“ There is no worse moment for human relations that when peace talks begin.”
Lao Tse
I. A never ending story Few photographs stay fixed in our memory. When they do, they are powerful symbols, sometimes by imposition and others, spontaneously, by communion. That may be the yearned place a photographer wants for his images, a photographer that has a hard time sending into oblivion what he considers memorable for everyone else. But how to leave a mark on the collective conscience of societies that have been exceeded not only by images of brutality, but by the same facts that cause them, and that look to be overcome by the victims to survive their circumstances? That is the subject of this text.
II. There used to be truths here The war on drugs in Colombia was declared by
Belisario Betancur’ s government in 1984, as an answer to the killing of Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, Secretary of Justice, who denounced the participation of drug lords in politics. This time determined the way the media, artistic manifestations, and of course, the public, had to learn to document, communicate, symbolize and sublimate the armed conflict. Something similar is happening in Mexico since the presidency of Felipe Calderón, beginning 2006.
The origins of drug trafficking, multiform and complex, have determined the recent stories of these two countries. They are explained, however, as a result of unequal societies in a constant process of consolidating a democracy that never comes. Their Colonial pasts have been reaffirm-
62 LARMAGAZINE. 011