Talk:Bonanza marimbera

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Page scope

Bonanza marimbera treats the export of marijuana from northern Colombia to the United States between the late 1960s and the mid-1980s, the trade Colombians call the bonanza marimbera: its beginnings in the coffee smuggling of the Guajira and in the trade of Santa Marta, the growing areas of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and the Serranía del Perijá, the two terminals of Riohacha and Santa Marta, the passage by sea and by air to Florida, the traders, the estimates of its size, the campaigns against it from 1978 and its decline. The growing areas themselves belong to Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and Serranía del Perijá; the aerial spraying from 1984 to Herbicide spraying in Colombia; American policy to United States and cannabis eradication abroad. Routes are described at the level of region, town or port city that the cited sources use.

Data verification

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Discussion

Sources

• Scholarship. Lina Britto's book Marijuana Boom (2020; the introduction, chapter 2 and the notes to chapter 3) and her article in Contemporánea (2010) are the main histories of the trade; both rest in large part on interviews she recorded in the Guajira, Santa Marta and Bogotá. Eduardo Sáenz Rovner's articles in Cuadernos de Economía (2007 on the years before the boom; 2011 on Colombian traffickers in Miami in the 1970s) draw on American court records, the press and diplomatic files. Franklin Bonivento van Grieken's article in the Anuario de Historia Regional y de las Fronteras (2024) dates the boom and its end partly from the greetings to traffickers in 70 vallenato albums of 1976–1985. Iván Rada Verdecia's study of Villanueva (2018) is an undergraduate thesis built on interviews and the regional press.
• Colombian official reports. Two reports of Colombia's truth commission (2022): the Caribbean volume of its final report and its case report on the peasant land settlements of Cesar. Both treat the bonanza as background to the armed conflict.
• United States government reports. The House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control's reports on its missions to Colombia (1979; 1986), the estimates of the National Narcotics Intelligence Consumers Committee (1984; 1985–1986; 1990), the General Accounting Office's report on Colombia and Bolivia (1988), the State Department's narcotics strategy report (1988) and a CIA assessment of 1982. These are agencies with an interest in the campaigns they describe; their figures are given as their estimates.
• Press. Time (1979), the Bogotá weekly Semana (1982) and El Tiempo (1993). Articles from the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek and Atlanta magazine (1978) are cited from their reprints in the record of a Senate subcommittee hearing of 1978. Semana gives most of its figures without a source and calls some of them unofficial.
• Reviews of Britto's book. Reviews by Javier Guerrero Castro (2022) and Rubén Darío Molina Palacio (2025) question her reliance on the testimony of participants and, citing Sáenz Rovner, the weight she gives the Caribbean coast over intermediaries from the Andean interior.

Where the sources disagree

• When the trade began. Sáenz Rovner finds marijuana sent to southern Florida in the 1960s, and a Colombian report of 1952 already names Santa Marta as a source for Florida. Britto dates the origins to the late 1960s and the first export-only crops to about 1972; the General Accounting Office to the mid-1970s; Bonivento van Grieken has the Caribbean coast the largest supplier by 1976. A review of Britto's book by Bonivento van Grieken (2021) places the first export plantings in the Sierra Nevada in the first half of the 1960s.
• The peak and the end. Britto: peak 1972–1978, decline from 1978 to about 1985 (2010); her notes to chapter 3 cite 1976 as the peak year. The truth commission: 1975–1985. Bonivento van Grieken: the business at its last breath in 1982 and forgotten by 1985. Semana (1982) has four years of opulence. The House Select Committee (1986) dates the growth of the Guajira crop for export to 1973–1983. American estimates still put Colombia's share of the United States supply at 31 per cent in 1985 and 27 per cent in 1986, from growing areas that had moved away from the Sierra Nevada.
• Colombia's share of the American market. 70 per cent in 1978 (the DEA, through Britto); roughly two-thirds (Time, January 1979); about 70 per cent (House Select Committee, 1979 and again 1986); 79 per cent in 1981, the peak (General Accounting Office, 1988); three quarters (CIA, 1982); 57 per cent of supply in 1982 and 1983 and 42 per cent in 1984 (National Narcotics Intelligence Consumers Committee); 90 per cent in 1978 and under 40 per cent in 1982 (Semana, from what it called unofficial figures). The House committee's 70 per cent for 1985 conflicts with the committee of intelligence agencies' 31 per cent of supply for the same year. The sources measure different things (imports, supply, consumption) and do not reconcile.
• The area under marijuana. About 240,000 acres planted since the boom began (Colombian authorities, 1978, through the Wall Street Journal); about 250,000 acres in the Guajira (a Colombian official's helicopter survey, 1978, through Time); as many as 70,000 hectares in the Guajira (the Colombian Attorney General's office, through a CIA review of August 1978); a plantation of 40,000 hectares (Semana, reporting an army find of 1979); 17,000 hectares nationally and 15,000 in the Perijá in 1983, with credible estimates up to 44,000 (House Select Committee); 10,000 to 13,000 hectares in 1984 (the committee of intelligence agencies). A former Colombian finance minister advised dividing every Colombian figure by ten.
• Why the trade declined. Britto gives first place to the joint Colombian and American campaign of 1978–1980; the explanations she sets aside are the boom's own cycle and the rise of the cocaine trade. Semana (1982) adds the adulteration of loads and American home growing; economists writing in 2004 (de Quinto and Arcila) add competition from other Latin American producers; American agencies credit eradication, seizures and interdiction in the Caribbean.
• The Peace Corps story. A story that former Peace Corps volunteers organised the first export loads is repeated in Colombian writing, among them the Villanueva thesis. Britto finds no documentary evidence for it, and Bonivento van Grieken, reviewing her book, reports that she allows instead for seed brought by treasure hunters and by young Americans who were not volunteers.

Georeferencing

A town on the route is given a point where two gazetteers, Wikidata and OpenStreetMap, put it within about 2 km of each other. Points are entered to two decimal places.

• Riohacha: 11.54, -72.91. Wikidata 11.544, -72.907; OpenStreetMap 11.545, -72.915; 0.9 km apart.
• Santa Marta: 11.23, -74.20. Wikidata 11.236, -74.202; OpenStreetMap 11.232, -74.195; 0.8 km apart.
• Miami: 25.77, -80.19. Wikidata and OpenStreetMap 25.774, -80.194; the same point.

The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and the Serranía del Perijá, Florida and the United States are given without a point: a mountain range, a state or a country has no single point.

Infobox

• Period. The first year is 1972, when Britto has the first crops grown only for export and the start of the peak; smaller quantities were exported from the 1960s (Sáenz Rovner 2011) and in the late 1960s (Britto). The last year is 1985, the first year in which the truth commission, Britto and Bonivento van Grieken all have the bonanza over. American estimates show Colombian marijuana still reaching the United States after that, increasingly from other parts of Colombia.
• Route. The origin areas are the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta (Britto) and the Serranía del Perijá, where growing moved by 1983 (House Select Committee, 1986). Riohacha and Santa Marta are the two terminals Britto names; they are alternatives at one stage. Florida is the end of the circuit in Britto and in the campaign's name; Miami is where Sáenz Rovner has Colombian marijuana arriving by air and sea; the United States covers the other destinations the sources name (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, the southern states). Valledupar, Codazzi, Becerril, Maicao, Villanueva and the Gulf of Urabá are in the text only.
• Scale. The DEA's estimate for 1978 gives both a share and a quantity; the other estimates are in the Scale section and above.
• Legal status. Illegal: growing and selling marijuana was a crime in Colombia from 1947 (Britto 2020, p. 74), and its importers were prosecuted in the United States (Sáenz Rovner 2011).

Images reserved in the article

One image has a place in the article but is not yet uploaded:

• File:Bonanza-marimbera-routes-to-Florida.jpg (The route), a map to be drawn: an outline map of northern Colombia and the western Caribbean with the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and the Serranía del Perijá shaded; Riohacha, Santa Marta, Valledupar, Codazzi, Becerril, Maicao and Miami marked as towns; dashed lines by sea and by air from the Magdalena–Guajira coast to southern Florida, the Florida Keys and the waters near the Bahamas; a note that the lines are schematic. No landing places below town level and no vessels.