The Last Supper With Jesus, Hitler & Gandhi
My parents recently ate a meal in a restaurant converted from an old railway station in the mountain town of Urbina in Ecuador. Hanging on the wall was a cartoon by a person named Willarreal. Knowing my sensibilities, my father took a photo of it and sent it to me. I don’t know what to make of the cartoon and was hoping readers might have some thoughts on it.
I have no idea if this is a stock cartoon that has been widely circulated in Ecuador. Perhaps Willarreal is a famous political cartoonist in those parts – the Latin American equivalent of, say, Gary Trudeau. And I have only the faintest notion how to interpret it. Presumably, because it hangs on a prominent wall in a respectable place of business, it is readily understood by a significant number of the restaurant’s patrons. I make the supposition that my own dim understanding is a function of the fact that I have no access to the ideological assumptions that drive the life of a typical Ecudorian. The appropriate question isn’t “What does it mean?” but rather “What does it mean in Ecuador?”
Here’s what I think I see:
This is styled as a last supper with a traditional-looking Christ figure poised to distribute the elements of the Eucharistic meal. He is reaching for his “body” which, instead of bread, is a roast chicken. The other element (the “blood”?) includes two American products, a pack of Marlboroughs and a can of Coke, and two Latin American products, a bottle of Cuban rum and Café de Colombia. All these contain addictive substances. Are we to impute to the chicken a similarly addictive quality? Certainly animal rights activists would argue that North Americans are addicted to meat. Or maybe the chicken represents an addiction of a different sort. Maybe it’s an addiction to free markets where everything (including necessities like food) gets commodified and ends up in the hands of the highest valued user (i.e. the rich). Are local chicken producers being squeezed out by multinational food interests who export all of Ecuador’s product and leave the local markets with nothing? (I have to tread carefully here because my brother is a food broker who specializes in chicken. I wonder if my father was even aware of the possibility of such a critique embedded in the image when he sent it to me?)
And what about the disciples? If Hitler stands in for Judas, then what is the artist telling us about the other eleven? Gandhi and Nelson Mandela have universal cachet and aren’t likely to provoke objection except from the most reactionary of viewers. Some stand for leftist/revolutionary ideologies: Fidel Castro, Che Guevera, Leon Trotsky, Mao. Then there’s Ecuador’s leftist neighbours, Hugo Chávez from Venezuela and Evo Morales from Bolivia. (Who’s the guy in the lower right corner?) More interesting is the inclusion of Arafat. Does the Ecuadorian cartoonist regard the PLO as a revolutionary movement seeking liberation from an oppressive Israel? (Given Israel’s latest attacks on Gaza, “oppressive” is an apt description.) And is that Saddam Hussein in the upper left corner? What should we make of that? (Given that Morales came to power on Jan. 22, 2006 and Hussein was executed on Dec. 30, 2006, I’m guessing that the cartoon was drawn between those two dates.)
While the cartoon may be an affirmation of leftist politics and anti-capitalist economics, it is also a religious statement, aligning Jesus with the poor whom the revolutionary leaders represent. Maybe it’s evidence of the popular hold that liberation theology has had upon the people of Ecuador. Maybe it’s evidence, too, of how vague are the boundaries that separate religious and ideological convictions.
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