Cordillera Central (Colombia)
More actions
| Cordillera Central | |
|---|---|
| Central Cordillera | |
| ActiveCannabis last recorded here in 2024 | |
| Location | |
| Coordinates | 4.01, -75.34 |
| Country | Colombia |
| Provinces/States | Cauca Department,Tolima Department,Quindío Department |
| Area | 27,600 km² |
| Primary Mountains | Cordillera Central |
| Growing history | |
| Dated accessions | 2024 |
| Conservation | |
| Populations | none documented yet |
Cordillera Central (the Central Cordillera) is a cannabis growing region on the central range of the Andes in Colombia, between the valleys of the Cauca and the Magdalena. It is made up of three growing areas: Northern Cauca, on the western slopes of the range above the Cauca valley; Tolima, between the range and the Magdalena; and Quindío, on the western side of the range. Colombia's truth commission describes the north of Cauca as a crucial subregion for marijuana, especially in the municipalities on the Central Cordillera,[1]: 192 and in 2019 a presentation of the national drug observatory, citing the anti-narcotics police, named Cauca and Tolima among the main producing departments of the country.[2] Two Punto Rojo selections, ZOM-COL-QUIN-0120240001 and ZOM-COL-QUIN-0120240002, were collected as seed from a population grown near Calarcá, in Quindío, in January 2024.
Geography
The region is drawn on its three growing areas and takes in no land outside them. Northern Cauca covers five municipalities of the department of Cauca: Caloto, Corinto, Jambaló, Miranda and Toribío. Tolima is drawn on the whole department of that name, and Quindío on the whole department of Quindío. The three areas adjoin one another, so the region forms one shape of about 27,600 km². It does not take in the whole range: the parts of the Central Cordillera in Valle del Cauca, Caldas, Risaralda, Antioquia and Huila, and in Cauca south of the five municipalities, lie outside it.
Early reports
In 1961 the Colombian delegation to an inter-American narcotics meeting in Rio de Janeiro drew on a report of the secret police to describe where marijuana was grown in the country. According to the historian Eduardo Sáenz Rovner, it named Valle del Cauca, Caldas and Antioquia, with the municipalities concerned, and added that there were crops in Huila, Magdalena, Cauca, Tolima and Cundinamarca.[3]: 214–215 In June 1968 a police bulletin reported a farm planted with marijuana in Miranda, in the north of Cauca.[3]: 220
The truth commission places the first crops in Corinto and Caloto in the 1950s.[1]: 73 A journalist from Riohacha told the historian Lina Britto that in the early years of the marijuana trade on the Caribbean coast, in the late 1960s, the drug was said to come from Corinto, because the marijuana of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta became known only later.[4]: 79 A policy brief of the German-Colombian peace institute CAPAZ dates the first crops of cannabis for adult use in Corinto and Toribío to the 1970s, and says that prosecution cut production sharply between 1980 and 1990, when coca and opium poppy replaced cannabis as sources of income in the region.[5]: 2–3
Since 2000
The truth commission dates a revival of marijuana in the north of Cauca to about 2010, when the region became one of the main centres of the crop, grown both in the open and in greenhouses.[1]: 163 A 2024 study by the peace research institute Indepaz calls the five municipalities of Northern Cauca the main marijuana-producing enclave of the country, with an estimated 16,000 to 19,000 growers.[6]: 5 A survey of the anti-narcotics police reported in 2021 located 347.3 hectares of marijuana in Cauca, most of it in those five municipalities.[7]
In Tolima the army reported eradicating more than 8,000 marijuana plants in rural Ataco, Chaparral and San Antonio in February 2016,[8] and in January 2020 the armed forces reported 1.5 hectares of plantations in the vereda (rural district) of El Topacio, in Planadas.[9] A bulletin of the University of Tolima's Centre for Regional Studies on the years 2015–2020 found most of the department's eradicated marijuana in Planadas and Chaparral, and suggested that the concentration of illicit crops in the south-west of the department might be linked to their growth in northern Cauca and Valle del Cauca.[10]: 16, 19
The Ministry of Defence's open data list about 65 hectares of marijuana eradicated in the five municipalities of Northern Cauca between 2010 and 2020, and about 150 hectares in Tolima between 2007 and 2021, most of it in Planadas, Chaparral and Rovira.[11]
In Quindío the seed of the two Punto Rojo accessions came from the 2023 harvest of a landrace population near Calarcá. Cannabis is also grown there under licence for medicinal use: in 2019 El Tiempo reported a licensed crop of about 300 plants in the vereda of Corozal, near the town of Córdoba,[12] and in December 2023 the departmental agriculture secretariat counted eight production permits and about 130 small producers in the department.[13]
Licensed growing
Cannabis is also licensed for medicinal growing in the region. In 2016 the ministers of justice and health endorsed in Corinto the founding of a cooperative for medicinal cannabis, and by 2019 six companies and nine associations in the municipality were setting up greenhouses.[14] Between 2017 and May 2018 the Ministry of Justice issued seven licences to four companies to grow cannabis for medical and scientific purposes in Ibagué, Piedras, Saldaña and Fresno, in Tolima.[15]
Growing Areas
| Growing Area | Province | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Northern Cauca | Cauca Department | Active |
| Quindío | Quindío Department | Active |
| Tolima | Tolima Department | Active |
Appellations
Accessions
| Accession ID | Name | Collected | Area |
|---|---|---|---|
| ZOM-COL-QUIN-0120240001 | Punto Rojo 'Incense' Selection 2023 | Quindío | |
| ZOM-COL-QUIN-0120240002 | Punto Rojo 'Jaime's' Selection 2023 | Quindío |
Recent news
No news items are recorded for this growing region yet.
See also
- Colombia
- Northern Colombia
- Ariari
- Cordillera Central, the growing region of the same name in the Philippines
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Comisión para el Esclarecimiento de la Verdad, la Convivencia y la No Repetición (August 2022). Colombia adentro: relatos territoriales sobre el conflicto armado. Valle y norte del Cauca (PDF). Hay futuro si hay verdad: Informe Final, tomo 11, vol. 12 (in español). Bogotá: Comisión de la Verdad. ISBN 978-628-7590-38-0. Retrieved 20 October 2026 – via Biblioteca Hegoa.
- ↑ Observatorio de Drogas de Colombia (June 2019). Experiencia en la recolección de información sobre oferta y consumo: ODC. Taller para Fortalecer a los Observatorios Nacionales sobre Drogas de América Latina y el Caribe: Cuarta Edición (in español). Comisión Interamericana para el Control del Abuso de Drogas, Organización de los Estados Americanos. slide 21. Retrieved 20 October 2026.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Sáenz Rovner, Eduardo (2007). "La "prehistoria" de la marihuana en Colombia: consumo y cultivos entre los años 30 y 60" (PDF). Cuadernos de Economía (in español). XXVI (47): 205–222.
- ↑ Britto, Lina (2020). Marijuana Boom: The Rise and Fall of Colombia's First Drug Paradise. Oakland: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-32547-0.
- ↑ Granados, Diana; Rojas, Axel; López, William; Moriones, Germán; Anzola, Sebastián (August 2024). Regular para la paz: recomendaciones para la regulación del cannabis de uso adulto en el norte del Cauca (PDF) (Report). Policy Brief 10-2024 (in español). Bogotá: Instituto Colombo-Alemán para la Paz (CAPAZ). ISSN 2711-0346. Retrieved 20 October 2026.
- ↑ Espitia Cueca, Carlos Eduardo; Majbub Avendaño, Salomón (March 2024). La economía de la marihuana en el enclave productivo del Norte del Cauca (PDF) (Report) (in español). Instituto de Estudios para el Desarrollo y la Paz (Indepaz). ISSN 1909-0900. Retrieved 20 October 2026.
- ↑ Méndez, Alicia Liliana (15 March 2021). "La Policía ubicó el mayor centro de cultivo de marihuana 'creepy'". El Tiempo (in español). Retrieved 20 October 2026.
- ↑ "Ejército da duros golpes al narcotráfico en el sur del Tolima". La FM (in español). 23 February 2016. Retrieved 20 October 2026.
- ↑ "Military Forces and Prosecutor´s Office find marijuana of the residual GAO in Tolima". Comando General de las Fuerzas Militares de Colombia. 21 January 2020. Retrieved 20 October 2026.
- ↑ Mejía Baldión, Alejandro; Otálora, Yennifer Carolina; Tafur Villarreal, Andrés (March 2021). Oferta y consumo de drogas en el Tolima: recomendaciones para su atención (2015–2020) (PDF) (Report). Boletín de Análisis Regional CERE, no. 3 (in español). Ibagué: Centro de Estudios Regionales, Universidad del Tolima. ISSN 2744-8347. Retrieved 20 October 2026.
- ↑ Ministerio de Defensa Nacional. "Erradicación". Portal de Datos Abiertos de Colombia (dataset) (in español). Retrieved 20 October 2026.
- ↑ "Entre cafetales del Quindío crece un cultivo de cannabis medicinal". El Tiempo (in español). 10 March 2019. Retrieved 20 October 2026.
- ↑ Rodríguez Tapasco, Paula Carolina (7 December 2023). "El primer dispensario legal de cannabis en Colombia está en el Quindío". Radio Nacional de Colombia (in español). Retrieved 20 October 2026.
- ↑ Arias, Gloria (28 June 2019). "La marihuana, a punto de dejar a oscuras el campo caucano". El Tiempo (in español). Retrieved 20 October 2026.
- ↑ "Actualmente cuatro empresas tienen licencia para cultivar cannabis medicinal en el departamento de Tolima". Agronegocios (in español). Colprensa. 15 May 2018. Retrieved 20 October 2026.