JESÚS ABAD COLORADO Mutilated Christ, Bojayá 2002

Jesús Abad Colorado, Ricardo Rondón Chamorro for Las 2 Orillas

Kate Horne’s documentary film The Witness: Cain & Abel depicts the lifework of Jesús Abad Colorado, a photojournalist whose camera has captured the struggles that Colombia has endured in the last twenty-five years.

Abad Colorado’s pictures have immortalized the profound pain and suffering of a country torn apart by social injustices. His images are rooted in the violent, yet heartbreaking reality of a civil war in Colombia that has overwhelmed the country for more than five decades.

In Colombia, like the biblical story of Cain and Abel, the civil war mirrors a senseless quarrel between siblings. Moreover, the social turmoil has been a consequence of injustices inflicted by wealthy landowners, multinational corporations, drug lords and corrupt politicians who have subdued the general population and taken away their land and rights.

This is the real tragedy in Colombia: people in rural areas have been forced to abandon everything and compelled to migrate towards metropolitan areas where there are scarce possibilities of having a better future.

JESÚS ABAD COLORADO Machuca Massacre, Segovia 1998

JESÚS ABAD COLORADO Mourning, Quibdó 2002

The subjects of Abad Colorado’s pictures are the true victims of the Colombian civil war. Whether they are civilians, soldiers, paramilitaries or guerilla militants, his images don’t polarize the conflict but rather humanize it.

As eloquently expressed by Abad Colorado “…sometimes when there are discussions about armed conflict, it’s forgotten that it affects an entire society and not a particular group. My photographic work talks especially about the countryside, but there are also pictures of the city, in a country where we should die of old age. Hopefully these images, which are a claim to memory, a manifesto against oblivion and a calligraphy of hope, will help us understand that war is a defeat for everyone”.