O projecto é diferente, arriscado, interessante e tem que continuar a sua história. Quem quiser ajudar basta visitar o site e contribuir com o possível.
"Last July, with the support of 83 emphas.is backers I managed to gather all the necessary funds for the first part of the “Shadow of the Condor”. I boarded for Brazil where I met people with incredible stories. After traveling in five different Brazilian states during a 4 week trip, I managed to finish my work in the country.
Operation Condor, was a secret military plan to eliminate the political opposition from six Latin American countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay) ruled by right wing military dictatorships. This plan born in 1975 and carried out over 3 years ended in 1978, resulting in “extrajudicial executions” of at least 60.000 people, largely young leftist students, workers and unionists.
Although in the region many people know what happened in each country individually during the dictatorships, most of the people don’t know that it was a joint effort between this regimes with the supervision of the United States to crack down leftist movements during the cold war all around South America.
For the last six years I have been working in all of these countries to investigate this story, but in order to finish the “Shadow of the Condor”, now I need to return to Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, and in a third phase to return to Paraguay and Bolivia. For this second phase, my plan is to spend a period of eight weeks in those countries.
In Argentina I want to follow the work being done by the forensic anthropologist team to identify the remains of many “disappeared” from the estimated 30.000 victims that the military dictatorship left dead and also continue to photograph the trials that are currently taking place where hundreds of military and civilian people who where involved in the abduction, torture and killing of victims among other crimes, are being sentenced to many years in jail.
In Chile, I plan to visit the Patagonia region where many concentration camps existed and are now memorial sites and also travel north to the Atacama desert where in 1973 the “caravan of death” - a military group - swept the region executing scores of political prisoners in the desert.
In Uruguay my plan is to investigate and photograph the actions of the Urban guerillas that were crushed by the regime. There are also several examples of survivors of Operation Condor caught by Brazilian and Argentinian military that currently live in Uruguay and I believe they deserve to have their story documented.
This chapter of Latin America’s history is still unknown to the majority of the people. No complete documentary project of this scope on all six countries has ever been done especially with a photographic component.
As I did in the first phase of this project, I will be in touch with the backers with updates from the ground on a weekly basis. The interaction that happened on the first trip to Brazil and the comments made by my backers were a major strongpoint, and helped me to think about how to approach the work and to make decisions on the ground.
With your support, I will be able to complete another very important step. This time and by focusing on these three countries, with such different stories to tell, I will be able to keep growing this body of work to show how Human Rights violations can have an immense long term impact on societies."