Juan Manuel Echavarría

In 2006, Echavarria visited a cemetery near the Magdalena River in Colombia. A colorful mausoleum stood apart from others not only because of the vibrant colors, but also because the graves are marked with the letters NN, or no name. Like his photographs of the mannequins discussed earlier, the tombs represent bodies that were pulled out of the river because they were victims of the violent massacres that ravage the countryside. The people who save the bodies perform a ritual where they agree to take care of the NN tombs and to pray for their souls. In return, they will receive favors from the dead.

In 2005 at the North Dakota Museum of Art, twenty seven artists' work from South America was shown to capture the meaning of "to disappear" during the 20th century military dictatorships in Latin America. During the 1970s, people who were considered a threat to the state were often killed or "disappeared." This term, disappear, became a word describing the people who had been killed without a trace. The artists who participated in this show were all in some way affected by this kind of violence. The curator, Laurel Reuter, hoped to portray the artists’ and their native countries' plight against these atrocities.

Echavarria started to produce photography and videos in 1995 that deal with the violence and civil conflicts that have plagued Colombia in the 20th century and still today. His pictures and documentations depict a nation that has become accustomed to the brutality associated with the conflicts between the national army, guerrilla groups, and paramilitaries which started in the 1950s and have continued through the drugs cartels of the 1980s into present day aggression. This seemingly endless and forgotten war becomes a reality to the viewer who is faced with photographs and videos showing death and destruction.

Money from drug trafficking allowed paramilitaries to develop extensive military capabilities. In the late 1990s, paramilitaries consolidated into a single coordinating body called the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia that had national spokesmen who claimed to share political ideas. The paramilitaries became a valid and recognized part of government that stood against liberal ideology. Soon the paramilitaries began to increase troops and enforce combat squads that often resulted in massacres targeting civilian populations. This violence was once again a terror-filled way to control resources such as land, drug production, and trafficking routes.

He studied at a university in the United States, and also spent time in Europe, specifically Greece, where he started to study mythology and poetry, and in his words, "became very dreamy". This showed up in his first book as he started his career as a writer publishing two novels, La Gran Catarata (1981) and Moros en la Costa (1991). He became fascinated with looking at history from different points of view, specifically looking at conquistadors confronted by cultures that were foreign. However, he soon became frustrated with writing as a creative outlet because his initial interest in literature stemmed from his love of the rich images it produced. Living and writing in New York, he told his artist friends that he was, "drowning in the world of writing". After realizing that he was more interested in imagery than writing, he turned to photography as a way to express the images and metaphors he wanted to portray.

The weakness of a central government has plagued Colombia throughout its history. In the early 1980s the story was no different. The escalating violence and a climate of insecurity fostered the growth of privatized armed groups that took matters into their own hands because of their lack of confidence in the state. Two main guerrilla groups (FARC and ELN), as well as paramilitary forces, fought the state. Political identities became blurred, ultimately producing no "good guys." Violent human rights atrocities continued and were being financed by the illegal drug industry. Colombia had a monopoly over the drug industry, specifically cocaine and heroin, in the Western Hemisphere which provided economic fuel for all of the different political and guerrilla parties. Drug traffickers used several methods to export these drugs into the United States, which prompted the United States to wage a war on drugs in the early 1990s.

Juan Manuel Echavarria Olano is a present-day Latin American artist from Colombia. Born in 1947 in Medellín, Colombia and now resides in Bogotá, Colombia and New York City.

In order to understand the contexts of Juan Manuel Echavarria's artwork, it is important to have a concept of Colombia's long history of violence that extends itself into the present day. Since Echavarria's birth in 1947, Colombia has not seen a year of peace. Over the last half century, Colombian violence has remained the largest conflict in the Western Hemisphere, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, and displacing millions of people. The victims of the ongoing violence are mostly poor and vulnerable citizens. Echavarria captures the violence that has pervaded his countryside throughout most of the 20th century in his artworks. A brief history of the different movements and groups since Echavarria's birth are listed as a backdrop to understand the perspective of the artist who provides viewers with such disturbing images.