Every war needs its justifications, a hemp of knotted grievances. All sides demand justice, and it is true that recent or distant history produces a multitude of abuses and aggressions that are still raw. But in a radical paradox, wartime conflicts are constructed as collective punishment, an essentially unjust judgment, a seed for new resentments. Violence will destroy people who have no guilt or control over the causes of the confrontation. This is not collateral damage, but a perverse strategy that will fuel future wars.
This vengeful hatred creates machines of destruction destined for the future, a horror delayed. Photojournalist Gervasio Sánchez has for decades documented the devastation caused by landmines in Cambodia, Afghanistan, Colombia, Bosnia and Mozambique, some of the hardest-hit areas. Statistics show that their explosions hit civilians 90% of the time. These weapons are intended to cause serious injury without actually killing, a feature that, according to Amnesty International, some manufacturers still emphasize in their advertising catalogs today: “It is better to maim the enemy than to kill him, as a disabled person with injury “The economic, social and moral costs are much more damaging than that of a deceased person.”
On the 25th anniversary of the Treaty of Ottawa, which banned the production, storage and placement of mines, Gervasio Sánchez publishes Vidas Minadas, in which he addresses those who are the body of memory, the skin of memory, the suffering stump of war are. Look with utmost tenderness at their faces and their achievements, not just the emptiness of their snatched flesh. It offers light and tribute to those who suffer, and has the moral elegance to portray them beyond their status as victims. Through the gallery of this book parade are children who caused the explosion while playing or by clinging to a branch to urinate on the side of the path. On the way to the market or to school. Young people in the fields, harvesting coffee, growing beans or looking for firewood. This cruel ammunition, designed so that the wound of battle does not heal and fear becomes unfamiliar, prolongs a perpetual war that mars peace and mutilates the future. The impossibility of relief. They are cheap weapons, the spare change of combat, but no one invests in disabling them later – bombs thrown into the future, eternal snipers, always on guard. Called, with a screaming expression, “anti-personnel mines,” they inflict their wounds on the most vulnerable beings: refugees, migrants, farmers, children. In the post-war period, the population returned to abandoned houses. Their land and roads are mined, but they have to work. You can only survive surrounded by the invisible enemy. They have to risk their lives to earn it.
Even in ancient times, classical heroes carefully practiced cruelty towards innocent people. In Euripides’ The Trojan Women, Odysseus throws a baby from the wall while Ajax brutally rapes Cassandra in the temple of Athena. Democratic Athens, so proud of its civic achievements, also practiced barbarism against the conquered cities. Thucydides tells of the attack on Melos, in which the Athenians executed all the adult men and sold the women and children into slavery. Centuries later, the Roman philosopher Seneca wrote in his letters to Lucilius: “We punish individual murders, but what can we say of wars and the glorious crime of laying waste to entire cities?” We praise acts that would be punished by the death penalty because they are committed by those who wear the insignia of a general. Man, the sweetest of all animals, is not ashamed to wage war and to entrust it to his children.” This vengeful spiral against the humblest continues to shorten daily life. Anti-personnel landmines, bombings and kidnappings, sieges, chemical weapons and other forms of latent death continue to prolong the terrible wartime paradox of indiscriminate crime.
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