This is not the first time Botero has adapted his whimsical style to the iconography of violence. As art critic David Ebony points out in the Marlborough show catalog, in 1973, Botero painted a large canvas, War, which centers on an enormous mound of naked, bleeding bodies, in response to news reports of the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East.

In the late '90s, Botero began a series of paintings that focused on the rampant violence of Colombia's drug-cartel wars. In Massacre in Colombia, the bullet-riddled bodies of innocent villagers lie together atop a puddle of blood as the last of their group, his hands tied behind his back, succumbs to the continuing hail of gunfire from local drug lords. Other canvases depict the victims of death squads, car bombs, and kidnappings, as well as the government assassinations of drug barons Pablo Escobar and Manuel Marulanda. But these earlier paintings lack the emotional force of the Abu Ghraib series, perhaps because he conceived them not as political commentary but as images drawn from Colombia's "dark folklore." In 2004, Botero donated 50 works from the drug-war series to museums in Colombia; he also plans to donate the Abu Ghraib series, preferably to an American museum. "I don't believe in making money off human suffering," he told Reuters.