Talk:Serranía del Perijá

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Page scope

Serranía del Perijá treats the Colombian side of the Serranía del Perijá, in the departments of Cesar and La Guajira, as a cannabis growing area: the marijuana grown there during the trade of the 1970s and 1980s, the reports of the 1980s and 1990s and the marijuana eradicated there since 2007. The range west of the Cesar–Ranchería valley is a separate massif, treated at Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. The departments are treated at Cesar Department and La Guajira Department, and Colombia's law on cannabis at Colombia. The Venezuelan side of the range is not part of this page. Coca and opium poppy are part of this page only where a source reports them with marijuana, and marijuana carried through the area is part of it only where a source ties it to growing there.

Data verification

Record source conflicts, dating problems and sources not used here. Keep narrative content on the article.

Discussion

Why the Serranía del Perijá is a growing area

Colombia's truth commission (case report on the land settlements of Cesar, 2022, p. 14) says that by the end of the 1970s marijuana crops had become established in the Serranía del Perijá, and gives a former FARC fighter's account of the armed groups that guarded the crops in the Perijá and the Sierra Nevada.
A delegation of the United States House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control visited the range in 1983 and was given an estimate of about 15,000 hectares there; in August 1985 it was told that production had been moving to the range from the Santa Marta area for two years (committee print, 1986, p. 11).
In June 1993 the head of the anti-narcotics police named the Perijá among the places where marijuana crops were increasing (El Tiempo); in 1995 the head of the anti-narcotics police named it among the three ranges holding most of the country's 6,000 hectares (Análisis Político, 1995).
A 2018 thesis on Villanueva places marijuana farms in the Perijá in the late 1970s, from interviews in the town, and quotes a 1977 press report of 380,000 plants seized on ten hectares near Becerril (Agustín Codazzi). A 2016 report places disputes over land to plant marijuana at San José de Oriente (La Paz) in the 1970s.
The Ministry of Defence's open dataset lists marijuana eradicated in twelve of the thirteen municipalities of the area between October 2007 and July 2020, and the army reported a plantation of more than 200 plants in Villanueva in October 2024.
The status is Active: the dataset's entries run to July 2020 and the army report is from October 2024. No source read says growing in the range has ended.

Name, extent and border

The name is the one the sources use: "Serranía del Perijá" (the truth commission, the 2018 thesis and the 2019 report), "Serrania Perija" (the 1986 committee print), "Perijá" or "Sierra del Perijá" (the 1993 and 1995 police statements). The page is titled after the range because no source names a smaller growing zone in it.
The border is drawn on the range itself, as the border of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta is: ground at or above 200 metres (SRTM elevation data), on the Colombian side of the international border, inside the thirteen municipalities that run up the range from La Jagua de Ibirico to Barrancas: La Jagua de Ibirico, Becerril, Agustín Codazzi, San Diego, La Paz and Manaure Balcón del Cesar in Cesar; Urumita, La Jagua del Pilar, Villanueva, El Molino, San Juan del Cesar, Fonseca and Barrancas in La Guajira. It measures about 4,260 km², and the infobox figure is rounded from it. The border follows the ground rather than whole municipalities because the municipalities also take in the floors of the Cesar and Ranchería valleys, where no source read places marijuana growing; the municipalities only set its southern and northern ends and keep it to the stretch the sources name. The 200-metre line is the one at which the Sierra Nevada stands apart from the Perijá; the towns of Agustín Codazzi, La Paz, Becerril, San Diego, La Jagua de Ibirico, Fonseca, Barrancas and San Juan del Cesar lie below it, in the valleys, and fall outside the border; Manaure Balcón del Cesar, Urumita, Villanueva, El Molino and La Jagua del Pilar stand on the first slopes, just above it, and fall inside.
The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta's border is cut out where the two meet, so the two areas do not overlap. San Juan del Cesar, Barrancas and Fonseca run up both ranges, and Distracción and Hatonuevo lie mostly on the Sierra side; only their land on the Perijá side is drawn here.
The dataset gives a municipality for each entry, not a place within it, so an entry in a municipality that also takes in valley land or Sierra land may come from either. The totals on the page are for the municipalities, as the dataset gives them. Barrancas, Fonseca and San Juan del Cesar, which also reach the Sierra Nevada, hold 31 of the 87 entries (about 54 hectares).
Left out: Chiriguaná (four entries, 10.5 hectares, 2013–2016), whose land is mostly in the Cesar valley and which no source read names as a growing place; Albania (one entry, 1.8 hectares, 2013; a police report of January 2017 of more than 400 plants in the corregimiento of Torramazón), Hatonuevo (3.5 hectares) and Distracción (2 hectares), where no source read places the growing in the range. The southern end of the range in Cesar (Curumaní, Pailitas, Pelaya and the south) is left out: no source read places marijuana there.
The point in the infobox is a point inside the border, not a field.

Sources

Truth commission (2022). The case report "Parcelaciones del Cesar", by the chapter on human-rights violations, p. 14. The statement on the marijuana crops of the Perijá is in the report's own voice; the account of the combos marimberos is from an interview with a former FARC fighter. Footnote 21 gives the bonanza marimbera as 1975–1985.
House Select Committee (1986). The committee print of the study mission of 3–19 August 1985, Colombia chapter, p. 11. The text says the shift to the range "was underway two years ago"; the page dates it from the 1985 visit. The figure of about 15,000 hectares is an estimate given to the delegation in 1983, not the committee's own.
Rada Verdecia (2018). A bachelor's thesis in social sciences (Universidad Pedagógica Nacional). The statements on farms in the Perijá (pp. 124, 136; p. 136 speaks of farms in rural Villanueva, many of them in the Perijá) are the author's; the mule trains and the switch to marijuana around 1977–1979 come from an interview of 3 July 2017 in Villanueva (pp. 124, 132). The 1977 seizure (p. 99) is quoted from Diario del Norte, 9 July 1977, p. 8, which was not read in the original; the list of growing zones (p. 75) is quoted from Betancourt and García (1994), p. 54, also not read in the original. The 1977 report calls Becerril a corregimiento of Agustín Codazzi; it is now a municipality.
Bonivento van Grieken (2024). Places the planting of the early 1970s on the Sierra Nevada and names Codazzi and Becerril as towns from which the marijuana was flown out (p. 184). The page gives it beside the sources that place crops in the Perijá; the two accounts concern the early 1970s and the late 1970s.
Ministry of Defence, Erradicación (open dataset). Read in the rows for Cesar and La Guajira with crop type marihuana (Cesar 102 rows, 143.26 hectares, October 2007 to July 2020; La Guajira 140 rows, 200.70 hectares, May 2007 to June 2019), downloaded on 20 October 2026. Each row gives a date, a municipality and an area; none gives a vereda, a method or a plant count. The totals on the page are sums of the rows for the thirteen municipalities. La Guajira's largest totals, Dibulla (94 hectares) and Riohacha (36), are on the Sierra Nevada and are not counted here.
La Prensa (2024). Carries the army's report of 15 October 2024; Diario del Norte carried the same report the same day. Neither says whether the vereda of Oro Azul is in the range.

Sources not used

Seizures of marijuana on the roads and in houses are not used as evidence of growing: about two tonnes at La Palma (La Jagua del Pilar), at Manantialito (Barrancas) and at El Molino (November 2024), one tonne at El Tablazo (San Juan del Cesar, June 2024) and 2.7 tonnes in a house at El Tablazo.
A 2020 report of a marijuana processing site in San Juan del Cesar places it in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, not the Perijá.
A 2015 report of the drug-policy groups MamaCoca and Indepaz says the spraying planned in 1978 was aimed at about 19,000 hectares of marijuana in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and the Sierra de Perijá; the figure is the report's own gloss on a letter that gives no area, and is not used.
An article in Cultural Survival Quarterly (issue 9-4) names the Sierra Nevada and the Perijá as the main growing areas of Colombian marijuana; its year of publication is not printed on the web copy, and it is not used.
Opinion columns and retellings (El Tiempo 2011, Las2orillas 2018, Rebelión 2021, Panorama Cultural 2025) name the Perijá with the Sierra Nevada but add no place, date or figure that the sources above do not give.
Venezuela reported destroying six hectares of marijuana on its side of the range in 2025; the Venezuelan side is not part of this page.
No source read gives a name for a cannabis variety of the range.