The Torture as a Fashion.
Hanging up and chaining a human being is “In”.

If I wanted to sell tunics or sandals or nails or spines of a cactus and I would make a commercial spot where a guy would make a banal parody of the crucified Jesus in different poses and from different angles: hanged up, tied up, chained and his face would be covered with a sheet. And if I after a long photographic session would dedicate myself to distributing thousands of catalogues with these pictures on, with the only aim of gaining money. What would you think about that?
When parents are warned not to let their children watch cartoons which are too violent, it is with the intention of avoiding that children gain some kind of sympathy for violence and reproduce it. However, cartoons still insist to present violence as something funny and comical. The same happens in movies. Everything is solved with violence. So the violence becomes something common and transforms us into insensible beings, used to all type of violence. Nothing will impress us. Behind an innocent commercial hides the hard work of psychologists, sociologists, filmmakers, politicians, publishers and others.
That is the case of Ripley in Santiago de Chile who released a campaign in two Pinochetist newspapers (El Mercurio and La Tercera) for an “innocent” catalogue in order to sell jeans. In a supplement commercial one is able to value how the principal figure, the hanger, by which the “models” are interfered pretending or practicing a cult of sadism and injecting suspension of the idea of being tied up, chained and hanged up from their hands and feet, like it would be the most natural and usual thing one could do. All these humiliations stay unnoted if you only have a nice pair of jeans covering your skin.

As a sample of total disparagement towards all the victims of torture in Chile and Latin America and especially pertinent to Iraq, the commercial is showed without any muffler or consideration of the past or present victims of the same kind of torture that the advertisement presents in a very rude way.

If this is the way to do it, to sell chairs, one should put a picture of a person convicted to death in an electric chair and celebrate afterwards that the chair stayed intact. One could also possibly show a dog cornering and biting a person to distinguish the benefits of buying an alert guardian to your house. In order to sell some sun protectors one could publish pictures of the prisoners of Guantanamo who are staying daily in the sunshine. One of these days there might appear a man burning another with a cigarette demonstrating how durable a certain brand of cigarette is. And if I want to sell metal beds, what would be better than showing a naked person jumping, screaming and suffering to confirm that the beds are well-made. The fact that the torturers have the same methods is of little or no interest for the large stores.

In Chile, the Law of Publishing Abuse does not contemplate this kind of practice or techniques as misleading publicity. (Deceptive Advertising) That means that nobody is being deceived here. There is no fraud, the methods of torture and pants are the most diaphanous, transparent and crystalline that exists. (And even if there would be some deceive, for big companies big money, big briberies and big purchases) So, there is not and will not be any kind of sanction.
The Council of Ethics of Publishing (conformed by the very own publishing agencies) will in the best and most optimistic case make a suggestion within four walls and in a very private way to the “supposed” offender so that they will withdraw their publishing techniques.

The Multi – Mega Store Ripley with branch offices almost all over the country and abroad dizzily increased their economical property during the era of dictatorship.

Convicted to a system of stockjobbers in style of “I buy now and will pay later” (three or five times more) this company became one of many artificial Oases where the poverty, thirsty for some artifact or clothing, deposits its last rattles in its dependences.
In its eagerness to help the society and to confederate with the terrific inequalities that exist in Chile, they founded a bank. The Bank Ripley

Unfortunately, the initiative of burning or delivering the pertinent credit cards in a public way to the Ripley firm did not succeed, due to the fact that almost the entirety of the clients have unsettled debts (I buy now, I will pay for the rest of my life).

Now, at least bombing Ripley’s web-page (www.ripley.cl) with demands of a public apologizes to the Chilean citizenship and to the rest of the world would be another good initiative.
It is clear, while they can fool us, misplace us, desensitize us, alienate us, make us enemies with each other, they will use each and every possible method.
We should be on the ball.


Andrés Bianque.



March 10th, 2006