Talk:Villamaría
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Villamaría treats the municipality of Villamaría, in the department of Caldas in Colombia, as a cannabis growing area, on the reports of marijuana grown there before the export boom of the 1970s. The department as an administrative unit is treated at Caldas Department, and Colombia's law on cannabis at Colombia.
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Record source conflicts, dating problems and sources not used here. Keep narrative content on the article.
Discussion
Why Villamaría is a growing area
- Sáenz Rovner (2007, pp. 214–215) gives the report presented by the Colombian delegation to the Inter-American Consultative Group on narcotics control in Rio de Janeiro in 1961, which drew on a report of the secret police. For Caldas it names one place where marijuana was grown: "en Villamaría, municipio cercano a Manizales".
- Britto (2020, p. 73) writes that Manizales got its supplies from neighbouring Villamaría, as Medellín did from Bello and Cali from Buga, in a passage on the crops of the Andean interior before the boom. The three pairs match the places of the 1961 report.
Growing status
- The status is Historical: the sources describe the years before the 1970s. The Ministry of Defence's eradication dataset, which begins in 2007, has no marijuana entries for Villamaría (downloaded 3 November 2026), and no source reports growing there since 2000. No source says that growing ended.
- The years are left blank in the infobox. The 1961 report is the only dated source, and it gives no first or last year of the crop.
Extent and border
- The map border is the municipality as drawn in OpenStreetMap (relation 385843), simplified; about 450 km², the figure in the infobox. Where it meets Tolima it follows Tolima's line.
- The sources name the municipality, not a place in it, so the border takes in the whole of it, from the edge of Manizales up to the high ground of the Nevado del Ruiz.
- The point in the infobox is the centre of the border, not a field.
Not used
- The herbarium sheet Arroyave 2 (undated), from the La Florida plant nursery in Villamaría, lies inside the border. Its label records a nursery, not a crop, so it is not placed in the area. The sheets from Manizales, from the botanic garden and the faculty farm of the Universidad de Caldas, are outside the border and record no crop.
- Guzmán, Fals Borda and Umaña (1962, t. I p. 224) say marijuana was easily found in western Caldas during the Violencia; that is about its sale and use, and names no place in the area.
- Sáenz Rovner (2007, p. 218) reports crops found in the 1960s in rural Riosucio and in Pueblo Rico (a farm with 3,000 plants), and Florian, Parada and Garzón (2009) sampled marijuana from rural Riosucio. Both places are in the west of old Caldas, on the Western Cordillera, outside this area.