Talamanca

Talamanca
Alta Talamanca
ActiveGrown here in 2000 or later
The Telire river near Bambú, in Talamanca, November 2017
⛶
Geography
Country	Costa Rica
Province/State	Limón Province
Coordinates	9.4221, -83.2082
Landscape
Area	2,800 km²
Terrain	The Caribbean slope of the Cordillera de Talamanca, the valleys of the Telire, Coen and Sixaola rivers and the coast between Cahuita and the Panamanian border; approximately the canton of Talamanca; the map line's outer edge leaves out ground above 4,000 m, bare or sparse ground, snow and ice and open water
Growing history
Documentation
Appellations	0
Accessions	0
Conservation
Populations	none documented yet

Talamanca is a cannabis growing area in the canton of Talamanca, in Limón Province, in the south-east of Costa Rica, on the Caribbean side of the Cordillera de Talamanca and on the border with Panama. The United States Department of State found cultivation in Costa Rica centred on "the more inaccessible areas of the Talamanca Mountain Range" in 1989, and estimated some 800 hectares of cannabis in the Cordillera de Talamanca region in 1994.^: 172: 127 The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime wrote in 2012 that 80 per cent of Costa Rica's cannabis was produced in Talamanca.^: 34 Of the 2,122,922 cannabis plants eradicated in Costa Rica in 2016, 1,680,570 (79.2 per cent) were in the canton of Talamanca, in 155 of the 225 plantations; in 2017 the canton accounted for 1,312,581 of 1,919,179 plants (68.4 per cent).^: 24: 36 The police operations reported from 2014 to 2023 named sites in the mountains of the district of Telire, among them the Cabécar communities of Alto Bley, Piedra Meza and Guayabal.

The canton and the Telire territory

The canton of Talamanca reaches from the Caribbean coast at Cahuita and the Sixaola river, on the Panamanian border, up the valley of the Telire into the Cordillera de Talamanca. Four indigenous territories lie in the canton: Këköldi and Talamanca Bribrí, of the Bribri, and Talamanca Cabécar and Telire, of the Cabécar. The Telire territory lies in the district of Telire, and in 2011 its communities were Alto Bley and Bajo Bley, Alto Piedra Meza and Bajo Piedra Meza, Alto Telire, Arco Iris, Butubata, Guayabal, Monte Verde, Rangalle and Río Congo. It then had 545 inhabitants, 533 of whom identified themselves as indigenous, at 3.2 people to the square kilometre.^{: 9, 27, 30–31, 34}

In 2012 Alto Telire could be reached only by helicopter or by a walk of several days over mountain trails. The Cabécar families there grew bananas, plantains and cassava on small plots and hunted; those old enough went down to the Valle de la Estrella to clear land for wages or to work on banana plantations for up to six months at a time. The Instituto Costarricense sobre Drogas, the national drug institute, set the canton's growing against its social indicators: Talamanca was last of 81 cantons in Costa Rica's Social Progress Index for 2016, and the district of Telire was in the lowest fifth of districts in the Social Development Index of 2017. The institute saw the forest cover and the difficulty of access in Talamanca and Osa as favouring the crop, and wrote that the social and economic factors behind people's involvement needed to be better understood.^{: 23: 35–36}

Reports of cultivation, 1973–2003

The Talamanca mountains from the air, July 2016

The Museo Nacional de Costa Rica holds a cannabis specimen collected in Talamanca in January 1973, recorded under the collector "Guarda de Asistencia Rural" (the Rural Assistance Guard). In 1989 the State Department found total production in Costa Rica small.^: 172 Its report on 1994 described some 800 hectares of cannabis scattered about the Cordillera de Talamanca region on the Atlantic coast.^: 127 In 1997 and 1998 the Special Support Police of the Ministry of Public Security, known as the Mountain Police, found and destroyed plots in the Caribbean region near Limón and Talamanca; in June 1998 they destroyed over 510,000 plants in the Talamanca mountains, some of them twelve feet (3.7 metres) high.

The Drug Enforcement Administration described the growing in its country briefs of 2000 and 2003. Cannabis was grown in small plots in the mountains south-west of the port of Limón, especially in Sixaola, the Valle de la Estrella and the Talamanca mountains near the Panamanian border, and in the Valle del General on the Pacific side. The plots were small and sometimes mixed in with legitimate crops, but numerous, especially in the Talamanca region.^: 3 By 2003 the agency found most of the marijuana consumed in Costa Rica to be grown locally, mainly in the Valle del General and the Talamanca area. It was not exported, in part because of its low THC content.^{: 3, 6}

Eradication since 2006

The police burned 179,316 plants in Talamanca in September 2006. In 2010 the drug police eradicated more than two million plants in the Talamanca range, the most since 2007, nearly a million of them in one sweep in November. No arrests were made; the government's drug commissioner, Mauricio Boraschi, said the police had found no evidence that international traffickers were involved in the growing, and critics called the sweeps a waste of resources. Over 562,000 plants were destroyed in the mountains of the Caribbean region in June 2012, and 38,500 plants ready for harvest in a forest near Alto Bley, in Talamanca, in June 2014.

From 2015 the press named the sites of each sweep. In September 2015 the drug control police eradicated 429,970 plants in 42 plantations covering 46,087 square metres, round Cerro Congo, Cerro Papaya, Monteverde, Guayabal, Piedra Meza, Cerro Cuzuco, Seira and Botubata. In June 2016 they cut 367,460 plants in 27 plantations at Finca 20, Alto Bley, Monteverde Arriba, Arco Iris, Cerro Congo, Asunción and Valle de las Rosas. An operation of eight or nine days in May 2017, between Piedra Mesa and Tortuga, destroyed some 423,000 plants. In May 2018 police cut 465,107 plants in 48 plantations at Cerro Tortuga, Monteverde, Arcoíris, Alto Piedra Meza, Cerro Avispero, Guayabal Arriba, Shorbata and Pejibayal. In May 2019 they destroyed 201,732 plants in 32 plantations in the mountains at Cerro Seira, Cerro Tortuga, Cerro Águila, Alto Cuen and Espavel, along the Madre de Dios river and at San Rafael de Bordón, and at Gandoca, in Sixaola, and Manzanillo, in Cahuita.

In March 2020 an operation in Alta Talamanca destroyed 361,735 plants in 44 plantations, after flights over Cerro Tortuga, Cerro Hule, Cerro Seira, Cerro Papayo, the Sey river, Alto Piedra Mesa, Guayabal Arriba, Guayabal Abajo and Cerro Monte Verde. In June 2021 a twelve-day operation in Telire eradicated 293,933 plants, and in September 2021 an operation flown with two helicopters of the United States Embassy's aviation programme destroyed 339,380 plants in 50 plantations at Cerro Congo, Cerro Tortuga, Alto Tortuga, Spiri, Cerro Seira, Arcoiris, Guayabal Arriba, Guayabal Abajo, Piedra Meza and Alto Bley. The police destroyed 340,000 plants in Telire and nearby places in 2023. A report of the drug institute published in 2019 found that, over the years, 78.3 per cent of the plantations eradicated in Costa Rica had been in Talamanca.

Growing in the Telire territory

The journalist Lucas Iturriza visited Alto Telire with a medical mission in 2012. Residents told him that two decades earlier Mexican and Colombian cartels had worked in the area and indigenous marijuana plantations had covered ten hectares or more; in his account the violence of those years was mainly between local clans, and the authorities began to act against it in 1992. By 2012, he wrote, the Cabécar of Alto Telire grew much less marijuana than before, and not everyone took part. For those who did it was one of the few ways to earn money: coffee and bananas took days to carry down the mountain and could not be sold at a competitive price, while buyers came up for marijuana and offered to carry it down, and growers bartered it with the traffickers for basic goods at marked-up prices. The director of the social security fund's Talamanca health area told him that residents had distrusted the medical missions while they travelled with the police, who raided them and burned their plants, and that the missions had stopped travelling with the police for that reason. In 2013 a Cabécar resident who had received death threats after denouncing the trade told La Nación that people now planted more marijuana than food. Geiner Blanco, of the Mesa Indígena, saw the growing as a means of survival, rooted in state neglect and poor living conditions.

Officials and the national press have reported on the growing in Telire mainly as drug trafficking. In August 2012 the Ministry of Education said a drug gang was keeping teachers out of Alto Telire, where some 300 Cabécar children were not attending school, in order to have the children grow marijuana; one of the village's two school buildings had been burned. In 2013 La Nación reported that marijuana growing had become a large business in the Telire reservation, with sacks selling for about ₡200,000 each. Diario Extra wrote in 2019 that traffickers replanted after each sweep and hired indigenous people to tend the plots, and that the police found no one when they arrived. Medical teams went with the eradication operations of 2015, 2016 and 2020, and in 2021 the police carried food and supplies for the school kitchens of Alto Bley and Piedra Meza.

Plants and growing methods

The plants cut in May 2018 averaged 3.41 metres in height. In 2017 the Minister of Public Security, Gustavo Mata, described a new plant found in the plantations between Piedra Mesa and Tortuga: half a metre to a metre tall, against two to three metres for the usual plants, hard to see from the air and ripe in about three months, with many flower heads. The seed was believed to come from Jamaica, and the plant to be comparable to the marijuana sold as "high-red" and "creepy". In 2019 the police reported finding seed from Colombia in Talamanca, sown for a better yield.

In 2016 the police found plants hidden under netting over which passion-fruit vines had been trained on a frame of rods.

Accessions

No accessions documented yet.

Recent news

No recent news items.

See also

• Costa Rica
• Creepy (cannabis)
• Jamaica