Santa Marta Gold
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| Kind of name | Trade name |
|---|---|
| Also called | Colombia Gold Colombian Gold Colombian Golden Santa Marta Golden Samarian Golden |
| Refers to | Marijuana grown in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and exported to the United States in the 1970s; later, seed lines sold under the name |
| Country | Colombia |
|---|---|
| Places | Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta Santa Marta (appellation) |
| In use | From the 1970s |
| First recorded | 1978[1]: 116 |
- HCG-COL-UNK-0120210001 (1970 Colombian Gold 2021)
- VIB-COL-UNK-0100000001 (Colombian Santa Marta Gold General Population)
Santa Marta Gold, also Colombia Gold or Colombian Gold, is a trade name for marijuana grown in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in northern Colombia and exported to the United States during the bonanza marimbera of the 1970s. In November 1978 The Wall Street Journal reported that the crop of the Guajira and Santa Marta region was known among users as "Colombia Gold, or Santa Marta Gold".[1]: 116 In January 1979 Time called it "a luxurious marijuana of heady strength".[2] The historian Lina Britto describes it as the first local strain grown for export, in the early 1970s.[3]: 174 Seed sellers have since sold lines under both names.
Name
The earliest forms in print are English. The Wall Street Journal article, by Everett G. Martin, ran under the headline "Colombian Gold". Martin reported an aide to a Colombian colonel saying that "Colombia Gold, or Santa Marta Gold, as the local crop is known among users," was prized for its potency. The article was reprinted in the printed proceedings of a United States Senate hearing on drug smuggling.[1]: 116 Time used "Santa Marta Gold" for the crop and "Colombian Gold" for a seized load.[2] Later writers use "Colombian Golden or Santa Marta Gold" (Britto, 2010),[3]: 166 "Colombian gold, or Santa Marta golden" (Britto, 2015)[4]: 83 and "Santa Marta Golden", the form of a 1978 thesis by Solórzano and Dangond that the economist Joaquín Viloria de la Hoz cites.[5]: 35 The columnist Humberto Mendieta wrote "Samarian Golden" in 2018.[6]
Britto writes that "Gold" "alluded to its yellow color and filigree-like texture, which was similar to Acapulco Gold, a Mexican strain famous in the United States".[7]: 91 Franklin Bonivento van Grieken writes that the name came from the yellowish colour of its leaves.[8]: 184
Darío Betancourt and Martha Luz García, citing Alejandro Gálvez and the journalists Mario Arango and Jorge Child, wrote in 1994 that Peace Corps volunteers who came to Colombia in the 1960s found the local marijuana and "bautizaron con los sugestivos nombres de Colombian Gold y Santa Marta Gold".[9]: 47 In 2011 the El Tiempo columnist Cristian Valencia wrote that the boom was rumoured to have been started by President Kennedy's "brigadas de paz" or by "los pilotos del Vietnam", and added: "Ignoro cuál de esas versiones sea verdadera".[10]
The marijuana
- An improved export strain. Britto (2010) calls Santa Marta Gold "an improved-seed strain characterized by its delicate flavor and soft effect" and dates it to the early 1970s.[3]: 166, 174 Britto's 2020 book reports the view of Ariel Martínez, a Santa Marta informant, that growers crossed a native gold-coloured plant from Quebrada Seca near Tucurinca and the Tapias River with seed from Hawaii and Sonora, and that "The new crossbreed preserved the delicate flavor, the golden color, and the velvety texture of the native strain". "According to Martínez, this was Santa Marta Gold." Britto adds that the export plant was grown first around Tucurinca and later around Pénjamo, on the western and northern slopes of the Sierra, where the driest microclimates suited it.[7]: 93–94
- One of three or four trade types. The anthropologist Anthony Henman, writing from fieldwork in Colombia in the early 1970s, divided what the world market called "Colombian" into la mona or gold, "ligeramente acanelada o dorada" and grown mainly on the Atlantic coast, mango viche or green, and punto rojo or red. In a finer scheme Henman listed la mona (Santa Marta gold) beside la roja de Santa Marta o de Panamá (Santa Marta red and Panama red).[11]: 275–276 Henman suggested that the colour came from a Sierra practice of cutting a strip of bark round the stem two or three weeks before the harvest, a method unknown in Cauca.[11]: 277
- La mona or amarilla. A reporter for the magazine Guajira, Carlos Antonio Herrera Fernández, called "Santa Marta gold" the traditional type, "la que le ha dado fama a Colombia", and wrote that it was commonly called "la mona" or "amarilla", and set "red point" (punto rojo) apart as stronger.[12]: 304 Time wrote in 1979 that crop tasters still rated Santa Marta Gold "the most famous of the Colombian line", but that Arhuaco growers at higher altitudes were growing a stronger Mona.[2]
- A grade. José Cervantes Angulo (1980) and Betancourt and García (1994) describe the dried crop graded A, B or C at the coastal stores; grade A was "Red Point" or Santa Marta Gold.[12]: 97[9]: 56
Viloria cites a 1978 thesis by Solórzano and Dangond for a harvest of Santa Marta Golden of 24,000 tonnes in 1977, from 60,000 hectares, with about 90,000 people working the crops.[5]: 35 The Medellín columnist Reinaldo Spitaletta wrote in 2022 that Santa Marta Gold became famous and "'trabó' a millares de consumidores de bareta en los Estados Unidos".[13] Mendieta named "Samarian Golden" and "Red Point" among the Colombian marijuanas the North American market sought during the boom.[6]
Grades of the export trade
Britto describes the classification that buyers in the Sierra used. The best marijuana was yellow, dry, clean, aromatic and mature and cost twice as much as the lowest grade; within it, "gold" contained "only flowers, no leaves". The grades below it were all exported. Britto writes that they "resulted not from species differentiation or genetic modification but from environmental conditions and cultivation methods".[7]: ch. 3
| Grade | Britto's English gloss |
|---|---|
| gold | (the best grade: "only flowers, no leaves") |
| concha de coco | coco shell |
| mango biche | green mango |
| rayada | striped |
| negra | black |
| cafuche | residue |
Colour names
Several Colombian names for marijuana are colour words.
| Name | Meaning of the word | Earliest dated source | What the name is applied to |
|---|---|---|---|
| mona, amarilla | blonde; yellow | 1976 | one of two varieties, negra and mona, named by their popular names in a Santa Marta agronomy thesis of 1976; the Santa Marta gold type (Henman; Herrera Fernández); an Arhuaco highland type (Time, 1979); one of "dos variedades" of Colombian marijuana (Semana, 1982)[14]: 47[15] |
| punto rojo, Red Point | red point | 1978 (Henman, from fieldwork in the early 1970s) | a Cauca type (Henman); a stronger, resinous coastal type (Herrera Fernández); grade A with Santa Marta Gold (Cervantes; Betancourt and García) |
| la roja de Santa Marta, Santa Marta red | the red of Santa Marta | 1978 (Henman) | one of Henman's four trade types, grouped with Panama red[11]: 276 |
| mango viche, mango biche | green mango | 1978 (Henman) | Llanos and Cauca green (Henman); an export grade (Britto) |
| la morada | purple | 1973 | a female plant near Aracataca, on the label of the herbarium specimen Partridge s.n., Aracataca (1973), HUA 534 |
| negra | black | 1976 | a variety in the 1976 thesis; a highland type at Silvia, Cauca, in 1974 (Henman); an export grade (Britto)[11]: 280 |
| Mona Cielo Azul, Blue Sky Blond | blonde of the blue sky | 1979 | a pale hybrid from the Cielo Azul heights, said to come from Thai seed (Time) |
Seed sold under the name
Seed sellers have sold lines as Santa Marta Gold and Colombian Gold. Reporting on a Green House Seed Company expedition in 2013, VICE wrote that growers on the north coast were "no están produciendo mucho Columbian Gold" and had moved to hybrids bred in California, British Columbia and Amsterdam.[16]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 United States Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency (1978). Stopping "Mother Ships": A Loophole in Drug Enforcement (PDF) (Hearing, 95th Congress, 2nd session, on S. 3437, August 22, 1978). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 "The Colombian Connection". Time. 29 January 1979. Retrieved 2 November 2026.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Britto, Lina (2010). "A Trafficker's Paradise: The "War On Drugs" and the New Cold War in Colombia". Contemporánea: Historia y problemas del siglo XX. 1 (1): 159–177. ISSN 1688-7638.
- ↑ Britto, Lina (2015). "Hurricane Winds: Vallenato Music and Marijuana Traffic in Colombia's First Illegal Drugs Boom". Hispanic American Historical Review. 95 (1): 71–102. doi:10.1215/00182168-2836916.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Viloria de la Hoz, Joaquín (November 1997). Café Caribe: la economía cafetera en la Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta (Report). Documentos de Trabajo sobre Economía Regional (in español). Cartagena: Banco de la República. doi:10.32468/dtseru.1.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Mendieta, Humberto (31 August 2018). "La Bonanza Marimbera II". El Heraldo (in español). Retrieved 2 November 2026.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 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.
- ↑ Bonivento van Grieken, Franklin R. (2024). "De la hambruna de la marihuana al Premio Nobel de Literatura: bonanza marimbera y vallenato en el Caribe colombiano (1976–1985)". Anuario de Historia Regional y de las Fronteras (in español). 29 (2): 179–198. doi:10.18273/revanu.v29n2-2024008.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 Betancourt, Darío; García, Martha Luz (1994). Contrabandistas, marimberos y mafiosos: historia social de la mafia colombiana (1965–1992) (in español). Bogotá: TM Editores. ISBN 958-601-481-9.
- ↑ Valencia, Cristian (13 February 2011). "De Santa Marta gold a California orange". El Tiempo (in español). Retrieved 20 October 2026.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 11.3 Henman, Anthony (2019) [1978]. Mama coca (in español). Translated by Gabriel Iriarte; preface by Wade Davis (8th ed.). Popayán: Editorial Universidad del Cauca. ISBN 978-958-732-345-0.
- ↑ 12.0 12.1 Cervantes Angulo, José (1980). La noche de las luciérnagas (in español). Bogotá: Plaza & Janés.
- ↑ Spitaletta, Reinaldo (18 October 2022). "Soy un perdido, soy un marihuano…". El Espectador (in español). Retrieved 2 November 2026.
- ↑ Ceballos C., Aníbal S. (1976). Algunos aspectos del cultivo de la marihuana (Cannabis sativa L.) (Tesis de grado (Ingeniero Agrónomo)). Santa Marta: Universidad Tecnológica del Magdalena. hdl:20.500.14923/2103.
- ↑ "Bonanza marimbera, adios!". Semana (in español). 1 November 1982. Retrieved 30 October 2026.
- ↑ Andavolu, Krishna (20 September 2013). "Ser el rey es maravilloso". VICE en español (in español). Retrieved 2 November 2026.