I was privileged to have met world-famous Colombian artist, Fernando Botero, who died last month [September 2023] at age 91, when he visited the University of California, Berkeley in 2007. I teach human rights at the law school, and the artists came to campus for the exhibit of his 2005 Abu Ghraib series. The canvasses and sketches depict the horrors of Iraqi prisoner abuse by US soldiers, based on leaked photographs taken by service members at the Abu Ghraib prison facility.
Overwhelmed by the paintings and awe-stuck by the artist who created them, I fumbled my few seconds with Mr. Botero. My memory is that I offered an anodyne appreciation of his work. If I could speak with him now, here is what I would say:
Mr. Botero, every day I enter the law school I try to keep in mind that the job of law professors is to train the next generation of lawyers to embody the highest values of the profession. It is true that we teach law students how to analyze the law, how to evaluate the strength of arguments, and how to weigh the equities in any given case. But law is not a set of rules that lawyers discover or inherit. Law is made through human intervention, in the form of legislation, interpretation by lawyers, as well as judicial decisions. You made vivid the power that legal professionals have to strengthen or to destroy the rule of law fabric that sustains humanity.
Your art is a provocation to viewers to ask: what is our role in safeguarding human rights?
Government lawyers drafted the rules of interrogating prisoners captured in the so-called War on Terror, setting the background norms for the torture of prisoners perpetrated by guards and recorded on film as trophy shots. And lawyers created the rules for the treatment of so-called enemy combatants the United States held at Guantanamo Bay. I interviewed dozens of former detainees, men never charged with a crime, who endured years of mistreatment proscribed by US government lawyers in violation of international law. Government lawyers and politicians led the public to believe that harsh treatment, even torture, of suspected terrorists was necessary to keep us safe. Your art asks us to confront this bargain and to reconsider what we become as a nation, if we accept that premise, and you offer us a way forward.
You said at the time of the exhibit that your outrage that the United State, which has stood for democracy and rule of law, would commit such abuse motivated you to paint the series. Your Abu Ghraib collection conveys the suffering of Iraqi prisoners. Yet through your iconic style of voluminous forms, you also render the victims literally larger than life and give their bodies a weight that suggests a hyper-permanence. Their humanity outlives the outrages inflicted on them by US soldiers. Humanity will endure in spite of depredations, but whether ruptures in rule of law are mended by justice is up to us. And I think this is what you meant when you said about these works that: “Art is a permanent accusation.”
Thanks to your permanent gift of the series to the university, I can view a few of the canvasses on display at our law school. Viewers must investigate the causes of US descent to systematic torture and the path to correct the injustice. The paintings accuse the audience of the dangers of believing that we must trade human rights for security; that it is acceptable to strip individuals of dignity simply by their being called a terrorist by a powerful state. The paintings accuse lawyers of their role in justifying rules that strip individuals of fundamental due process protections against arbitrary arrest, imprisonment, and torture.
Today, we find ourselves in the midst of another shocking rollback of fundamental rights and inversion of the rule of law, this time closer to home. The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade ushers in an era in which forced pregnancy, a form of torture under international law, is legal in the United States. There is a dangerous throughline from Abu Ghraib to the Dobbs decision: when we dehumanize one category of persons and legalize control over their bodies through direct or indirect violence, we make it easier to apply the same logic to an ever-expanding menu of targets.
It is more than two decades after 9/11 and we as a society have not yet answered your accusation, Mr. Botero, to our detriment. Yet progressive lawyers and students continue to name torture and fight injustice when it is unpopular to do so. Justice remains a work in progress, which is why we need compelling art, like yours, to continue to challenge us to action.
