Rodrigo Azaola
Impunity Landscapes VI, Open roads
2024
Two-channel HD video with sound. 6’34’’.
This video work looks at perhaps the biggest financial fraud ever committed in Mexico. It follows an intricate path of more than three years of research through financial and legal sources, court proceedings, and several freedom of information requests.
From 2006 to 2017, eight global systemically important banks (BBVA, Bank of America, Barclays, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, JP Morgan y Santander) manipulated billions of dollars in Mexican government bonds. The scale of the fraud was so massive that neither American nor Mexican courts have been able or willing to even approximate a figure.
In 2017, when an Oklahoma firefighters ' pension fund, which held Mexican debt, sued the banks, the fraud became public. Further investigations confirmed that banks continuously and deliberately exploited Mexico´s sovereign debt prices and availability. Thousands of clients and institutions all over the world were systematically overcharged or underpaid. In sum, for more than ten years, Mexican debt was bought low and sold high.
In late 2023, I finally received from Mexican authorities more than 500 pages related to this case. Most, if not all, were heavily redacted. The opaqueness of the case was more than literal; it was visual. I used these involuntary motives and designs to create a landscape, interwoven with a semi-fictional reconstruction of the testosterone-risk-fueled chats among the traders in Mexico City and New York, who candidly called themselves the “Hamster Squad.”
Open Roads is a portrait of the casino capitalism behavior of unchecked financial institutions as they shatter the sovereignty of states and the economic future of millions of people.