Caught in the Drug Wars, a Photo Essay by Photographer Zoraida Lopez

By Zoraida Lopez

“Clarita” and her pet bird along a mountainside in Minca, Colombia. Clarita’s entire family lost their home to paramilitary drug traffickers in the mid-1990s. She now lives in a small family farm with her parents, older brother, and younger sister. Her grandparents also lost their land and now live along the same mountainside.

Between 1998 and 2008, approximately one million acres of Colombian land was used for the cultivation of coca leaves, the main ingredient used to produce cocaine. The high production of Colombian cocaine has created a dangerous drug trafficking climate with the civilian population caught in the crossfire. This has led to a loss of land, forced displacement, kidnappings, massacres, and countless disappearances, which in turn has left thousands of children, including many girls, without homes or parents. The cocaine market has also produced the “mule,” a term to describe individuals at the lowest level of the drug trading hierarchy. These “mules” are often poor, young women and girls, who, because of their own desperation, carry out the jobs that no one else wants to do — transport drugs within or on their bodies.

In 2011, I travelled to Medellin, Colombia. For eight days, I lived in Pedregal, a maximum-security women’s prison where the vast majority of women I met were serving sentences for drug trafficking or drug related crimes. While there, I taught photography to twelve of the women who were incarcerated and later curated an exhibition of their work at both Pedregal and the Paul Bardwell Gallery in Medellin.

To understand the depth and impact of a problem as large as the cocaine industry, we need to understand the communities and networks it impacts. We must speak with the women and families who have lost their land to drug wars and to the children who have lost their parents.

In January this year, I returned to Colombia to continue my work with the women at Pedregal and to document the stories of those who have been effected by the cocaine industry. I returned because I believe that in order to understand the depth and impact of a problem as large as the cocaine industry, we need to understand the communities and networks it impacts. We must speak with the women and families who have lost their land to drug wars and to the children who have lost their parents.

These images are the result of my last two trips to Colombia. They capture everyday girls who will grow up to become women in Colombia. They underscore the conditions in Colombia that cause women and girls to be vulnerable — a vulnerability that derives from Colombia’s cocaine industry. They capture both the pain and the possibilities in their lives.

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