Okay, I’m on vacation?and should be staying away from the computer, but I just saw one of the most disturbing art exhibits I’ve ever seen.?I think it needs more attention than what it’s been getting.

“Los Desaparecidos/The Disappeared is an exhibition of works by 27 artists from seven countries in Latin America (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, Uruguay, and Venezuela) which brings together visual artists’ responses to the tens of thousands of persons who were kidnapped, tortured, killed, and ‘vanished’ in Latin America by repressive right-wing military dictatorships during the late-1950s to the 1980s. The artists in this exhibition approach the phenomenon of ‘disappearance’ from personal perspectives. Their paintings, photographs, sculptures, and videos express individual experiences of the turbulence and chaos that rocked their countries in the mid-decades of the twentieth century.”

One of the “paintings” was an in depth description of the torture methods from a survivor.?From?getting?electrical shocks while having water dripped on them?as they’re hanging by?their arms on hooks; to having the skin on the soles of their feet scraped off;? to?one man having his testicles ripped off slowly with string.?There were?many?scetched pictures?of?faces, and written names?of many of those who?disappeared dealing with these?dictatorships.??
?The Disappeared

Project Disappeared

Read Part 1 of The US as Police State.

In part 1, I took a very brief look at the history of the United States from 1787 to around 1980 and found a history of government repression of citizens at varying levels of government: restrictions on voting, vote fraud, and slavery. Not to mention the genocide of the Native Americans at the hands of the US military.

So now I turn my attention to Ronald Reagan and the point where the “War on Drugs” actually became a war, and not mere prohibition. The drug war is meant to stamp out the “drug problem” in America. A problem that the government helped engineer in t he first place. As detailed in Gary Webb’s series of “Dark Alliance” articles for the San Jose Mercury News, and later a book by the same name, the C.I.A, with the explicit knowledge of the Reagan administration, supported Nicaraguan contras in their sale of cocaine to drug dealers in Los Angles starting around 1981. For more information, see Webb’s 1998 article for the Orange County Weekly, The Crack-Up.”

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