Northern Cauca

Northern Cauca
Norte del Cauca
ActiveRecorded as grown here since 2000
⛶
Hierarchy
Growing Region	Cordillera Central (Colombia)
Geography
Country	Colombia
Province/State	Cauca Department
Coordinates	3.03, -76.25
Landscape
Area	1,500 km²
Terrain	Western slopes of the Central Cordillera above the Cauca valley; approximately the municipalities of Caloto, Corinto, Jambaló, Miranda and Toribío
Growing history
Documentation
Appellations	5
Accessions	0
Conservation
Populations	none documented yet

Northern Cauca (norte del Cauca) is a cannabis growing area in the north of the department of Cauca, in south-western Colombia, on the slopes of the Central Cordillera above the valley of the Cauca River. It covers five municipalities, each an appellation: Caloto, Corinto, Jambaló, Miranda and Toribío. A 2024 study by the peace research institute Indepaz (Instituto de Estudios para el Desarrollo y la Paz) calls these five municipalities the main marijuana-producing enclave of the country, with an estimated 16,000 to 19,000 growers;^: 5 most of them are members (comuneros) of indigenous reserves (resguardos).^: 22 Marijuana was reported grown in Cauca in 1961,^: 214–215 and growing in the north revived from about 2010, both in the open and in greenhouses.^: 163 A survey of the anti-narcotics police reported in 2021 located 347 hectares of marijuana in Cauca, most of it in these five municipalities.

Early reports

A report of the Colombian delegation to an inter-American narcotics meeting at Rio de Janeiro in 1961 named Cauca among the departments where marijuana was grown.^: 214–215 In June 1968 a police bulletin reported a farm in Miranda planted with marijuana.^: 220

The Colombian Truth Commission's report on the Valle and the north of Cauca places the first crops in Corinto and Caloto in the 1950s, when, it says, the first peasant growers were arrested.^: 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.^: 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 a variety called corinteña was carried to the Caribbean coast and on to the United States.^: 2–3 A seed and supplies dealer interviewed in Toribío in 2018 rejected the 1950s date: marijuana, he said, first reached the vereda (rural district) of La Quebradiza in Corinto around 1980 and then El Naranjo in Toribío. The governor of the López Adentro reserve told the journalist Sebastián Serrano that men of the M-19 guerrilla brought the seed of "what we now call Corinto" in the early 1980s.^: 58

According to the CAPAZ brief, prosecution cut production sharply between 1980 and 1990, when coca and opium poppy replaced cannabis as sources of income in the region.^: 3

Expansion after 2010

The Truth Commission dates a revival of marijuana in the region to about 2010, when the north of Cauca became one of the main centres of the crop, grown both in the open and in greenhouses. According to the authorities, it reports, Caloto, Corinto and Toribío had the most cultivation and supplied about half of the marijuana sold in Colombia; the commission states that the FARC guerrilla controlled the trade until it demobilised in 2016.^: 163 Elsewhere the report places the crop mainly in the municipalities on the Central Cordillera: Caloto, Corinto, Miranda and Toribío.^: 192

Communities told Indepaz that between 2004 and 2014 growers from outside the region, from Pereira, Medellín and Cúcuta, set up large plantations and greenhouses inside the reserves without the consent of the indigenous authorities, each with up to 40,000 plants. Indepaz dates the spread of the crop among indigenous and peasant families to the 2010s.^: 19–20 In the boom of 2012–2014, when a few large outside growers still held most of the trade, a pound paid the grower up to 1,800,000 pesos; the price fell when small local growers took up the crop.^: 22–23 The CAPAZ brief links the expansion of the early 2010s to the arrival of a type called "creepy", which needed little land and fetched close to 400,000 pesos a pound.^: 3 After the FARC left in 2016, the Truth Commission reports, the boom drew hundreds of indigenous and peasant families; in 2018 each family was estimated to have 1,500 to 2,000 plants. A pound of flowers then paid 40,000 pesos while a 25-pound arroba of coca leaf paid 35,000.^: 194

A typical plot, in Indepaz's account, has 500 plants on about 500 square metres, raised from clones taken at pruning. Bulbs are lit at night for the first two months of vegetative growth and switched off for flowering. The cycle takes 17 to 19 weeks; a plot yields 180 to 250 pounds of marijuana, with two harvests a year.^: 40 In Corinto in 2019 growers had from 50 to 1,000 plants each, many of them in the yards of their houses, and their lights could be seen at night from the plain. In June 2019 the attorney general's office asked for the power supply to be cut at 16 points in 18 veredas of Corinto, Miranda, Toribío and Caloto where, it said, illegal organisations had built marijuana greenhouses. In the crop-substitution census of Corinto, 1,100 of the 1,800 families counted were involved in growing marijuana.

Varieties

A characterisation by the national police, cited by the Dejusticia researchers Luis Felipe Cruz and Isabel Pereira, names four native varieties of Cauca, cominera, corinto, mango biche and punto rojo, adapted to the region's climate and taking seven to eight months to harvest.^: 86–87 The journalist Diana Maria Pachón, visiting a farm off the track from El Palo, in Caloto, towards Tacueyó, found 2,000 plants of the type called corinto or corintiana, up to three metres tall, taking six months to flower; its seed sold by the pound. In 2012 the news site La Silla Vacía reported "Corinto" grown between Toribío and Miranda, selling at about 170,000 pesos an arroba. The seed dealer interviewed in Toribío said that the native varieties came from Santa Marta by way of Medellín, among them one called Corinto Gold.^: 58

Growers in the 2010s turned to creepy, a name that, according to a Toribío grower, covers indica types grown from cuttings without seed. The native varieties fell out of use because they needed more work, yielded less and suffered more from pests; one grower told the Dejusticia researchers that people planted creepy because it paid well, "and that was how people lost even the seeds".^{: 58, 85–86} In 2022 a Toribío grower said that the type most sown in the area was one called patimorada locally, after the colour of its stem.

Growers, armed groups and indigenous authorities

For the indigenous communities of the north of Cauca, the Nasa, coca is an ancestral plant and marijuana an introduced one; they credit marijuana with healing powers but have grown it mostly for want of other income.^: 58 In 2020 the small growers, most of them members of the reserves, formed an association, El Gremio, with a central board in Toribío and branches in all five municipalities.^: 22 The CAPAZ brief dates its founding to 2021.^: 3 According to Indepaz, El Gremio registered between 16,000 and 19,000 growers and limited each to 500 plants (250 for a single person) and 20 bulbs, all of them switched off on the 25th of each month; it also set rules on water for irrigation and a minimum price of 50,000 pesos a pound.^: 22–23

The Dagoberto Ramos front, one of the FARC dissident groups formed in the region after the 2016 peace agreement,^: 5 is the armed group with most control of the five municipalities, according to Indepaz. In 2018 it circulated a statement that marijuana could be grown only in Toribío, Corinto, Caloto, Miranda and Jambaló, to avoid a glut. Growers told Indepaz that the front takes no tax from them but charges outside buyers 10,000 pesos for each pound they take out of the region. The front, Indepaz writes, enforces El Gremio's rules with punishments up to killing.^: 25

The indigenous authorities have opposed the crop. Comuneros who grow marijuana cannot hold office in their reserves, a rule confirmed in 2021 in a plan of the Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca (ACIN) for the defence of the Nasa people. In 2021 the authorities began visiting families and uprooting plants, which brought them into conflict with the growers.^: 25–26 The CAPAZ brief lists checkpoints, trials under indigenous jurisdiction and forced eradication.^: 4 By 2024, Indepaz reports, the authorities and the indigenous guard had stopped this eradication and were working on economic plans to offer the growers other sources of income.^: 49 Between November 2016 and March 2024, 90 Nasa people were killed in the north of Cauca, 49 of them guards or authorities; Indepaz suggests that some of the killings may be linked to the eradication campaigns.^: 29

From November 2023 the price paid to growers fell from 50,000 to 18,000 pesos a pound. Growers blamed the fall on the rapid spread of planting, including into other municipalities of the north of Cauca such as Santander de Quilichao and into Valle del Cauca.^: 27

Extent and figures

In 2017 the government's crop-monitoring system stated that it had no census method for measuring the area under marijuana,^: 83 and in 2019 the national drug observatory stated that there was no official information on the hectares of marijuana in Colombia; the same presentation, citing the anti-narcotics police, named Cauca among the main producing departments. An indicator based on lit greenhouses seen in satellite images, prepared by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime and published in 2017, found 507 square kilometres under light alerts for possible cannabis crops in 36 of Cauca's 42 municipalities. The alerts were concentrated in Popayán (22 per cent), Toribío (21), Corinto (14), Caloto (9), Santander de Quilichao (8) and Miranda (3);^{: 59, 84–85} the Truth Commission adds Jambaló, Buenos Aires and Suárez with one per cent each.^: 193

Media reports cited by Cruz and Pereira gave 6,000 hectares in the north of Cauca, 12,596 hectares and about 4,000 hectares between Corinto, Caloto and Miranda,^: 85 and the Truth Commission gives a 2018 estimate of 7,000 to 12,500 hectares.^: 194 The police survey reported in 2021 located 347.3 hectares of marijuana in Cauca, among them 128.2 in Toribío, 101.2 in Corinto, 41.4 in Caloto, 13.1 in Miranda and 1.9 in Jambaló. Indepaz estimated 13,561 growers in its 2023–2024 fieldwork: 8,000 in Toribío, 2,500 in Corinto, 1,871 in Caloto, 790 in Jambaló and 400 in Miranda, each harvesting about 500 pounds a year.^: 46–47

The Ministry of Defence's eradication data list 111 entries of marijuana eradicated in Cauca between January 2010 and April 2020, about 74 hectares in all. Of these, 102 entries and about 65 hectares are in the five municipalities: 28.2 in Corinto, 16.4 in Caloto, 12.3 in Toribío, 5.1 in Jambaló and 2.6 in Miranda.

Licensed growing

In 2016 the ministers of justice and health endorsed in Corinto the founding of a cooperative for medicinal cannabis; by 2019 six companies and nine associations in the municipality were setting up greenhouses. An association of Toribío that applied for a licence to grow medicinal cannabis was refused one and opened a hostel with a cannabis museum instead. In Corinto an association of 148 Afro-Colombian, peasant and indigenous growers held licences for psychoactive and non-psychoactive cannabis in 2022, but had not yet harvested a legal crop. Growers told Indepaz that new planting followed the announcement of a legal medicinal market in 2016 and later talk of legal recreational use.^: 27

Appellations

Appellation	Status
Caloto (appellation)	Active
Corinto (appellation)	Active
Jambaló (appellation)	Active
Miranda (appellation)	Active
Toribío (appellation)	Active

Accessions

No accessions documented yet.

Recent news

No recent news items.

See also

• Caloto (appellation)
• Colombia
• Corinto (appellation)
• Jambaló (appellation)
• Miranda (appellation)
• Quindío
• Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta
• Tolima
• Toribío (appellation)