Estudios ambientales en la Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta (1986)
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| Author | Cesar Barbosa, Guillermo Rodríguez and Alfonso Avellaneda, for INDERENA |
|---|---|
| Language | Spanish |
| Composed | 1986 |
| Written at | Bogotá |
| Published | 1986 (agency report, not printed for sale); web copy by Mama Coca |
| Publisher | Instituto Nacional de los Recursos Naturales Renovables y del Ambiente (INDERENA) |
| Place | Bogotá |
| Regions documented | Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Magdalena Department |
|---|---|
| Uses documented | Growing for the export trade of the late 1970s; intoxicant use |
| Digital facsimile | Read the web copy at Mama Coca |
|---|---|
| Original held at | Centro de documentación, Fundación Pro-Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta (as the web copy states) |
Estudios ambientales en la Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta afectada por cultivos de marihuana y fumigación con glifosato (Environmental studies in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta affected by marijuana crops and glyphosate spraying) is a report written in 1986 by three officials of INDERENA, the Colombian government's institute for renewable natural resources and the environment. It describes a field commission to the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, made with the anti-narcotics police of Magdalena, to see the state of a mountain range cleared for marijuana and sprayed from the air with glyphosate, and to set the terms of reference for a study of the spraying's effects on the environment.[1] It gives the altitudes and river valleys that clearing for the marijuana boom had reached by 1986.
The report is a government agency's case against the spraying programme of another branch of the same government, and it is evidence of that dispute as much as it is a survey of the mountains. Its short history of marijuana in the Sierra Nevada is cited to a botanist whose volumes say something else.
Origins
INDERENA, the Instituto Nacional de los Recursos Naturales Renovables y del Ambiente, had warned the government against aerial spraying of marijuana with herbicides from 1978. In a letter of 19 June 1978 it asked for an environmental study of the areas before any spraying, as the national code of renewable natural resources required. In August 1984 it wrote again, this time that it opposed spraying the national parks with glyphosate.[2]: 3 The report gives the same history in its own words: two letters from INDERENA's management to the director of the National Police, of 1978 and 1984, setting out terms of reference for a study, to which the police did not reply. In March 1986 the Procuraduría, the public prosecutor's office, asked INDERENA what it was doing, and the police asked it to send two officials to fly over the sprayed areas. That flight led to a proposal for environmental studies in the national park and its buffer zones, which INDERENA sent to the National Narcotics Council in July 1986.[1] For the spraying itself, see Herbicide spraying in Colombia.
The commission of December 1986 was the new visit with specialists that INDERENA then asked the police for. Its task was to make the terms of reference precise, so that a study and monitoring could begin.[1]
The commission and its authors
The report is signed by Guillermo Rodríguez, Cesar Barbosa and Alfonso Avellaneda. It describes Barbosa as a biologist with a master's degree in systematic botany, Rodríguez as an industrial engineer and archaeologist, and Avellaneda as a chemist.[1] The three flew over the northern and south-western slopes of the Sierra Nevada for about 18 hours with the anti-narcotics police of Magdalena, and looked at the edges of the Tayrona and Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta national parks.[1]
The dates in the web copy do not agree. The commission is dated 12 to 16 December 1986, but the report is signed at Bogotá on 6 October 1986. The terms of reference printed after it are dated 31 July 1986, and a list of equipment for a pesticide-residue laboratory, prepared by the national agricultural inputs laboratory of the Instituto Colombiano Agropecuario (ICA), is dated 21 July 1986.[1]
The report
The report opens with a summary of the problem in six points and then has sections on the history of human use of the Sierra Nevada, the present state of the clearing, vegetation, river basins, soils and social and economic conditions. A section on the terms of reference names six sampling areas and four stations where sprayed and unsprayed ground could be compared, and lists the samples of water, soil, plants, animals and people to be taken. Ten conclusions and recommendations follow, then a bibliography. The appendices are the terms of reference for an environmental impact study of the programme to eradicate marijuana and coca, the ICA laboratory list with its costs, and a budget of about 22.75 million pesos for a biological study of the spraying's effects.[1]
The botanical sections draw on published vegetation studies of the Tayrona park and the Buritaca valley; the soils section on the Instituto Geográfico Agustín Codazzi (IGAC); the section on the indigenous peoples of the Sierra on the anthropologist Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff.[1]
Marijuana in the Sierra Nevada as documented
The history the report gives
The report opens its account of marijuana in the Sierra Nevada with three dated statements, each cited to the botanist Víctor Manuel Patiño. It says that the plant was brought to the Sierra early in the 17th century for hemp fibre and was soon displaced by cabuya (Furcraea foetida); that braceros and sailors of the Caribbean coast used it as an intoxicant from 1927; and that the first clandestine marijuana fields on the Atlantic coast were recorded in 1945.[1]
Patiño's volume on introduced plants says something different. He writes that hemp growing "no tuvo predicamento" (never took hold) in equatorial America. The year 1927 is in his text, but as the date from which marijuana appears in the law of Costa Rica. For 1945 he writes that in the years after it the Colombian press reported finds of small clandestine plots from time to time, on the Atlantic coast, in northern Antioquia and in the Valle del Cauca.[3]: 395, 405 The report also says that growing for intoxicant use increased after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, "fomentado por veteranos" (encouraged by veterans).[1]
The clearings
In the report's account, forests on the foothills below 500 metres were cut and burned in 1977 and 1979 for marijuana, in the valleys of the Guachaca, Mendihuaca, Piedras, Córdoba, Toribio and Frío rivers, and this gave rise to the "bonanza marimbera". In another section it dates the clearing of the headwaters of the Bonda, Mendihuaca and Guachaca to 1979.[1]
By 1986, it says, the clearing for marijuana reached 2,100 metres in the valley of the Río Frío, inside the national park, and passed above 600 metres, the park's limit, in the Guachaca valley. On the Caribbean slope the short rivers from the Córdoba to the Mendihuaca had been cut since the 16th century and more heavily in the last 20 years for marijuana; in the long valleys of the Guachaca, Buritaca, Don Diego and Palomino, opened up by the coast highway (the Troncal del Caribe), the fields had reached about 500 metres. The slope that drains into the Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta was, in the report's words, the most affected by cutting, burning and planting of marijuana, and so the most sprayed. In the basins of the Frío and Sevilla the original humid forest was wholly destroyed between 1,000 and 2,000 metres. Lower down, on older farms of the Tucurinca, Aracataca, Piedras and Fundación valleys, marijuana was grown mixed with food crops.[1]
The growers and the spraying
The report describes the growers of 1986 as migrants, mostly from the interior of the country, drawn by the boom of the late 1970s, who moved through the region rather than settling. It says that spraying with glyphosate had pushed growing higher: as the police sprayed more, growers cut and burned steeper slopes, where the most important fields now were and where spraying hardly reached them.[1] It names the developed world's demand as the cause of the destruction, which enriched "unas pocas gentes" (a few people) for a time.[1]
Findings and recommendations
The report calls glyphosate a harmful chemical, not to be applied from the air, and the more dangerous for being sprayed through almost the whole year; its effects, it says, had not been studied in tropical ecosystems such as those of the Sierra Nevada. It warns that people, at the end of the food chain, would be the most affected; that streams and runoff could carry the herbicide to the Ciénaga Grande, already close to collapse from other pollution; and that the forest reserve, parts of the national park and the indigenous reserves were being cleared and burned for marijuana.[1]
Its recommendations ask for the studies to be done by qualified specialists, with unsprayed control plots; for a careful review of the herbicides in use in Colombia before they were authorised or suspended; for no spraying with glyphosate in national parks or indigenous reserves; for urgent management of the parks; and for the southern zone between the Serranía Mendigua and the Siguanarrugue river, up to 1,500 metres, to be added to the national park. It calls the Sierra Nevada a heritage of humanity to be protected as a priority.[1]
Later use
The text survives as a web copy that Mama Coca made from the documentation centre of the Fundación Pro-Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. The copy links it to INDERENA's proposal for environmental studies and to a study "proposed again" in 2000 for an ecoregional conservation strategy.[1] The copy has typing errors (for example "Marihuna", "costa" for cota, contour), and the maps and photographs the report mentions are not in it.
See also
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 Barbosa, Cesar; Rodríguez, Guillermo; Avellaneda, Alfonso (1986). Estudios ambientales en la Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta afectada por cultivos de marihuana y fumigación con glifosato (Informe de comisión) (in español). Bogotá: INDERENA. Retrieved 19 October 2026 – via Mama Coca.
- ↑ Moreno, María Mercedes (2015). Memoria histórica de las fumigaciones 1978–2015: las aspersiones aéreas en contexto de guerra (PDF) (Report) (in español). MamaCoca and Indepaz. Retrieved 21 October 2026 – via Dejusticia.
- ↑ Patiño, Víctor Manuel (1969). Plantas cultivadas y animales domésticos en América equinoccial (in español). Vol. IV: Plantas introducidas. Cali: Imprenta Departamental.