Cannabis in vallenato

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The main stage of the Vallenato Legend Festival in Valledupar in 2007.

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Cannabis in vallenato covers the place of the marijuana trade in vallenato, the accordion music of Colombia's Caribbean coast, during and after the bonanza marimbera, the export of marijuana from northern Colombia to the United States in the 1970s and early 1980s. The trade's intermediaries and exporters, known as marimberos, hosted vallenato parrandas (private parties built around the music), paid composers and performers, met the costs of recordings, bought records in bulk to give away and had their names called out in songs. Composers wrote songs in their honour; a few songs took up the trade itself.^{: 72, 86–87: 185, 187–188, 192–193}

The historian Lina Britto argues that the marimberos helped carry vallenato from the local stage to the national market in the 1970s. She also argues that their part in its history was afterwards left out of the national memory.^: 71 Franklin Bonivento van Grieken, working from the greetings recorded on 751 songs, argues that the support of politicians and cultural promoters would not have been enough, without the patronage of the marimberos, to make vallenato Colombia's leading genre.^{: 182, 188}

Accordion music before the boom

Until the middle of the 20th century the upper classes of the region looked down on accordion music, the music of peasants, farm workers and the urban underworld. The composer Gustavo Gutiérrez Cabello told Britto that the rules of the Valledupar Club prohibited it.^: 76 The cattle-ranching families who moved into cotton in the 1950s and 1960s took the music up and held vallenato parrandas while lobbying for the creation of Cesar Department in 1967. In Britto's account they made the music part of their own claim to lead the region.^: 78–80 On 27 April 1968 the department's governor Alfonso López Michelsen, the composer Rafael Escalona and the writer Consuelo Araújo Noguera launched the Vallenato Legend Festival in Valledupar.^: 79

Escalona's "El almirante Padilla" tells of a coffee smuggler whose cargo a navy ship seized.^: 99–101 Smugglers of coffee and other goods celebrated a successful run with a parranda, though Britto writes that guitars, not accordions, played at these parties.^: 77

The parranda in the trade

In Britto's account the marimberos followed the cotton growers and made the parranda a stage in the trade itself. A parranda closed one operation and opened the next, displayed the wealth it had brought and produced the gossip, jokes, tales and songs through which the traders' reputations circulated.^: 72 The journalist Germán Rojas, a correspondent in the region during the boom, told her that young traders who had "crowned" a shipment celebrated it with whistles and parrandas with good vallenato bands, so that everyone knew.^: 84 Britto reads the parranda as a place where traders showed their strength and settled who stood above whom, while rivalry that could be deadly in business was turned into drink and song.^: 85

The journalist José Cervantes Angulo, writing in 1980, reported a saying from La Guajira that a marimbero's party without vallenato musicians was no party at all.^: 288 Britto describes one gathering around 1978 at El Pájaro, a natural seaport used for the export, where several exporters each hired a band; a smuggler who attended remembered Los Hermanos Zuleta, Diomedes Díaz and the Sonora Matancera playing in a hamlet of about ten houses.

Patronage

The composer Sergio Moya Molina described three kinds of patronage to Britto. After a round of improvised verse at a parranda, hosts and guests chose which songs should be recorded, with which accordionist and singer and on which label; the artists were paid for the night in kind or in cash, "sometimes in dollars"; and once an album was in the shops, marimberos bought LPs and tapes in quantity to give to relatives and friends. Britto concludes that together these "created a market for composers, which barely existed before".^: 86 Moya Molina told her: "They raised our prices, and record companies had to begin to pay us better."^: 86

Bonivento van Grieken adds that record labels treated a vallenato album as a financial risk and often had the artist pay for its production. In his account marimberos paid those costs, along with transport, sound equipment and clothes for performances.^: 187 He describes the arrangement as one of reciprocity: the traders gained prestige while musicians could live from their music, tour and buy better instruments. He also holds that the marimberos gave out of love for the parranda and the music more than for any return.^{: 188, 191} In 1994 the sociologists Darío Betancourt and Martha Luz García wrote that the spread of vallenato groups in the preceding years owed much to the money of the marijuana trade.^: 65–66

Britto tells of the start of Diomedes Díaz's career through the tape-recorded memoir of the marimbero she calls Chijo, who met the young singer at a parranda at his house in San Juan del Cesar and paid his personal expenses while he recorded a new album. She notes that the account may not be accurate in its facts and uses it for what it shows of the parranda as a place of exchange between men.^: 91–92 Bonivento van Grieken writes that Tres canciones (1976), the album that gave Díaz his first hit, greets two marimberos, Alcibíades "Chijo" López and Miguel Agustín "Lucky" Cotes, and that López had paid for the recording.^: 186–187 Díaz's "El profesional" (1979), about a singer without schooling who is a good professional, is read by Britto as the voice of a generation of musicians who had made the music a career.^: 137 Not every musician gained. A profile of the accordionist Alfredo Gutiérrez in El Tiempo in 2006 reported that when the boom began the leading mafia figures of La Guajira and the coast paid radio stations not to play his music, finding his clothes and shows unmanly, and favoured Poncho Zuleta and Jorge Oñate instead.

At the festival

Alfonso López Michelsen in 1977, when he was President of Colombia. As governor of Cesar he launched the Vallenato Legend Festival in 1968.

Britto writes that the marimberos never set themselves against the cotton growers' festival and counted it as part of their own world. A former exporter recalled travelling to Valledupar for the festival with composers and folcloristas and drinking with them for days.^: 91 A correspondent of the Bogotá magazine Alternativa wrote in May 1978 that the festival was for ranchers to sell their cattle, record labels to promote their sales, politicians to take their share "and mafiosos to exchange shout-outs".^: 91 Marimberos also looked for new talent there: Moya Molina's first parranda with traffickers followed his first appearance at the festival, at the age of 20.^: 91

Greetings

Vallenato singers had spoken short phrases over the instrumental passages of songs since the 1940s. The names of cotton growers, politicians and their relatives entered the songs during the cotton boom. The composer, producer and radio host Lenín Bueno Suárez told Britto that greetings to traffickers in the middle of choruses, given in return for contributions to recordings and other costs, began in the mid-1970s; radio called the payments payola. Britto adds that many greetings came out of particular friendships and ties of compadrazgo.^: 87 Betancourt and García date the general custom of sending greetings and messages from within songs to the same years.^: 60 Cervantes Angulo wrote in 1980 that, as people in La Guajira said, a self-respecting marimbero had to be named in the songs. Each mention, he added, earned the musicians 100,000 or 200,000 pesos.^: 288 The news weekly Semana, looking back on the boom in November 1982, repeated the figure and called vallenato and its performers the favourites of the great traffickers. Musicians and producers interviewed by El Heraldo in 2014 dated paid greetings to the second half of the 1970s, when artists were also given Ranger pickups, weapons and jewellery. The composer Celso Guerra told the paper that before the marimberos vallenato was worth little, "pero llegaron los 'marimberos' y pusieron los precios" (but the marimberos came and set the prices).

Bonivento van Grieken built a database of every greeting on 751 songs from 70 albums by Diomedes Díaz, Los Hermanos Zuleta, Jorge Oñate, Los Betos, the Binomio de Oro and Adaníes Díaz.^{: 182, 188} Every one of their albums released between 1976 and 1978 carries at least one greeting to a marimbero, besides greetings to the traders' relatives and associates. Between 1979 and 1983 some of the artists stopped greeting them, as their lyrics turned from rural and regional subjects to life in the cities. More than 35 songs in the corpus are tied directly to the trade; he counts more than 60 in all.^: 189 In his master's thesis he reads the greetings as a record of the trade's fortunes, rising and falling with its best years.^: 62

Songs

Britto finds that songs written in honour of marimberos kept the forms of other vallenatos and do not make a subgenre, unlike the Mexican narcocorrido. They also dealt with the landscape, love, machismo, fortune and poverty, compadrazgo and rivalry.^: 88 Most of them, Moya Molina told her, came out of the rounds of improvised verse at parrandas.^: 86 Bonivento van Grieken writes that almost every marimbero had one or two songs of his own.^: 189

• "Soy parrandero y qué" ("So what if I like to party"), by Lenín Bueno Suárez, recorded by Los Hermanos Zuleta on Dos estrellas (1977), portrays a childhood friend of the composer whom Britto calls the most renowned trafficker of the day; the chorus names him as Lucky Cotes.^: 58 Bueno Suárez said Cotes never paid him for it. It became one of the biggest hits of his career.^: 87: 132 Britto writes that it is still sung at parrandas "with the passion of an anthem".^: 132
• "El Gavilán Mayor" ("The Big Sparrowhawk"), by Hernando Marín, recorded by Diomedes Díaz and Colacho Mendoza on Dos grandes (1978), honours, in Britto's reading, a marimbero known for his air shipments, under the image of a bird of prey; Bonivento van Grieken identifies him as Raúl Jacobo Gómez Castrillón, whose nickname the song takes.^: 88: 188 Cervantes Angulo reported in 1980 that the man gave Díaz a Ranger pickup after Díaz sang the song more than a hundred times in one night of parranda.^: 71–72 Whom the song was written for is disputed. The musicologist Julio Oñate called it Marín's portrait of himself. The researcher Martín López González holds that it was not first dedicated to the trafficker. Bonivento van Grieken thinks it was. El Tiempo's report of the man's death in an ambush, in January 1991, says that Marín wrote the song for him, singing of his eccentricities and his women. Celso Guerra told El Heraldo that the musicians took some money from a marimbero who claimed the song was about him. Bonivento van Grieken attributes the dispute to a wish to deny the trade's part in the music.^: 56: 188
• "Buena parranda", by Carlos Huertas, recorded by Jorge Oñate and Colacho Mendoza on Silencio (1978), carries its greeting in the lyric itself: the song says that Chijo López asked the composer for a song for Lucky Cotes.^: 190
• "Lluvia de verano", by Hernando Marín, recorded by Diomedes Díaz and Juancho Rois on La locura (1978), was written for the composer's friend Lisímaco Peralta, a marimbero; its title sets past hardship beside summer rain, which is rare and soon over.^: 75 Britto lists it among the songs that celebrate traffickers.^: 86
• "La celosa", by Sergio Moya Molina, recorded by Los Hermanos Zuleta on Río crecido (1974), took its humour, the composer told Britto, from the habits of his marimbero friends.^: 92
• "Campesino desamparado", by Rafael Machuca and Jorge Araque, recorded by Juancho Polo Valencia in 1977, tells of farmers whose rains have failed and who are tempted to sow marijuana.^: 185
• "Adiós a un amigo", by Euclides Enrique Coronado, recorded by Los Hermanos Zuleta on Dinastía y folclor (1979), mourns the marimbero Rafael Aarón, known as Maracas, killed outside his house at carnival time.^: 194

"El marimbero"

"El marimbero", by Romualdo Brito, was recorded in 1979 by Los Hermanos Meriño with Brito singing, on the album Alma de mi alma.^: 193 Its narrator is called a marimbero for having changed his lot, having been a street child and a beggar without schooling; now that he has money the government pursues him. He declares he has nothing to be ashamed of. Britto writes that a trafficker known as Pocholo inspired it and links him with a regional tradition of self-reliance and distance from the central state. In her reading the song meets vallenato's standards of social criticism and protest.^: 88–89 Bonivento van Grieken calls it "una especie de himno de los marimberos" (a kind of anthem of the marimberos), aimed at the government of Julio César Turbay Ayala. He places it with two other songs of 1978 and 1979 that objected to the government's measures in La Guajira. One is "Riohacha", by Armando Zabaleta, recorded by Los Hermanos Zuleta, which accuses the government of lying through the press about violence in the department; the other is Brito's "Yo soy el indio", recorded by Diomedes Díaz and Colacho Mendoza, which complains that La Guajira's wealth does not reach its people.^: 192–193

In 1981 the Puerto Rican singer Daniel Santos, whom Britto describes as a publicly known marijuana smoker admired by young men in Riohacha in the 1950s and 1960s, recorded "El marimbero" with La Charanga Vallenata as the title song of an album of vallenatos. That version became an international success.^{: 121: 88–89: 192}

Sound and market

Britto argues that the trade did not change what the musicologist Rito Llerena Villalobos called vallenato's "integral aesthetic function" but magnified its place in society. In her account the marimberos hastened its commercialisation into a second golden age of more urban lyrics and accordion routines.^: 89 The ethnomusicologist and musician Roger Bermúdez told her that musicians of the 1970s extended the introductions, interludes and endings of the standard melodies, so that songs grew longer and more rhythmic. Record labels in Barranquilla and Medellín added electric guitars, bass, drums and chorus voices. The caseta, a stage of beams and corrugated iron put up for one night and moved by truck to the next town, carried the music to audiences beyond the radio and the private parranda.^: 90 The lyrics moved from farm work, weather and village courtship to city life, study, travel and spending. The radio presenter Marina Quintero told Britto that verses about leaving a village for the city spoke to people who had made that move themselves.^: 89–90 Britto, following the anthropologist Peter Wade, writes that vallenato has been Colombia's best-selling national style since the 1970s.^: 73

The end of the patronage

The decree known as the Security Statute (Decree 1923 of 6 September 1978) and the military campaign against the marijuana trade in La Guajira from November 1978 turned the marimberos, in Bonivento van Grieken's words, from heroes of the people into military targets.^: 191–192 Britto writes that the parrandas and the trade collapsed together; Moya Molina told her that the traders became fugitives who had to lower their profile and partied far less often. Bonivento van Grieken gives two reasons for the musicians' withdrawal: the genre now had the backing of record labels, radio stations and promoters and needed the traders' money less; many artists also preferred to keep their distance from men the army was hunting. Parrandas that had ended in hangovers now ended in police raids.^: 193–194 The marimberos disappear from the greetings on the albums he studied between 1980 and 1983.^: 81

Los Hermanos Zuleta had sung of the death of a marimbero in 1979; in 1982, Bonivento van Grieken points out, they sang for the king of Sweden.^: 194 They travelled to Stockholm with Rafael Escalona in the delegation that accompanied Gabriel García Márquez to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1983 they recorded Escalona's "El vallenato Nobel" on an album of the same name.^: 181

Memory

Bonivento van Grieken's 2024 article takes its title, "From the marijuana famine to the Nobel Prize in Literature", from the two ends of this story: the shortage of marijuana in the United States that the journalist Barry Farrell described in Life in August 1969 and the Nobel of 1982.^{: 179, 183} He writes: "Para 1985, nadie quería ya acordarse de los marimberos" (by 1985 nobody wanted to remember the marimberos).^: 194 Semana had written in November 1982 that, while the big traffickers held on, the lesser marimberos were left with the nostalgia of their opulence. In Bonivento van Grieken's view vallenato is in part heir to their patronage. The history of the trade, he argues, cannot be understood without the music, because the songs hold part of its memory.^: 195

Britto writes that any serious collector or listener knows of the relationship, but that the literature on vallenato and public discourse played it down or ignored it.^: 73 She finds that vallenato is presented as a national patrimony cut off from these contradictions. Even musicians who benefited, she writes, minimise the trade's role; Bueno Suárez told her that the public figures who promoted vallenato in Bogotá mattered more and that "marijuana was just a stepping-stone". She suggests two reasons: the festival's discourse of tradition or fear that a link with drugs would taint the musicians' achievements.^: 93 In her conclusion the marimbero of vallenato "was made invisible", absorbed into the region's agricultural and merchant elite.^: 94

The novelist Alonso Sánchez Baute wrote in 2017 that the festival was born between the cotton and marijuana booms and that "con los marimberos comenzó su degradación" (with the marimberos its degradation began), because many composers lent themselves to praising them. The vallenato scholar Abel Medina Sierra accepts that the barons of the boom were patrons of performers, but calls the story built on it a "leyenda negra" (black legend) used to stigmatise vallenato musicians. He points out that patronage came in earlier and later booms too. In his account the state itself made the traders' dollars ordinary by having the Banco de la República buy them through the so-called ventanilla siniestra.

In Bonivento van Grieken's account the custom of paying to be greeted in a song outlived the boom, taken up by figures from entertainment, radio, television, cattle ranching, illicit business and paramilitarism.^: 86 Being greeted in a vallenato, he writes, is still a measure of prestige in some circles of the Colombian elite.^: 196 He dates a revival of the marimberos' stories to the film Pájaros de verano (2018), which he faults for showing the Wayuu as the main actors of the boom.^: 86 He presents his own article as an argument for seeing vallenato as a music with contradictions, not as a criticism of it.^: 196

See also

• Bonanza marimbera
• Cannabis in music
• History of cannabis in Colombia
• Marijuana Boom (2020)