By Julián Fernando Trujillo Amaya

FRAGMENTS…

The El Dorado myth is a European creation based on various stories that had been narrated by Native Americans and a series of medieval representations that formed part of the Renaissance’s collective imagination. The El Dorado myth envisioned the dreams of some Europeans and founded their own reality in the New World. America became the realization of a utopia. The “City of God”, “The New Atlantis” or “Paradise Lost” was no longer a desirable and imaginary, but non-existent location. The “Utopia” now was not only conceivable but truly possible. America was a real possibility and its existence an indisputable fact. However, the reality overcame the fantasy of the Renaissance’s great utopias and served as a basis or stimulus for its development: “the utopia is American”, as Arturo Uslar Pietri said . And certainly the “New World” recovered the hope of forlorn Europeans in search of a “heavenly Jerusalem” on Earth and became an object of idealization through travel journals, letters, chronicles, stories and legends. In El Dorado there was a symbolic articulation of the ambition for wealth and the European’s willingness to dominate on the twilight of the middle ages. This built a complex network from which the modern bourgeoisie world conception emerged. El Dorado then became the motivation for many expeditions, and was the yearning of many a conquistador and colonizing companies that eagerly looked for a world full of riches to seize in the paradisiacal landscapes of the American continent: “everything important that has happened or is happening takes the route of the American rhizome”.

The ethical and political lesson that the El Dorado myth leaves behind should be critically analyzed and not disguised with the rhetoric of marketing. One aspect to take into account, in the archaeological analysis is its utopian character. Christopher Columbus believed that he had found “the paradise on earth” that the West European culture had dreamed of for so long, with the installation of the “New World” in the virtual space of the utopias. This type of discourses and beliefs, that the West used to conceive the Americas, has helped to increase the ambition without limits of Europeans and people from the United States. It has forged the violent character of those who yearn for the riches of El Dorado and has negatively influenced the collective imagination of corrupt politicians, the disoriented revolutionaries groups and Latin American drug traffickers. They, just as the conquistadores, pirates, adventurers, merchants, bankers and others who seek El Dorado, have erred in trying to follow the mistaken path of Christopher Columbus delirium, pioneer in the construction of the El Dorado myth: “Gold – said Columbus in his Diario de viajes – is the most exquisite of all the elements that are found in the new world, he who holds gold can buy everything you need in this world and in the thereafter. Indeed, with gold you can even achieve that your soul enters paradise”.

El Dorado has an explicit plot which is repeated over and over for centuries. The graph of its historic trajectory and the places that indicate the legends can be visualized in the maps that represent the expeditions and travels of the conquerors in the territories of the “New World”. In the same way, is possible to recognize a basic diagram, and several connections can be identify between the characters, objects, places, actions and concretes effect that compose El Dorado myth.

These networks show an asymmetric relation between two types of characters, the winners and the losers. According to this mythical conception, foreigners are the winners and natives are the losers .  While for the foreigners gold represents wealth, fortune and success, for the natives from Latin-American gold represents divinity, balance and harmony.  The natives work, own and offer gold to their gods. The foreigners search, crave and usurp gold for its personal benefit. Their urges to find gold leads them to violence and to make large investments, expeditions and dangerous trips. Natives make rituals and other cultural practices, built legends and produce artworks with gold. The effects of El Dorado in foreigners are the expansion of power, wealth accumulation and elegant life style of the Leisure classes. The consequences of this myth for natives are death, misery, slavery and expropriation. For the foreigners, El Dorado myth serves as a utopia and a justification of existence; through the one they feed their thirst for adventures and utopian fantasies. By contrast, for natives El Dorado was first a ritual to relink them with the gods and a collection of stories, but then it became a strategy to mislead foreigners that were looking for gold and finally a tragic reality. When drawing the map of the networks that compose the texts which presents the stories and tales about the search for El Dorado, the pattern of connections between all these paths and elements (gold, places, characters and actions) are evident, “but in order to see this pattern, we must first extract it from the narrative flow, and one way to do so is with a map. Not, of course, that the map is already an explanation; but at least it shows us that there is something that needs to be explained”.

The construction of El Dorado myth extends his network through new literary works, music, movies, videos and television series. Besides The road of El Dorado by Artur Uslar Pietri (1947) and The equinoctial Adventure by Lope de Aguirre de Ramón Zender (1964), which worked as  base for the movie “Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes” (The Warth of God, 1972) directed by  Werner Herzog, we also have the novel by  Wolfgang Hohlbein “Indiana Jones und das Gold von El Dorado” (1991) and the movie “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of Crystal Skull” (2008), the animated adventure musical comedy film “The Road to El Dorado”, directed by Eric “Bibo” Bergeron, Will Finn y Don Paul (2000), the french-japanese television series “The mysterious cities of Gold” (1982, 1983, 2007), the literary works of the Colombian writer William Ospina tittled “Ursua” (2005), “The cinnamon country” (2008)  and  “The snake without eyes” (2012),  which with the mini TV show of adventure and fantasy “The Search for El Dorado” (2010) are a proof of the El Dorado myth in the collective imaginary of the Occidental World. American Utopia is still alive, as well the lyrics of the song “El Dorado”, from the British group Electric Light Orchestra, clearly says: “And now I found the key to the eternal dream/ Then I will stay, I’ll not be back, Eldorado./ I will be free of the world, Eldorado./ Then I will stay”.

Through these discourses and symbolic forms, the dominant powers in Western culture reiterate and promote complex mythology which conceals the painful tragedy of indescribable reality. The horrors of El Dorado myth have been lazily extended over five centuries for the leisure classes of the “First World”. This reality of poverty and injustice that generates war and violence requires an immediately and radical change. According to Zerda, the El Dorado that we should conquer is a genuine and sweeping utopia that does not condemn the peoples of Latin America to centuries of misery and solitude: “The current generations enjoy the benefits of the art of iron and technologies such as the printing press, which are powerful elements of civilization. With this, and other knowledge we must, not only hold up the memory of the ages and the social construction of our ancestors, but also free from extermination the countless cultures that are degraded and vilified outside the protective scope of our most developed population centers.”

However, when there is no more gold to explode, we will just have the myth and our representations of it to remember the sad utopia that we were not able to change.  The British group Iron Maiden expresses it unmatched in the lyrics of their song El Dorado: “So gone is the glory/ And gone is the gold/ Well if you need a story/ I’ve come it has to be told (…) El Dorado come and play/ El Dorado step this way/ Take a ticket for the ride/ El Dorado streets of gold/ See those over sold/ You’ve got one last chance to try”. But much more forceful and emotive is the video of the band “Calle 13″ entitled Latin America whose chorus says: “You can’t buy the wind. You can’t buy the sun. You can’t buy the rain. You can’t buy the heat. You can’t buy the clouds. You can’t buy the colors. You can’t buy my happiness. You can’t buy my pains”.

You can read full text below:

El Dorado Leyenda, Mito y Utopia New 01

The post Rhizomatic cartography of El Dorado appeared first on &.

Introduction
Foucault showed the philosophical and historical value of research about the anomaly. He taught the importance to pay attention on the marginalized. He pointed out the analysis of madness and prisons. Also he insisted about the relevance of studying the infamous men. The French philosopher considered (1979) that to rediscover the splendor of these situations and characters or “life-poems”, as he called to infamous men, we had to submit a certain number of simple rules:

• that it should be a question of personages having really existed;
• that these existences should have been both obscure and unfortunate;
• that their story should have been told in a few pages or better in a few sentences, as briefly as possible;
• that these narratives not simply constitutes strange or pathetic anecdotes, but that in one way or another they should have really taken part in the miniscule history of these existences, of their misfortune, of their rage or of their uncertain madness;
• And that in the shock of these words and these lives should be born again for us a certain effect mixed with beauty and fright (Foucault, 1979: 78).

I have tried to follow these rules to introduce Pablo Escobar as an example of infamous man. This personage obliges us to reread the history of Latin America in general and Colombia in particular. His biography is a breaking point, anomalous event, and the confluence of a multitude of social, political and cultural factors which we do not understand yet.

The Foucault’s point of view
Foucault and his teacher Althusser criticized the traditional notion of history (1998: 281). According to Foucault there are diverse ways to write history and historian’s attention has shifted from long periods of time, “ages” or “centuries”, towards a phenomenon of rupture and discontinuity (Foucault, 1989: 47). That same notion of discontinuity has changed and is positively valued in relation to its historic function (Foucault, 1998: 299). The discontinuous is valued as a positive element that determines the object of study and validities its analysis. In order to systematically apply the concept of discontinuity we must free ourselves from notion as tradition, influence, development, evolution, spirit or age’s mentality, and other similar concepts, to focus our attention on the multiplicity of disperse events (Foucault, 1998: 302; Deleuze, 1988: 2, 13-14). Any attempt to or manner of grouping them under a general category is already an arbitrary method of documenting and making history (Foucault, 1998: 281, 300; Cfr. Deleuze, 1988: 12-13).
A way to unify, group or individualize by imposing an external or internal order are the ideas of “book” and “oeuvre”. However, once there is a detailed analysis of these alleged units, it turns out that the unity of the book is not homogeneous. The relation of a book with other books is varied and complex, it sets up a field of discourse, it is found to be interwoven in a network with other books, texts and phrases. The notion of oeuvre is less stable and hence a more problematic unit. It does not respond to that which can be represented by its proper name, the only unit that can recognize in the work of an author is a certain function of expression (Foucault, 1998: 303-305).
Moreover, there are other usual forms to organize the discourse and reduce its discontinuous character. One is to refer it to a secret and unrecoverable origin. This view requires a search for a supposed origin or a principle that escapes us. Another form is to assume that all discourse is based on something already said, but not in the sense of that which has been pronounced or written, but in the sense of something unsaid, in an underground sense, which must be interpreted. Consequently, the new way of making history leads us to investigate the discontinuity of events in a discursive space that is articulated just as it is stated. The question that guides us is what is this irregular form of existence that comes to the light from what is said but not in any other place? (Foucault, 1998: 305-306).
The discourse analysis that Foucault proposes does not only points towards the declarative event, considered independently, but tries to understand how these statements, in their specificity and discontinuous character, are articulated with other events that are not of a discursive nature but that are of an order economic, social, political, artistic, etc. completely different. According to Foucault, archive work should lead us to the analysis of what he calls “monuments”, the symbols through which we conserve events and things, with the intention of understanding the language game that determines in a given culture or society the appearance and disappearance of statements, its persistence and its disappearance. The archaeological analysis is then centered in how objects are constituted, subjects positioned and concepts formed (Foucault, 1998: 303-305; 324-325).
Along these lines I would like to shift our attention to a series of specific statements, made by a concrete individual within the framework of a complex network of disperse historical, social and political events, whose appearance is connected to singular artistic objects, by means of which discursive subjects worthy of mention and recognition are positioned.

The Encounter between Fernando Botero and the drug trafficker Pablo Escobar
In the context of the war between drug trafficking Cartels, the Cali Cartel planted a bomb in Pablo Escobar’s house, he was perhaps the most famous Latin American drug trafficker. During an interview the Colombian artist Fernando Botero recalled this event, which occurred in 1993, and said the following: “When they put a bomb in Pablo Escobar house, they emphasized the fact that he had a Botero in his house and this resonated widely with the Colombian press. So, I asked the director of the newspaper El Tiempo to write an editorial and inform the public that I felt repugnance due to the fact that Escobar had one of my works. My journalist friend suggest me to leave the country for my safety after writing the editorial, and so I did, I packed and went to Europe”
However, the “paisa artist” not only said the previous statement but also painted several pictures of Pablo Escobar’s death. These paintings have generated controversy. Fernando Botero is a Colombian painter (born in Antioquia just like Pablo Escobar) who has been recognized internationally for his artwork in a very particular style. Botero is considered to be the most valued living Latin American visual artists in the world. This Colombian artist has shaped Latin America from different angles such as religion, the family, the street, bullfighting, the circus and the violence. His classic fat figures make him unmistakable, although he denied that his work is “images of fat people”, but that, according to him, the volume is the most important element as “in the works of Van Gogh, for example, it was the color”, and in a press conference he emphasized that “the volume is applied to everything, I apply the roundness to everything. My works are sensual because of this”.
“Pablo Escobar Muerto” (1999), is an example of how Botero can express an historical event through his works of art. There Botero expresses his version of the drug trafficking Lord fleeing across the roofs of Medellín, just before being taken down by the police on December 2nd, 1993. The painter represented Escobar as a giant on the roofs of several houses with “bullets raining down” and in the background a landscape out of a typical “small town” of Antioquia, although not necessarily the city of Medellín. ”Fernando Botero recently affirmed that the idea is that in the future people will remember the tragic moment endured by the country, so as to not repeat it ”, and added ” I love my country. The proof is in the three thousand paintings that I have painted inspired by its reality ”.

The artist does not try to glorify the person or the scene, but instead represent in his paintings events related to Colombia’s violence and the drama of drug trafficking. This work is connected to another painting made public by Botero in 2006, a painting titled “La muerte de Pablo Escobar”. This painting shows three characters: a police officer, a women and Pablo Escobar, with the traditional robust silhouette that characterizes Botero’s style. The size of each character indicates a hierarchy: Pablo is a giant that preferred his tomb in his country full of mountains and traditional small towns than a jail in a modern city in the United States. The police officer is next in importance, timidly showing with his finger and face full of disbelief that Escobar has passed away with a pistol in his hand, and, finally, the woman has her hands placed as if praying and her face as if he were before a martyr or saint. The painting clearly shows the drug lords place within the social conception, for some he was a villain, but for others he was a hero or martyr: “He helped the poor and died fighting”.

In “Pablo Escobar muerto” the discontinuous becomes present, the singular and unique event, in this work we see the gangster boss lying on the roof of a house after he was riddled with bullets, but in a position as if he were sleeping, as if he had not died. From below, in the street, at a distance, a police officer points as if showing the woman next to him that from the moment of Escobar’s death the history of drug trafficking will no longer be the same. Pablo turns into a model to be imitated that is revived in each new drug trafficker that follows his footsteps through this “valley of tears”.
These Botero paintings show the tragedy of a complex society molded by catholicism and Capitalism, divided between rich and poor and between those who love Pablo and those who hate him, between those that reject drug trafficking and those that accept and coexist with it. Botero and Escobar are an example of the paradoxes of a society mired in contradictions and paradoxes, where beauty, art and culture coexist with violence, hunger and death. The junction between the words of Botero and the death of Pablo are examples of events and things that broke Colombian and Latin American history in two. They express a multiplicity, a discontinuity. An archaeological perspective allows us broaden the understanding of the significance of the drug trafficking concept, the ways in which some of Botero’s art work were made and a complex web of events where Colombian drug traffickers and artists are established as subjects of discourse.

Bibliography
Deleuze, G. (1988). Foucault. University of Minnesota Press. Minneapolis, London.
Foucault, M. (1979). Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy (Vol. 2). Feral Publications. University of Sidney, Australia.
Foucault, M. (1998). Aesthetics, method, and epistemology (Vol. 1). The New Press. New York.
Foucault, M. (1989). Foucault live: (Interviews, 1966–84)(S. Lotringer, Ed., J. Johnston, Trans.). New York: Semiotext (e).

To inquire about Pablo Escobar:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp4KkJ12aPQ

Pablo Escobar – King of Coke – 2007 • Full Movie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwuud6vwkhw

Hunting Pablo Escobar HD Documentary National Geographic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEQW2QkPSmo

Pablo Escobar – King of Cocaine

To inquire about Pablo Escobar’s death:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxj1JbWQe8g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IkQVBhKivs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvsbvbR4AZQ

Pablo Escobar’s Death

To inquire about Fernando Botero’s paintings:

https://www.museodeantioquia.co/exposicion/salas-fernando-botero/

The post Drug trafficking as a Cultural Event: Pablo Escobar and Fernando Botero appeared first on &.