction problem and who are not the most vulnerable demographic in society.
But he still does not know, Carreras says, "if society is prepared not to stigmatize these people."
For now, it has been able to include, in the courtyard of the exhibition, a group of anonymous stories, illustrated and investigated by the Paraguayan collective El Surti. There is “Olivo”, a 31-year-old Mexican doctor, father of a 2-year-old girl, who has treated more than 200 patients with Covid during the pandemic. Olivo likes to use LSD with friends, cocaine or ecstasy at weddings or birthdays, and his favorite is DMT, a natural chemical linked to ayahuasca. "Olivo" is the perfect example of the professional consumer who has fun and does not have an addiction problem; or, in the words of Carreras, the 'enlightened consumer'.
"But that story of the doctor, for example, still cannot be photographed and have its own name," he explains.
"If he's in a photo, I'm not sure he won't be fired from his job later."
In the visual battle against the Nixon war, there are still images difficult to capture.
Credits
General Edition: Eliezer Budasoff
Writing: Camila Osorio
Header photo: Sara Aliaga
Images: Santiago Carneri |
Sara Aliaga |
César Rodríguez |
Yael Martínez |
Andrés Cardona |
Johis Alarcón |
Cooperativa Sub |
Charlie Lamb |
Alejandra Rajal |
Jorge Panchoaga
Video: Johis Alarcón
Design and programming: Alfredo García