Plan Colombia Nightmare in Art

Johnathon tours with the artwork on the giant canvass made of recycled plastic drinks bottles. He facillitates workshops and discussion. See his Wayuu Indigenous blog on links list

The Plan Colombia pesadilla (nightmare)

This graphic is the product of many intercambios about the issue of colonialism in the Andean Region of South America that took place between our collective and organizers over the spring of 2002 in Ecuador, Colombia and the U.S. These exchanges of information and inspiration were collaboratively sewn together into a quilt of images, that are organized into a circuit of progressions and contrasts that inform and engage the viewer throughout their journey of the graphic.


Before and after: barter economy and capitalist exchange

Teaching torture to the army

The long history of colonialism in the Americas, currently manifested in the Andean Region as "Plan Colombia", is a strong metaphor of the multi-faceted destructive influences of U.S. foreign policy and corporate monoculture on a global scale. This graphic attempts to expose the lie of the drug war as a smokescreen for multinational corporation's interests in extraction of the rich biodiversity and natural resources of the Amazon and her peoples. It is an anti-war poster that speaks in the mythology of our times… the cancerous monomyth of corporate globalization, and its antibodies of grassroots resistance.

Here BP is represented as a mosquito/oil pump sucking Colombia´s wealth from the ground. This was the idea of the Uwa tribe who consider oil as the blood of Mother Nature and are surrently resisting oil expansion in their territory in the department of Arauca.

In an attempt to overcome the tendency of images to simply portray "what we are against," this graphic illustrates this story in three "layers" to help the viewer experience the different aspects of an extremely complex, and brutal situation. The mission was to give an illustrated explanation of not just the nightmare, but to also give weight to the inspiring stories of hope, courage and struggle of those that are directly experiencing it. As North American youth that have endured the destructive and racist brainwashing of television, videogames, cultural appropriation and advertising imagery, our collective felt it was essential to produce this representation in collaboration with organizers in the Andean region, to get the story straight. The result, is thick with those voices. The tools produced from this collaboration are being distributed, as anti-copyright material, for use in campaigns in both the South and North of the Americas.

For more graphics with explination see the web page

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