This is the first image made by Ecuadorian artist Oswaldo Guayasamin that I’ve encountered. It’s a
picture that stayed with me, one that I thought about but, for some reason,
never made a video on. It’s a haunting painting titled Lagrimas de Sangre, or Tears of Blood.
It’s striking, it’s scary, it’s filled with pain, but I never thought it was as incisive as it is
before making this video. This painting isn’t just terrifying for the sake of being terrifying,
but positions itself as one of his many artworks struggling for liberation.
Let’s look at Oswaldo Guayasamin’s Lagrimas de Sangre.
I think the best introduction to Guayasamin’s work and character as an artist is to show
you Ecuador’s Parliament. Its main room, hosting 137 members,
is overshadowed by an immensely imposing mural. This mural was made by Guayasamin in 1988 and,
aside from the motif of hands which we’ll go back to later, there’s this one image
which was quite controversial: the nazi-like figure with the letters CIA inscribed on its
helmet. It deeply offended US Secretary of State George P. Shultz when he visited the country.
Guayasamin’s intentions were clear: to denounce US intervention in Latin
America. The strength of his convictions permeate his art.
Oswaldo Guayasamin was born in Quito, Ecuador of an indigenous father and a
mestiza mother. He was the oldest of 10 and was brought up in poverty. While painting,
he’d work driving taxis or trucks and, in 1932, protests during the Four Day War would kill his
best friend, Manjares, resulting in Los Ninos Muertos, one of his first paintings in 1941.
At the age of 23, in 1942, he’d have his first exhibition where he’d be discovered
by Nelson Rockefeller who would buy some of his artworks and become a patron.
Guayasamin’s career is often separated into three periods: Huacaynan, or the Trail of Tears,
The Age of Anger and, later, the Age of Tenderness. Lagrimas de Sangre,
the painting we’ll be looking at, was made during The Age of Anger, so that’s the period we’ll be
focusing on. The Age of Anger paintings were very often, if not always, social. He’d paint
mostly portraits depicting poverty, injustice, human suffering, authoritarianism, racism…
He’d very often depict these themes through hands. Hands can represent the working people,
hands can represent labour… They can also represent pain.
Here, in Las Manos de la Protesta, Guayasamin relays pain, not only through facial expression,
though we can’t even see the subject’s eyes here, but through this person’s hands. These hands
are filled with bony, contorted fingers. The way these fingers unnaturally bend,
the way they’re scratched and distorted, conveys the pain of the subject.
However, Guayasamin didn’t only picture the hands of the oppressed, but also the hands of
the oppressors. In Meeting at the Pentagon, a five part series, Guayasamin shows five cartoonishly
evil Americans, conveying their maliciousness through their facial expressions and their hands.
This brings us to what sparked the Age of Anger and his Lagrimas de Sangre. After world war II,
revolutions were brewing in the impoverished countries of Latin
America. Socialist ideas were spreading like wildfire. The United States did not want any
communist influence on the continent, so they intervened. The Cold War in Latin America,
or US intervention in Latin America, was an extremely bloody enterprise which would lead
to the destabilization and impoverishment of an incredible amount of countries.
Operation Condor, a campaign essentially promoting right-wing dictatorships in
countries where democracy would enable socialism, was adopted by the CIA in November 1975. However,
US intervention in Latin America had already done damage by then.
In 1954, the CIA organized a coup d’Etat in Guatemala under code-named Operation
PBSuccess. The democratically elected president Jacobo Arbenz was replaced
for the military dictator Carlos Castillo Armas.
In 1964, the democratically elected president of Brazil, Joao Goulart, was replaced by a military
dictatorship that would last until 1985. The coup was backed by the United States.
In 1976, the democratically elected president of Argentina, Isabel Peron,
was replaced by a military dictator, Jorge Rafael
Videla. The right-wing dictatorship was backed by the United States.
We could go on and on, talking about the backing of the Contras in Nicaragua or of the Death Squads
in El Salvador. We could talk about the 1963 coup d’Etat in Ecuador, Guayasamin’s home country,
which, according to former CIA agent Philip Agee, was incited by the US.
However, Lagrimas de Sangre, made in 1973, was dedicated to three people:
Salvador Allende, Chile’s former president, Victor Jara,
a theatre director and musician and Pablo Neruda, a poet and diplomat.
What these three men had in common was the fact that they
were all murdered during the 1973 coup in Chile.
Salvador Allende was a dangerously popular left-wing presidential candidate,
at least dangerous to US interests. The US would meddle in the chilean 1964 elections,
“In fact, when the Church Committee investigated years later, they discovered that the US spent
more money per capita to get the candidate it favored elected in Chile in 1964 than was
spent by both [presidential] candidates (Johnson and Goldwater) in the 1964 election in the US!”
Similar efforts were made in 1970, but Allende’s
popularity was unshakable. When he won the presidential election in 1970, Nixon,
Kissinger and CIA director Richard Helms met. There was already a report, Annex - NSSM 97,
now declassified, which revealed plans to overthrow Allende in case he took office.
Helms noted that there were two possible answers to the chilean
problem: the soft and the hard line. Sabotage their economy,
or install a military right-wing dictatorship like they’ve done before.
The US ambassador in Chile, Edward Korry, “was given the job of implementing the "soft line."
Here’s how he described his task: "to do all within our power to condemn Chile
and the Chileans to utmost deprivation and poverty." That was the soft line.”
But why was Allende feared by US officials so much? It wasn’t because of his program to give
free milk to half a million impoverished children, but, mostly, because the US feared that Chile
would become an example of what a country could look like if they were economically independent.
Allende wanted to nationalize major industries, including copper mining. To nationalize means to
make an industry the property of the government, essentially transforming 100% of the profits of
that industry into revenue for the government, which could then be redistributed through social
services, healthcare, education, etc. If Chile was to gain possession of their major
industries from multinational businesses, take the profit from these industries and invest in
their infrastructure, that wouldn’t only make it so the US, and other interests, couldn’t own
chilean resources, but that could have a snowball effect in other countries where they would also
nationalize and exploit their own resources, instead of having foreign interests do it.
On September 11th 1973, Chile’s economic, social and political life would change forever.
Allende was murdered, alongside other prominent figures. The US-backed right-wing
military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet was installed and would reign until 1990.
Today is September 11th, which marks the 49th anniversary of this tragic event.
Guayasamin understood the importance of this event and made Lagrimas de Sangre the same year.
This perfectly captures the many emotions being felt by latin-americans during the 9/11 coup.
Allende, a democratically elected leftist president,
was murdered and replaced by a military dictator backed by the most powerful country in the world,
so that this powerful country and its allies can continue to profit from Chile’s resources.
What can you do if you’re an anti-imperialist chilean, or an anti-imperialist guatemalan,
or an anti-imperialist ecuadorian. The CIA and the United-States made it clear that, if you’re
a developing country, you can have a democracy as long as it doesn’t harm US interest. If it does,
a brutal military dictatorship will be installed and there’s nothing you’ll be able to do about it.
The 9/11 coup made it clear that democracy, voting, participating in electoral politics
could not be a way to combat imperialism anymore. The 9/11 coup essentially made a
whole population powerless in front of US domination and exploitation.
Guayasamin seems to be portraying a reaction to the news. A reaction
to the fatalistic realization that there’s no alternative to US hegemony.
Firstly, there’s the fingers covering three fourths of the composition. Just like in Las Manos
de Protesta, made 5 years earlier, the fingers are crooked, bony, but not as tense this time.
These hands are still dirty and used, they’re still the hands of the oppressed,
but they’re not in pain, not as they were in Las Manos de Protesta. These hands don’t signal
pain or suffering, but disbelief and shock. They’re clumsily covering the subjects’ mouth.
Secondly, the subject’s eyes pierce the canvas to stare directly at us. They don’t convey pain,
or disbelief, but fear. They’re essentially two bright circles emerging from deep dark sockets.
The pupils are simple dots, making the eyes appear larger than they are. Fear is not
only conveyed through the subject’s eyes, but also through the darkness surrounding them.
Thirdly, one element distinguishes itself from the rest of the painting through the fact that it
has colour. The painting gets its title from these red tears. We don’t know how many tears there are,
the subject is hiding them with their fingers. Of course, these tears relay sadness as tears
often symbolically represent, but tears of blood have an added element of pain, perhaps even a
slow death as vital energy leaves your body, as if the sadness in itself became a hemorrhage.
The fight against capitalism, imperialism, colonialism and other forms of oppression would,
of course continue and still continue today all across the world. However,
Guayasamin saw in the 9/11 coup the destruction of hope for a better world.
How exciting it must have been to see a president prioritizing his own people and his own country,
putting the national interest above the US foreign interest. How exciting
it must have been to see this being achieved peacefully, democratically, hoping it will work,
hoping it will inspire other countries to do the same, to do it peacefully and democratically.
But how painful, how terrifying, how crushing would it feel to see
foreign interests decide for you, for your country, that you’ll be, and continue to be,
a people and a land open and available to generate profits for foreign investors.
How painful, terrifying and crushing must it feel to become powerless,
to be stripped of your agency, so foreign capitalists can keep making more money.
It’s hard to understand the extent of that pain, that terror and that oppression if you don’t
experience it. Guayasamin, through some of the most expressive images in art history, tried to
convey these emotions, tried to best describe the experience, not through words, but through images.