RED LINES

All my problems started with this cartoon. When a student gave the presidencial car the finger, so Rafael Correa, the former president of Ecuador and his guard, got out of the car and threatened him. The  President´s secretary of comunication sent me a direct message. He wrote  "nice cartoon but is a lie, you forgot the most important thing: the obscene gesture, and that the drawing was an exaggeration because it is was not a limousine, the car was a Toyota Land Cruiser."

      Cartoon posted 07/05/2015

Direct message sent 11/05/2015

Politicians always are the most worried about what they look and called on drawings. ("...if you want drawing my opinion don´t make fun of  my lastname to my family...") ("...should be seen to the journalist as a snake spitting imfamies and I as a victim deffending of them")

Cartoon posted 22/08/2018

Direct message sent of one member of National Assambly 02/09/2018.

Cartoon posted 26/06/2015

Direct message sent 26/06/2015

I think that Correa ruled for 10 years because we have clowns as candidates. This story is true.

This other story is true too. I live in front to the catholic church and they occupied the public space with fireworks, that was forbidden and I put a demand in the Municipality, after that, one person was talking with the priest about it and the priest told him that “my house need an exorcism”. I made this cartoon some months later.

Cartoon posted 10/03/2017

The priest David Velez sent this message 30/09/2016

Correas´s government finished but I had other problems with other kind of power: the Catholic Church. After I posted the exorcism theme, they told me with a hashtag #CatholicPhofia:  "It´s very easy attack an intitution for some mistakes, but we have never seen a cartoons of the saints and bishops”. The threat of exorcism could be a mistake but at the same time appeared many cases of phedophilia while they were censoring an art expression in Quito.

 

Cartoon posted 07/08/2017

Long direct message sent 15/08/2017

                                       

Once, a guy (a victim of sexual abuse) wrote me and called me. He asked me a cartoon about his story, because he had never seen a cartoon published in newspaper or magazine and he trusted on my images to let people know. ( -Are you coming too to the dynamics of the sin? -And they named our home as a hell…)

Cartoon posted 20/05/2018

 Some people have used  my cartoons on a demostration, then the image is not of cartoonist any more.

 

Cartoonist is one of the rarest professions, you are not a writer but you write, you are not a journalist but you publish in the media and you are not a political scientist but give your political opinions.

The cartoonist profession starts basically when you realize that you are pretty useless for just about everything, except for drawing and painting. From a very young age I had my first job as a cartoonist in a newspaper in a small city in Ecuador, and then I had no alternative but to draw on politics because politicians have that bad taste of influencing society and therefore in our lives and it is not possible to remain indifferent.

To use creativity in my job is not difficult, it doesn’t take much effort and you just have to copy what happens in the daily life with politicians. I have been drawing for many years on political topics, human and women's rights, the environment problems and mainly I try to draw about themes that others cartoonist don´t dare or also about themes that they said are” controversial topics” for example the abortion or  the marriage equality. And these are all the things that a cartoonist says and everyone laughs about; we say it seriously but the whole world thinks it’s a joke.

Cartoon posted after of  Florida´s shoting

Now let’s talk about the complex part of this job. It is when people think that a cartoonist is a politician in disguise but it is just a normal citizen who gives an opinion, and no one can take away or criminalize the right to freedom of expression. Humor is a simple tool to see the reality in another way, so there should be no limits. Not to joke about death, the saints or Muhammad? Personally, I think you can, and you should, because a drawing can never be more offensive than the reality itself. Sometimes people wrote me: You passed the line, and I ask perhaps doesn´t the fiction is used for that?

Since 2006 with the government of former president Rafael Correa, journalist and media enterprises were afraid to publish the cartoons because they could go to court or get a fine. I lost my job of cartoonist in a newspaper in 2014 because the newspaper closed and I lost count, in the last years, of all the written and virtual media in my country that have closed the doors to my work. Once a manager of a web page asked me for a cartoon of a politician, when I send it she told me: I am sorry but I can´t publish it because you are making fun of him. (Yes I knew, my job is to make mockeries).

And I remember when I did an exhibition of political cartoons in a Cultural Institute, the director censored it by saying the place was not for “political opinions”. (Yes I knew my job could create a political opinion)

    I didn´t get a fixed place to publish and despite censorship and intrusions in my home, my personal commitment was to always draw from the opposite sidewalk of the power, because the power has other less innocent mechanisms to make fun of others, such as the law or the force, for example a communication law. That law was created 5 years ago and in the first 2 years more than 200 mass media and 500 radios were criminalized including humor. The law doesn´t separated the fiction of the reality, once a cartoonist had to change a cartoon for an imposed correction. When the last government censored a cartoon, an exhibition, a nude, they are inventing a” perfect world”, they are safeguarding our morality. At the moment, the law is current and the government of Moreno, doesn´t have any hurry to amend, replace or change it.

With the change of government the situation changed, after 4 years, finally I got a space in a newspaper (not daily, only once a week) and in general we have more freedom but unless the law is repealed or amended is too early to speak about the real change. First the Ecuadorian government must tell us what happened with the killed journalists this year in the limits with Colombia. We deserve to know the truth.

And now when we were thinking that this nightmare, the censorship and the intolerance was ending, we have other tyranny: the tyranny without tyrants as said David Trueba. I have been drawing for more than 20 years political humor and I don’t have a rule, a definition or whom to make mockeries to. Humor can disturb anything, but it doesn´t mean than who is offended has the right.

Finally and this is the most complicated part of my work. Humorists have to work double because their big rival are the politicians themselves, because every day there are several subjects full of nonsense that sometimes is very difficult to draw about that and lead us to want to say: "Humorists of the world surrender and abandon the profession. There is nothing to do, the politicians have won us."