Serranía del Perijá
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| Serranía del Perijá | |
|---|---|
| Perijá | |
| ActiveGrown here in 2000 or later | |
| Hierarchy | |
| Growing Region | Northern Colombia |
| Geography | |
| Country | Colombia |
| Province/State | Cesar Department, La Guajira Department |
| Coordinates | 10.27, -73.05 |
| Landscape | |
| Area | 4,300 km² |
| Terrain | Mountain range on the border with Venezuela; approximately the Colombian side above 200 m, from La Jagua de Ibirico to Barrancas |
| Growing history | |
| Documentation | |
| Appellations | 0 |
| Accessions | 0 |
| Conservation | |
| Populations | none documented yet |
Serranía del Perijá is a cannabis growing area on the Colombian side of the Serranía del Perijá, the mountain range along the border with Venezuela, in the departments of Cesar and La Guajira in northern Colombia. The area is drawn on the stretch of the range from La Jagua de Ibirico in the south to Barrancas in the north. Colombia's truth commission found that marijuana crops had become established in the range by the end of the 1970s, during the trade Colombians call the bonanza marimbera.[1]: 14 A delegation of the United States House of Representatives that visited the range in 1983 was told that about 15,000 hectares of marijuana were grown there, and in 1985 it reported that production had been moving from the Santa Marta area to the range, east of Valledupar, for two years.[2]: 11 The Ministry of Defence's open data list marijuana eradicated between 2007 and 2020 in twelve of the area's thirteen municipalities,[3] and in October 2024 the army reported destroying more than 200 marijuana plants in rural Villanueva.[4]
The bonanza years
The truth commission's report on the peasant land settlements of Cesar dates the bonanza marimbera to 1975–1985. It says that at the end of the 1970s the ELN and FARC guerrillas entered the centre and north of Cesar to fight over the corridors around the marijuana crops of the Serranía del Perijá. A former FARC fighter told the commission that in the 1970s private armies called combos marimberos, which guarded the marijuana crops, came to the Perijá and to the Sierra Nevada and fought one another.[1]: 14
San José de Oriente, a corregimiento (rural division) of La Paz in the range, was settled by Liberal families who left Ocaña, Ábrego and El Carmen in 1949 to escape the violence between Liberals and Conservatives. In the 1970s disputes over land to plant marijuana brought armed groups such as Los Arrebatos and Los Ladrillos to the corregimiento.[5] The Yukpa, whose six reserves lie in La Paz, Agustín Codazzi and Becerril, had been pushed higher into the mountains by the cotton plantations of the late 1960s; a 2019 report published by Mongabay says that the marijuana boom of the 1970s brought a new wave of migrants, and with them violence over the smuggling routes.[6]
In a 2018 thesis on Villanueva, Iván Rada Verdecia writes that the marijuana was harvested on farms in the Serranía del Perijá and carried down to caches in the countryside of the municipality, where it was pressed into blocks. A resident he interviewed in 2017 said that mule trains of 100 to 300 animals brought it down from high in the range, and that people turned to planting marijuana because a quintal of it sold for 70,000 to 100,000 pesos against 20,000 for malanga and 60,000 for coffee; the price was good there around 1977–1979.[7]: 124, 132 The thesis quotes a report in the newspaper Diario del Norte of July 1977: police and F-2 agents, in an operation from the air, seized 380,000 marijuana plants on ten hectares in the vereda (rural district) of San Jenaro, in the corregimiento of Becerril, municipality of Agustín Codazzi, and detained fifteen workers.[7]: 99 It also quotes a 1994 social history of the Colombian mafia by Betancourt and García, which lists San Juan del Cesar, Villanueva, Urumita, Fonseca and Barrancas among the growing zones of southern La Guajira, with the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.[7]: 75 In a 2024 article Franklin Bonivento van Grieken places the planting of the early 1970s on the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, from where routes once used for other contraband carried the marijuana to towns such as Codazzi and Becerril to be flown to Florida.[8]: 184
Eradication in the 1980s and 1990s
On its 1983 visit the delegation of the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control was given the estimate of about 15,000 hectares in the range, at a time when 17,000 hectares had been reported for the whole of Colombia. When it returned in August 1985 it was told that very little eradication had taken place in the range that year, that growers were resisting and that there had been some firing on the helicopters, and that a concentrated effort against the sector was to begin about 19 August.[2]: 11 In June 1993 the new head of the anti-narcotics police warned of a rise in marijuana crops in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the Perijá and Caquetá, and said the groups behind it were those that had exported marijuana in the 1970s.[9] In 1995 the head of the anti-narcotics police told a workshop on illicit crops that Colombia had 6,000 hectares of marijuana, mainly in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and the Perijá and San Lucas ranges.[10]: 80–81
Since 2000
The Ministry of Defence's open data list 87 entries of marijuana eradicated between October 2007 and July 2020 in twelve of the area's thirteen municipalities, about 145 hectares in all: 50 entries (about 82 hectares) in Cesar and 37 (about 63 hectares) in La Guajira. The largest totals are in Barrancas (about 45 hectares), Agustín Codazzi (38), La Paz (30), Fonseca (8), La Jagua de Ibirico (6.5) and El Molino (6); smaller totals are in Becerril, Manaure Balcón del Cesar, San Juan del Cesar, Villanueva, San Diego and La Jagua del Pilar. Most entries are of one or two hectares; the two largest, of five hectares each, are in Barrancas in 2014. Between 2013 and 2017, 63 entries added up to about 122 hectares.[3]
In October 2024 soldiers of the army's Tenth Brigade found a marijuana plantation in the vereda of Oro Azul, in Villanueva, and destroyed more than 200 plants. They arrested one man and seized three packages of marijuana ready for sale.[4]
Accessions
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See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Comisión para el Esclarecimiento de la Verdad, la Convivencia y la No Repetición (2022). Caso «Parcelaciones del Cesar: tierras campesinas tiznadas por el conflicto» (PDF) (Report) (in español). Comisión de la Verdad. Retrieved 20 October 2026.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control, U.S. House of Representatives (1986). Latin American Study Missions Concerning International Narcotics Problems (August 3–19, 1985) (PDF) (Committee print). Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office. SCNAC-99-2-1. Retrieved 19 October 2026.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Ministerio de Defensa Nacional. "Erradicación". Portal de Datos Abiertos de Colombia (dataset) (in español). Retrieved 20 October 2026.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 "Ejército desmantela cultivo ilícito de marihuana en La Guajira". La Prensa (in español). 15 October 2024. Retrieved 20 October 2026.
- ↑ Velásquez, Tatiana (26 June 2016). "La Paz, un pueblo entre la sorpresa y la desconfianza". La Silla Vacía (in español). Retrieved 20 October 2026.
- ↑ Sáenz, Julián (19 August 2019). "Colombia: Indigenous Yukpa besieged by deforestation and armed conflict". Mongabay. Retrieved 20 October 2026.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Rada Verdecia, Iván Alonso (2018). Cultivadores, comerciantes y marimberos. Historia social del municipio de Villanueva – Guajira, 1974–1986 (Licenciatura en Ciencias Sociales thesis) (in español). Bogotá: Universidad Pedagógica Nacional. hdl:20.500.12209/10543.
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ "Prevén nueva bonanza marimbera". El Tiempo (in español). 7 June 1993. Retrieved 20 October 2026.
- ↑ Restrepo, Luis Alberto; Reyes, Alejandro (1995). "Cultivos ilícitos: relatoría del Primer Taller Internacional". Análisis Político (in español) (25): 80–88.