Award-winning photo journalist Stephen Ferry spent over 10 years documenting Colombia’s armed conflict, a canon of work he has drawn together in a book which endeavours to explain a complicated struggle spanning generations, “not simply a drugs-war,” said the journalist.
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The book “Violentology,” which was awarded the Tim Hetherington Grant in 2011 by the World Press Photo group and Human Rights Watch, is intended as “a manual of the Colombian conflict” as the journalist explained few people outside of the country have much understanding of what is going on in Colombia.
“I was invited in 1999 to give a workshop to Colombian photo journalists. I had worked a lot in Latin America and in Potosi, Bolivia, but it was only then that I saw how complex the situation in Colombia was,” said Ferry. “There are so many elements to the war, it is not just a drugs-war like so many people think, it started way before there was even a drugs-trade coming from Colombia.”
The book, which contains an historical text by Director of Colombia’s Historical Memory Center, “is a way for me to show my concern,” said the journalist, who maintains that although “things seem better in Colombia: the government has improved, the economy has improved, safety has improved, which is a good thing. But there are still plenty of things wrong, still lots of corruption and violence.”
During his research, Ferry met with many of the FARC leaders and groups in the mountains and jungles and stayed with them in their camps. The journalist said that often he had to wait for weeks to finally be invited to the meetings with the leaders. “I work very slowly and very carefully,” he said, “I was very careful in contacting them. I didn’t promise to do things for them, I made sure they knew I wasn’t going to publish propaganda for them and I think they respected that.”
The book is called Violentology after the Colombian school of historians and sociologists, the Violentologists, and aims to explain the conflict from the perspective of human rights. “It shows the civilians who stand up to the violence: journalists, trade unionists, peasant leaders, human rights leaders.” There is a chapter in the book on the indigenous people of the Sierra Nevada mountains, who have according to Ferry, peacefully opposed violence from all sides, from the guerrillas, the State and the paramilitaries.
The U.S. has spent billions of dollars over the last 20 years in support of the Colombian military in the war against drugs, but has often turned a blind eye to obvious links that existed between the Colombian government and paramilitary groups during this time, according to Ferry. “The paramilitaries began with a group ‘Death to Kidnappers’ and grew into a Frankenstein group who are responsible for the deaths of thousands and huge numbers of forced disappearances.”
Although the paramilitaries formally disarmed between 2004 and 2006, there are still insurgent groups of neo-paramilitaries like the Aguilas Negras and other criminal bands, and according to Ferry these groups are no less of a threat to Colombian civilians.” They do things differently now, the paramilitaries realized that they were drawing too much attention to themselves if they carry out the massacres like they did five or 10 years ago,” he said. Now they issue death threats and work by quieter, but just as violent, methods.
“I haven’t emphasized the drug-trade in the book, though there is one chapter about narco-submarines,” said the photographer, who says that the world focus on Colombian drug-trafficking takes away from the fact that there’s something much more complicated going on, and hides the real issues.
The book is deliberately designed to be an homage to Colombian investigative journalists and along with an epilogue by renowned Colombian journalist Maria Teresa Rondros, contains “elements of design that keep this work very close to the practice of the printed press.”
“When I started designing the book in 2008, I saw a lot of our work as journalists is done on the Internet and I became concerned about that and started thinking a lot about paper,” said Ferry. “I started seeing that a lot of the websites that I had consulted for the work were no longer there. I can make people pay attention much better to the story, and hold their attention much better with a large physical object rather than a website.”
Ferry is hopeful that the peace talks which will start this week between the Colombian government and the FARC will work saying, “the two groups seem more committed and serious. Conditions on the ground are more favorable than they’ve been for quite a while. There needs to be room for peasants and others who are leftist-thinking to be able to have a legitimate non-violent political movement.”