Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta

Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta
ActiveRecorded as grown here since 2000
⛶
Geography
Country	Colombia
Province/State	Magdalena Department, Cesar Department, La Guajira Department
Coordinates	10.78, -73.59
Landscape
Area	12,300 km²
Terrain	Coastal mountain massif; approximately the massif above 200 m
Growing history
Documentation
Appellations	0
Accessions	0
Conservation
Populations	none documented yet

Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta is a cannabis growing area on the mountain massif of that name, on the Caribbean coast of northern Colombia, across the departments of Magdalena, Cesar and La Guajira. According to the economist Francisco Thoumi, the marijuana of Colombia's export boom of the 1970s grew mainly in the Sierra, and the traders who ran the export boom, called in Colombia the bonanza marimbera, came from the Sierra and the neighbouring Guajira peninsula.^: 1–2 The trade declined after an eradication campaign from 1978 and aerial spraying from 1984,^{: 171, 174} but police and the national ombudsman's office have reported marijuana grown in the Sierra since 2000, among them fields destroyed in 2019 and 2020.

Before the boom

In a report on the Sierra written in 1986, three officials of INDERENA, the national natural-resources institute, wrote, citing Patiño's survey of the cultivated plants of equatorial America, that the plant had been brought to the Sierra early in the 17th century to be grown for hemp and was soon displaced by cabuya, a fibre from Furcraea foetida. They added that the first clandestine marijuana fields on the Atlantic coast were recorded in 1945.

The historian Eduardo Sáenz Rovner found that in the early 1940s marijuana was grown in Magdalena and in neighbouring Atlántico, where he documented some 60 cases of possession, sale and cultivation in and around Barranquilla between 1940 and 1944.^: 211 A confidential report of the Colombian foreign ministry in 1952 said that Santa Marta had become an important source of marijuana sent to Florida ports in banana ships, and that a man called "T el T" grew it on a farm near the city, supplied the local brothels and was the main exporter.^: 213–214 The report of the Colombian delegation to an inter-American narcotics meeting in Rio de Janeiro in 1961 listed Magdalena, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, among the departments where it was grown. In February 1968 the police found a three-hectare field on a farm in the foothills of the Sierra, and in mid-1969 another in rural Ciénaga.^{: 214–215, 218–219}

The historian Lina Britto writes that marijuana had been grown in the south-eastern foothills, around the plantations of the United Fruit Company, since the 1930s for the domestic market, and that because of its quality it was rarely exported.^{: 164, 166} A resident of the Sierra since the late 1960s told her that in those years the buyers travelled to the Andean coffee region for marijuana and took it to the coast for export, and that "Colombian Gold did not exist yet".^: 164–165

The export boom

Britto dates the peak of the trade to 1972–1978, when local crops grown only for export turned an inchoate traffic into a full export sector.^: 16 In her account the first such crops appeared on the Guajira side of the massif, in its western and north-eastern foothills, financed and technically assisted by American and Colombian investors. The growers came from outside the region, many of them peasants from the Andean interior driven out by La Violencia; the intermediaries were local men of the Guajira, where smuggling had long been the mainstay of the economy.^: 166 Elsewhere she writes that in the 1970s peasant farmers of the Sierra began to move from banana, cotton and coffee to marijuana. Thoumi wrote that local and American entrepreneurs at first gave seed to poor peasants and bought the harvest for American buyers, and that many peasants of the Sierra, who mostly had roots in the area, left the business once a few good crops had given them enough capital to live on legal ones.

The INDERENA officials dated the clearing to 1977 and 1979, when forest below about 500 metres in the foothills was cut and burned for marijuana in the valleys of the Guachaca, Mendihuaca, Piedras, Córdoba and Toribio rivers and of the Río Frío. Citing a study by the financiers' association ANIF, Britto puts the value of the trade in the mid-1970s at 1.4 billion dollars, 39 per cent of the value of all Colombian exports.^: 167

Santa Marta Gold is the name under which this marijuana became known to consumers in the United States.^: 221 Britto calls "Colombian Golden or Santa Marta Gold" an improved-seed strain with a delicate flavour and a soft effect, the first local strain made for export, in the early 1970s.^{: 166, 174} A 2016 article published by the International Drug Policy Consortium calls it a variety grown on the slopes of the Sierra Nevada that smokers in the United States favoured in the 1970s and 1980s; Sáenz Rovner writes the name "Santa Marta Golden".^: 221

Eradication and decline

Decree 2144 of 1978 set up controls over the Sierra and the Guajira to suppress the growing and transport of marijuana. The campaign, run jointly with the United States and called "Two Peninsulas", began on 1 November 1978; some months later the Sierra was fumigated.^{: 160, 171} Britto argues that the criminalisation of growers and traders and the militarisation of the region between 1978 and 1980 explain the decline better than the boom's own cycle or the rise of cocaine, and that by the mid-1980s the export business had collapsed.^{: 3, 16}

A delegation of the United States House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control that inspected eradication in Magdalena, in the north-coast region, in August 1985 called it the principal illicit marijuana cultivation area in Colombia. It reported that herbicide spraying in the north-coast region, begun in 1984, had eradicated 3,400 hectares by the end of that year, out of an estimated 10,000 to 13,000, and it recorded that production had begun to move from the Santa Marta area to the Serranía del Perijá east of Valledupar two years before.^: 9–11 In 1986 the INDERENA officials found that spraying with glyphosate had pushed growing onto higher and steeper ground. Clearing for marijuana reached 2,100 metres in the Frío valley, inside the national park, and the slope draining to the Ciénaga Grande was the most cleared, planted and sprayed. Most growers by then were migrants from the interior drawn by the bonanza of the late 1970s.

The 2016 article says that government fumigators and competition from marijuana grown in the United States ended the "Santa Marta Goldrush", and that farmers switched to coca. Thoumi wrote that marijuana did not disappear, though plantings were marginal across Colombia by 1990. In 1995 the head of the anti-narcotics police told a workshop on illicit crops that there were 6,000 hectares of marijuana in the country, mainly in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and the Perijá and San Lucas ranges.^: 80–81

Since 2000

A study of 2004 by the anti-narcotics police, the environment ministry and the national parks unit covered the illicit-crop sites on the northern face of the massif, from the sea up to 1,200 metres between the Tapias and Tucurinca rivers. It found that coca and marijuana had a large share in the economy of some zones, mainly on the northern and western slopes. Figures of the anti-narcotics police for the Sierra and the rest of Magdalena give 4 hectares of marijuana eradicated in 2008, 140 in 2009, 115 in 2010, 156 in 2011, 102 in 2012 and 6 by mid-May 2013; eradication of illicit crops in the zone had begun in 2005.

In June 2015 the police destroyed a marijuana field, with plants over two metres tall, in a rural part of the Sierra. In July 2018 a plot of about 1,600 square metres was found in the foothills of the Sierra in Zona Bananera municipality, and 590 plants were pulled up by hand. An early-warning alert of the national ombudsman's office in May 2018 reported that some peasants said they were being urged to plant coca and marijuana, and that marijuana growing had increased in areas with a strong foreign presence: Minca, Don Diego, Buritaca, Tayrona park, Trompito Alto and Mendihuaca, and Palomino, Mingueo and Dibulla in La Guajira. It was grown in small, scattered plots so as not to be easily detected; criminal groups handed out the seed and bought the harvest at prices they set.^: 16–17 In February 2019 soldiers and police pulled up 660 plants in the upper part of Palmor, in the Sierra, and in May 2020 the police destroyed about two hectares, some 10,000 plants, at Altos de Jolonura in the Sierra, which they attributed to the criminal organisation Los Pachencas.

Accessions

No accessions documented yet.

Recent news

No recent news items.

See also

• Colombia
• VIB-COL-UNK-0100000001, a seed accession catalogued under the name Colombian Santa Marta gold
• Quindío