about COCA

The first, unique COCA book is in the collection of The Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Bainbridge Island, WA. The subsequent editioned version has been acquired by: Stanford University, Stanford, CA; Princeton University, Princeton, NJ; Smith College, Northampton, MA; Tufts University, Medford, MA; University of Delaware, Newark, DE; Private Collection of Davis & Louise Reimer.

Eliana Pérez’s book, COCA, is the second in her series about her home country, Colombia. It continues her evocative exploration at the bloody intersection of poverty, violence, and a global market economy.  Following the peace agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC guerilla group in 2016, Eliana turned her efforts toward documenting and addressing the many challenges facing her homeland, starting with the Falsos Positivos scandal (Falso +, 2019, in the collection of Yale University) and now examining the cocaine trade and its effects on Colombia’s environment and communities.

COCA Text

“Greedy plunder of Earth’s most valuable commodities brings suffering, death and extinction to the world’s most vulnerable inhabitants. Cocaine production in the wilds of Colombia is no exception, wiping out the people, plants and animals living there.

From above, the Colombian Amazon resembles the coat of a mangy dog: bald spots fester where parasitic coca farms multiply. After a short while, each patch is abandoned and the producers move on to flay another hectare of this dwindling natural system. The harvested coca leaves require chemical processing to become cocaine, and the many serpentine freshwater rivers are convenient sewers for the poison waste. Riverbanks rot with cankerous processing labs, discharging toxins into our planet's mightiest waterways.

The War On Drugs is a war on Colombian peasants. The farmers, community leaders and Indigenous residents that dare resist cultivation, trafficking, or eviction from their land are massacred. The state’s solution: a carcinogenic rain of herbicide withering leaves and corrupting cells. Like the coca plant dropping its blood-red fruit, the violence reseeds itself, ensuring successive iterations of victimization and destruction.”