Against Forgetting – Testaments of Colombia’s Conflict
The photographs of Jesús Abad Colorado are searing evidence of the toll this violence, the oldest and largest current conflict in the hemisphere, continues to exact on the country. The United States is directly affected by the crisis. U.S. military assistance to Colombia since 2000 is above $3 billion, aimed at curtailing cocaine production and trafficking. Yet neither has declined appreciably and the drug trade continues to fuel the conflict.
Seen from afar, Colombia's violence has obscured the richness of its culture and its spectacular natural diversity. But, in the Americas, Colombia ranks 4th highest in the gap between rich and poor, and land ownership and the control of natural resources remain nodal points of the conflict. The resulting political violence is so chronic that it has eclipsed the social issues that provoked and continue to feed it. The litany of suffering is long: thousands are killed every year in extrajudicial assassinations.
One-quarter of all irregular combatants are children. More than two million people are internally displaced, mostly poor farmers and their families fleeing massacres and threats. Five thousand kidnap victims remain captive, many for several years. The cultures of some 400,000 indigenous people are threatened by increasing armed incursions into their territories. And intimidation and fear are pervasive, impeding peace negotiations, human rights monitoring and media reporting. This is the world that Jesus Abad began photographing in the early 1990s and that he continues to bear witness to.
Jesús Abad Colorado began photographing while studying at the University of Antioquia in his home city, Medellín. From 1992-2000, he worked for MedelIín's daily newspaper El Colombiano. Today his work is renowned in Colombia where it is published in major media and NGO reports and has won several awards. He has also exhibited widely in the Americas and in Europe. Mr. Abad focuses primarily on the impact of armed conflict on ordinary people both to document the multi-faceted ways in which violence disrupts daily life and because of an acute sense of its deep, complicated roots in his beloved country. And so his work transcends individual experience, bound by the conviction that photography is memory at its most powerful - "an ethical commitment to the dignity of the present and the future." Against Forgetting, his first show in New York, is a variation on an exhibition of the same name shown in conjunction with the International Symposium on Restorative Justice and Peace in Colombia in February 2005 in Cali.
ICTE PHOTO EXHIBITS ON HUMAN RIGHTS: Against Forgetting- Testaments on Colombia’s Conflict, Photographs by Jesus Abad Colorado. The photo exhibit was sponsored and hosted by AlvarAlice Foundation and the International Center for Tolerance Education of the Third Millennium Foundation. http://www.seedsoftolerance.org/
Colombian Consulate in NY Photo Exhibit: “Contra el Olvido”, Photographs by Jesus Abad Colorado, Photo exhibit presented by the Consulate General of Colombia in New York and AlvarAlice Foundation. (ADD – againstforgettingconsulateinvitation.pdf)
