It was exactly 50 years ago when Ernesto “Che” Guevara was executed in Bolivia, shot nine times, in the legs, chest and throat, while bound in a schoolhouse in the dusty village of La Higuera. His capture, and murder, was part of a CIA operation, intended specifically to eliminate the revolutionary leader, and maintain the US supported right-wing government that gripped Bolivia at the time, fronted by would-be dictator René Barrientos. This was not the first US intervention in the fate of the Bolivian people, nor would it be the last. Over the next 5 decades the US would aggressively suppress socialist political parties in Bolvia, supporting a bloody coup against leftist president Juan José Torres in 1972, leading to a decade of military rule. After the 1982 election of president Hernán Siles Zuazo, Bolivia once more moved towards the left, and the US once again intervened, suspending all international aid. Even as recently as 2008, the US Agency for International Development was found to be pumping taxpayers money into right-wing factions in order to undermine president Evo Morales, a socialist activist and the first indigenous leader of Bolivia since the Spanish invaded 500 years before.

Shot nine times, in the legs, chest and throat, while bound in a schoolhouse in the dusty village of La Higuera

So it is with a certain amount of surprise that on touching down in a virtual Bolivian countryside in Ghost Recon: Wildlands, outfitted in my branded tactical gear and with a DEA agent to avenge, I find my crew-cut special-forces soldier in conversation with a rebel leader who begins by quoting the godfather of socialist thought himself; Friedrich Engels. The “Agrarian Proletariat” that we, the player, are about to help this cliched rebel leader realise, couldn’t be closer to Guevara’s vision of a peasant uprising. It’s a bizarre shift, one that can only lead to two conclusions: either Wildlands’ writers are exceptionally poor students of the history they are about to trample over, or that the image of the socialist rebel (typified by Guevara himself) is so strong that they simply gave into its allure, effectively silencing decades of US sanctioned oppression in the process. Either way, the disconnect cannot be ignored. Here we are, playing as the descendants of those who orchestrated Guevara’s death, about to collaborate to realise his socialist dream.

This absurd switch perfectly demonstrates how little interest Wildlands has in Bolivia as a country, a history, or a reality. Instead, it only wishes it to be an image. It isn’t even able to demonise its people with an effective enough argument, instead importing a known enemy; Mexican drug cartels, to stand in as the target of the players illegitimate violence. This fictional conceit, willfully ignorant, and predictably playing off Trumpist fear-mongering of those “South of the Border”, succeeds because the what the game assumes is players equal level of ignorance. Its entire existence seems to stem from a need to make a game about killing Mexicans in a country more dramatic and beautiful than Mexico might muster. The player is made complicit in this, oohing and ahing at the dramatic Bolivian landscape while simultaneously exacting violence on its Mexican imports. There is no attempt to cohere Bolivian political realities and histories with the violent campaigns of Mexican cartels, just as there is no attempt to settle the armies of tattooed and sagging-panted “Sicario” into the Bolivian countryside. This countryside, clearly built from a large volume of reference gathering and research, is central in this sense of disjunction. Its realisation, often startlingly detailed and atmospheric, sits in direct contradiction with the games disinterest in the country and its people. This is perhaps most startling in the NPC members of the indigenous population, carefully outfitted and sculpted, who walk in endless loops, brainlessly imitating routines and feigning an expression of pantomime fear when threatened. In images they appear almost relateable, human, and yet in practice they are functionless objects, treated with as much affection as a roadside rock.

Because of this, when coming to photograph Wildlands I found myself initially frustrated. Here was a misanthropic world asking to be made beautiful, to have its perverse political logic stripped away and be turned into pure image. Trying to gather portraits of the Bolivian population seemed to play into the games military tourism; snapping shots of exotic locals and their customs, hiding the players ignorance behind a virtual lens. Meanwhile landscape shots seemed to devolve into little more than postcards, foreign beauty packaged ready to send home, across the border. I wanted instead to find the misanthropic military eye the game saw the world with, one that reshapes landscapes as battlefields, people as targets and entire countries as the playgrounds of the US military. And after some time, I found it, behind the lifeless lens of the game’s handheld drone.

A symbol of the violence implicit in its gaze, a violence that shatters the game’s hollow, beautiful landscapes

There’s a kind of political purity to Wildlands‘ drone. Its primary use, throughout the campaign, is to mark and identify enemies. This seemingly innocuous videogame function becomes exceptionally relevant when placed in the context of military drone usage today. The classification, marking and identifying of targets in drone strikes has become a political, legal and ethical battleground. It was President Barack Obama’s increasing use of drones in foreign territories that led to the infamous classification of any 18-49 year old man killed in a strike as a “Military Aged Male”. A cynical and inhuman way of reducing the figures of civilians killed through collateral damage of drone attacks, “Military Aged Male” identifies enemies in death. It follows the perverse logic that if a foreign, adult male is killed in a drone strike, then they must be an enemy of the US. To conceive of how powerful this logic is, its important to understand that there are reports that suggest up to 90% of drone victims under Obama’s administration “were not the intended targets” of the attack. This is just the beginning; since entering office, President Trump has approved drone strikes at 4 times the rate of the previous administration, and is currently considering legislation to lower safely threshold of a proposed drone strike from a “near certainty” that civilians will be left unharmed to “reasonable certainty”, effectively transforming any area into a legally classified “temporary” battlefield. In this context, the role of the drone becomes fundamentally about identifying enemies, even if that process occurs through the act of killing.

In contrast Wildlands’ drone operates in a mode of total certainty. Launch it from an open hand and under the players control it simply pings any enemy who passes under its machine gaze. This might seem logical in game; where NPC’s are defined as enemies, allies or neutral by their very existence, but Wildlands is also a representation of reality, and in representing its drone as such a hyper-functional machine eye it propagates the same logic as the “Military Aged Male” classification. It makes the process of visually identifying an enemy an act of pure divination, one performed by a machine mind of optical imaging, bureaucratic processes and tactical planning. And so, in order to capture this machine mind, and the military eye which it scans the world with, I turned to Wildlands drone as a photographic device. From its elevated position I found the echoes of real-life drone strikes I had been looking for. In its crosshair I found the paranoid, hyper-aggressive military perspective that led to the US’s manipulation of Bolivian politics. And in the fractured noise that muddied its screen as I reached the edge of its operational range, I found a symbol of the violence implicit in its gaze, a violence that shatters the game’s hollow, beautiful landscapes revealing them to be the flat, empty signifiers that they truly are.

Heterotopias 002 will be published in early May. follow @heterotopiasZn or sign up to our newsletter to be informed about its release.

Issue 001, featuring photography of Kane & Lynch 2, and analysis of Inside, Strider and Tomb Raider is avaliable now from itch.

