This mural was made by Soma and Germán out of an idea by Jáfana, which consisted in using a picture on a historian’s essay (The Pictures We Don’t Get to See by Kevin Coleman) to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the strike of the banana workers of the United Fruit Company asking for better job conditions. The Colombian army was deployed to protect the interests of the multinational company, killing many strikers in the process, many of them assembled in Ciénaga’s main square. In the 70s, the Masacre de las Bananeras attained international renown as it was used as the basis for a fictional event in One Hundred Years of Solitude. The urban legend says the workers refused to disperse even when given a 5 min warning. “You can have the last minute”, someone is supposed to have screamed from the multitude as the countdown approached 60.
Soma and Germán used the stencil technique to paint this piece, which is something unusual in their work. For this, they took advantage of a stencil manual made by StinkFish and which he left with us during the Ciclón Callejero.