Is designated “mule” to those people, real human couriers, carrying large quantities of cocaine into the stomach through  the intake of capsules or on their bodies or luggage.

We might think historically that the forms of exploitation, production and marketing that characterize the economies of extraction and transition from colonial times until today, have been common to Latin   America ‘ s regions. The dynamics of colonial activities, was closely linked to foreign trade, the exploitation of natural resources and the organization of large-scale looting. The history of Latin American markets and short-cycle economies, has had to do with the external demand for products.

The breeding of mules in Córdoba and later wintering in Salta, aimed to the mines of Potosi, was one of the few activities in the XVI and the first half of XVIII centuries that enjoyed some prosperity. The mules were the impresindible and irreplaceable element in the development of trade, transport and social life of the XVII century. The signifia- cant “mule” ancient beast of burden, unsurpassed energy source, since ancient times for its exceptional biological virtues (frugality, endurance, longevity, gentleness, intelligence, etc.) was also a symbol of stupidity, incompetence and ignorance.

The various mules seem to consciously or unconsciously ensure the ends of the chain: production, consumption and population incorporated into this new industry and, most of all, aspects that have to do with profits and the fate of the high profits of the business. Cocaine is now the largest mass exportation product that develops in outer peripheral areas around centers that appear as the great meccas of prosperity. In this project I try to think of the “mule” like “dialectical image” as defined by Benjamin as “flashing conjunction between past and present from which emerges a “constellation”. It is not a process but an image; “There is a jump, a censoring over the time that passes.”

Put in the synchronous agreement through reading this and its then political dimension would then replace the idea of a target and a lineal subjective experience of a qualitative time. The routes of the mules of the XVI century to the XVIII, from Cordoba involving the extraction and exportation of precious metals superimposed on the new routes of human mules of XX and XXI centuries aimed once more to the northern countries, and the posts or colonial sites are replaced by airports.

I understand the juxtaposition of images apparently unlink in time as knots that are tied non-hierarchical to heterogeneous levels that I use to document the intense socio-economic imbalances and prevailing cultural conditions in the Latin American reality.