Talk:Tolima

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Discussion for: Tolima • View • Links • Related changes

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Page scope

Tolima treats the department of Tolima, in central Colombia, as a cannabis growing area: the crops reported there in 1961, the fields destroyed since 2007, and the licences to grow medicinal cannabis issued there since 2017. The department as an administrative unit is treated at Tolima Department, and Colombia's law on cannabis at Colombia. Marijuana carried through Tolima from other departments is part of this page only where a source ties it to growing in Tolima.

Data verification

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

Discussion

Why Tolima is a growing area

• Sources report marijuana grown in Tolima at the scale of the department. The report of the Colombian delegation to the Rio de Janeiro meeting of 1961, as Sáenz Rovner (2007, pp. 214–215) gives it, names Tolima among the departments with crops. A presentation of the national drug observatory at a workshop of the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission in June 2019 (slide 21), citing the anti-narcotics police, names it among the main producing departments.
• Fields inside the department are reported by the armed forces and the press: Ataco, Chaparral and San Antonio (La FM, February 2016), the vereda El Mirador in Chaparral (Minuto30, October 2017), and the vereda El Topacio in Planadas (armed forces, January 2020, and an undated bulletin).
• The eradication figures cover the whole department. The Ministry of Defence's open dataset lists marijuana eradicated in 16 municipalities between 2007 and 2021, and the bulletin of the University of Tolima's Centre for Regional Studies gives the department's totals for 2015–2020.
• The status is Active: every report of fields and every eradication record cited is from 2007 or later, the latest from November 2021 (Roncesvalles). No source read says growing in Tolima has ended.

Extent and border

• The map border is the department of Tolima as drawn in OpenStreetMap (relation 1309495), simplified. The sources report cultivation by department (1961, 2019), and the ministry's records place eradication in municipalities across it, from Planadas, Chaparral and Rioblanco in the south to Fresno, Herveo and Líbano in the north and Icononzo and Villarrica in the east. The page is therefore drawn on the whole department and not on the southern municipalities alone. The area is about 24,100 km², and the infobox figure is rounded from it.
• Most of the eradicated area lies in the south and west: Planadas, Chaparral and Rovira account for about 90 of the roughly 150 hectares in the ministry's records, and Planadas and Chaparral for 61 per cent of the 2015–2020 total in the University of Tolima bulletin.
• The point in the infobox is the centre of the border, not a field.

Sources

• Ministry of Defence, Erradicación (open dataset). Read in the rows for Tolima with crop type marihuana (122 rows, June 2007 to November 2021), downloaded on 20 October 2026; the portal gives the last update of the data as 16 September 2026. The dataset defines eradication as the physical elimination or direct damage of illicit crops, in hectares. Each row gives a date, a municipality and an area; none gives a vereda, a method or a plant count. The totals by municipality on the page are sums of those rows. For comparison, the same rows for Tolima list 454 hectares of coca and 98 of poppy.
• University of Tolima, Centre for Regional Studies, bulletin no. 3. The pages carry the date March 2021, the cover March 2020, and the catalogue record a first edition of 2023; the page gives March 2021, the date of the series issue and of its report in El Nuevo Día (30 March 2021). The bulletin gives 64.75 hectares of marijuana on p. 14 and 64.5 on p. 19; the page uses 64.75. The table of eradication by municipality (p. 17) is printed as an image and was not read; the percentages come from the text on p. 16. The bulletin gives Ibagué's 9.16 hectares as "the last five years" in a passage on six years; the page gives only the percentage.
• Armed forces bulletins on El Topacio. Two bulletins report eradication in the vereda El Topacio, Planadas, by Ground Operations Battalion No. 18 with the CTI. The one dated 21 January 2020 gives 1.5 hectares of plantations; the undated one gives four hectares (two ready, two growing) and a 500-plant seedbed. They may describe the same operation or two; the page reports each as printed. A version on the attorney general's website could not be retrieved.
• Sáenz Rovner (2007). The 1961 report as he summarises it names municipalities for Valle del Cauca, Caldas and Antioquia only; for Tolima it gives the department alone.
• National drug observatory (2019). A slide presentation; the statement on producing departments is attributed on the slide to the anti-narcotics police (DIRAN). The same slide says there was no official figure for the hectares of marijuana in Colombia.

Sources not used

• Seizures on the roads and in towns are not used as evidence of growing. Several are of marijuana the police or army say came from Cauca or Valle del Cauca: 130 kg in Planadas (2024), about 1,770 kg in Roncesvalles (2021), more than two tonnes in Honda (2019), 1,900 kg in Cajamarca (2026) and 40 kg in Ibagué (2020). Others give no origin (Ataco–Planadas road, Chaparral, Rioblanco).
• Coca and opium poppy are separate crops, and reports of them are not used here. The report of the National Centre for Historical Memory on the paramilitary Tolima bloc discusses poppy and coca in southern Tolima and does not mention marijuana. A report of the army's eradication at Rioblanco (vereda El Diamante) concerns coca only.
• An early-warning alert of the national ombudsman's office (016 of 2022) on Planadas, Ataco, Chaparral and Rioblanco mentions illicit cultivation and the transit of coca, poppy and marijuana in one phrase, without saying which crop is grown; it is not used.
• A 2021 chapter by Judith González Eraso lists Tolima among the departments with marijuana crops in the 1960s; it draws on Sáenz Rovner, who is cited instead.
• No source read gives a name for a cannabis variety of Tolima. A seller's glossary of Colombian varieties (Bunkerlinge, 2026) lists a Punto Rojo of highland Tolima but gives no source for the attribution, and is not used.