Receiving funding till July 5! To help fund this project, see: http://www.emphas.is/web/guest/discoverprojects?projectID=311
In 1975, at the height of the cold war, six Latin American countries ruled by right wing military dictatorships created Operation Condor, a secret military plan to eliminate their political opponents. This plan which carried out over 3 years ending in 1978, resulted in "extrajudicial executions" of at least 60.000 people, largely young leftist youths inspired the Cuban revolution and its role models like Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.
Although Condor has long since ended, many relatives of the victims still don't know what happened to their loved ones, and the majority of the of those responsible for their deaths and disappearances have never been brought to justice.
My interest in the subject of political repression and prisoners came out of my own family's experience; two of my grandparents spent years in prison in my country Portugal, for political reasons. In my first book "For your free thinking" published in 2007, I began documenting their stories as well as their fellow prisoners. This experience encouraged me to examine other dictatorships around the world.
In the past 9 years I have devoted a significant amount of time to this research, mostly in Latin America, and since 2005, have been working on my project, Shadow of the Condor. This project consists of three segments, the first one is Brazil; the second Argentina, Chile and Bolivia, and the third Uruguay and Paraguay.
I have already traveled frequently to Brazil to photograph places and people whom I consider the living memory of their country's past repression. In Recife in northeastern Brazil, for instance, I have interviewed and photographed Elzita Santa Cruz, a mother of ten who is now 97 years old. In 1964, when Brazil's military dictatorship began, several of her children were arrested for political reasons on different occasions. In 1974, one of them, her son Fernando, became Brazil's first politically "disappeared" person. Since then, Elzita has been demanding that the Brazilian authorities open their archives and explain what happened to Fernando and the other victims of the twenty-one-year dictatorship. In addition to Elzita, there are a number of other relevant personalities whom I would like to photograph so as to help define what happened in Brazil during that dark time.
For this project, I need to return to Brazil in order to finish the process already begun. My plan is to go to Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo first and also to return to the northeast, as well as to Araguaia, a jungle region where, in the 60's and 70's, a Cuban-style guerrilla army fought the regime, and was wiped out.
In this collaboration with the backers on Emphas.is, I am going to finish the first part of the project, which is to complete my work in Brazil, so that I can then move on to complete the work in the other five countries. In the end, it is my hope that the resulting images, published in book form and exhibited publicly, can be used not only to create a visual memory, but can also be also used as evidence by a number of human rights organizations which are still trying to bring those responsible for Operation Condor's repression to justice.
Project must be funded in full by July 5, 2011 to be awarded contributions.
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Guerrilha do Araguaia - Parte 1by tvbrasil14,992 views
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