Freire

Introduction to the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo

From 1976 to 1983 Argentina went through what was called the “Dirty War.” During this time the country went through a military coup and extreme humanrights violations resulting in the killing and “disappearance” of over 30,000 people. Many people simply vanished and were never heard from or seen again.

The 1970’s and 1980’s were also verypolitically and economically unstable for many other Latin American countries. Many countries experienced big changes in governments as presidents were overthrown and military personnel or guerillas tookpower. Over these twenty years some of these countries went through drastic changes in political ideology ranging from democratic, socialist, communist, and dictatorship forms of government.

Theinstability in Latin American was captured by authors, poets, and painters. One of these people was Oswaldo Guayasamin. He was a painter who was born in 1919 and passed away in 1999. From 1961 to1990, Guayasamin broadened his worldview to embrace universal themes of crimes against humanity developing a series of over 100 politically charged paintings titled, “Edad de la ira” which translates to“Age of Rage.”

Guayasamin’s Age of Rage paintings are humanist work, marked as expressionist. The paintings reflects the pain and misery that the larger part of humanity endured, and denounced theviolence that every human being had to live with in this 20th century. He wanted to capture the fact that the world was marked by world wars, civil wars, genocide, concentration camps,dictatorships, and tortures. These feelings are captured very clearly in four paintings entitled, “The Hands, The Meetings in the Pentagon, The Tortured, and
Guayasamin painted “The Tortured” from 1976 to 1977.The torture, perhaps the most moving of these four works, was inspired by the brutal torture and murder of the Chilean activist folk singer, Victor Jara, who was killed during the overthrow of...