Ariari
More actions
| Ariari | |
|---|---|
| Región del Ariari | |
| ActiveRecorded as grown here since 2000 | |
| Geography | |
| Country | Colombia |
| Province/State | Meta Department |
| Coordinates | 2.9, -73.9 |
| Landscape | |
| Area | 19,200 km² |
| Terrain | Llanos piedmont of the Eastern Cordillera, the Ariari and Güejar valleys and the Serranía de La Macarena; approximately the municipalities of Lejanías, Mesetas, El Castillo, Vistahermosa and La Macarena |
| Growing history | |
| Documentation | |
| Appellations | 0 |
| Accessions | 0 |
| Conservation | |
| Populations | none documented yet |
Ariari is a cannabis growing area in the department of Meta, in eastern Colombia, where the Eastern Cordillera falls to the Llanos. It takes its name from the region of the Ariari river,[1] and is drawn here on the five municipalities in which the sources cited name the crop: Lejanías, Mesetas, El Castillo, Vistahermosa and La Macarena, around the northern Serranía de La Macarena. Marijuana was planted in the Serranía and around Vistahermosa in the mid-1970s, in a boom that collapsed with prices around 1977 and gave way to coca.[2]: 58–59, 95[1]: 204 In 2019 a presentation of the national drug observatory, citing the anti-narcotics police, listed Meta among the main marijuana-producing departments of the country.[3] The Ministry of Defence's eradication data for Meta list marijuana only in these five municipalities: about 239 hectares between 2007 and 2018, 220 of them in Lejanías.[4]
The marijuana boom of the 1970s
The sociologist Alfredo Molano, in an oral history of the colonisation of the Guaviare published in 1987, describes how marijuana reached the settlers of the Serranía de La Macarena. Pilots came with seed, handed it out free with a few instructions, and returned to pay well for the first harvest, after which the settlers planted again on a larger scale. Within two years, he writes, the Serranía had begun to rival the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, and within months of that success the crop had spread down the rivers that leave the piedmont: the Güejar, the Guayabero, the Ariari and at last the Guaviare.[2]: 58–59 Two of his informants told him that Vistahermosa, in those years, was the rival of San Pedro de la Sierra, in the department of Magdalena, for both the quality and the quantity of its marijuana. Molano writes that the crop spread through the Serranía, the piedmont and the river flats of the Güejar and the Ariari in the middle of the decade. Specialised traders and some of the local cattle ranchers financed the fields, the ranches' airstrips served at first, pickers and packers were brought in from the Sierra Nevada, and aircraft left the region with loads of up to 20,000 pounds.[2]: 95
Writing in 1989, Fernando Cubides recorded that a report of the director of the Administrative Department of Security (DAS) had noted the spread of marijuana growing inside the Macarena reserve in 1974.[5]: 73 In the same issue of the journal of the National University, the economist Óscar Arcila described hundreds of hectares of the reserve cleared to plant it. Around 1977, he wrote, regional and national overproduction met a contraction of foreign demand, which was turning to a variety of better quality than the tropical countries offered; the crisis was overcome a year later with a new crop in the region, coca.[6]: 76
The historian María Clara Torres places the first plantations in Vistahermosa, close to the Serranía de La Macarena national park, in the mid-1970s, and their disappearance at the end of the decade. Following Arcila, she writes that prices fell so far in 1977 that marijuana had to be burned or dumped in rivers, and that from about 1978 coca began to take the place of the plantations in the park.[1]: 204 For Molano the marijuana years had been a "general rehearsal" (ensayo general) for the coca that followed.[2]: 59–60 A regional study by the Ministry of Justice and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime also calls the marijuana boom in Meta short-lived; it states that self-defence groups linked to Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha brought the seed to parts of Vistahermosa on the Güejar, and that the crop opened the way to coca.[7]: 44
Fields reported since 2000
In January 2016 the newspaper El Tiempo reported that the army's Seventh Brigade had found and destroyed half a hectare of marijuana, some 5,400 plants, in the vereda (rural district) of Cafetales, in Lejanías. Three kinds were growing there, "creepy", "punto rojo" and the traditional plant, the first under a kind of greenhouse holding 380 plants; the paper noted that the first two had historically been grown in Cauca. The brigade's commander, General Oswaldo Peña Bermeo, said that marijuana had been replacing coca in the area because it found a readier sale in small-scale dealing, and the paper suggested that the crop's arrival in "this region of the Ariari" might be linked to its climate and terrain and to its nearness to markets, Bogotá among them. A source quoted by the paper described plantings of one or two hectares at most, some of them beside the peasants' plots of blackberry, coffee or plantain.[8]
In 2017 the Meta police reported two operations in Lejanías. In February they destroyed a crop and two marijuana storage sites in the vereda of Barcelona, with more than 1,500 plants between them, planted or set out to dry.[9] In April they reported the manual eradication of 12 hectares of marijuana, more than 12,000 plants, in the vereda of Las Delicias.[10]
Eradication figures
The Ministry of Justice study notes that marijuana growing in Meta has no permanent monitoring, and reads it from the reports of forced manual eradication. These show four hectares in Lejanías in 1999, the first marijuana they list, then occasional entries in Vistahermosa, El Castillo and Mesetas, and eradication in Lejanías every year from 2010, reaching 144.7 hectares in 2013. The authorities, it adds, describe crops in the open and under greenhouses, of one to two hectares at most, located in Lejanías.[7]: 53
The Ministry of Defence's open data list 77 entries of marijuana eradicated in Meta between May 2007 and October 2018, about 239 hectares in all. Lejanías accounts for about 220 hectares in 64 entries between December 2010 and April 2017, most of them in 2012 (about 47 hectares) and 2013 (about 145). The remainder lies in Mesetas (about 8 hectares, 2012–2016), El Castillo (5.5, 2013–2015), Vistahermosa (about 4, 2007–2017) and La Macarena (about 1, 2018).[4]
Accessions
No accessions documented yet.
Recent news
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See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Torres, María Clara (September–December 2021). "Arroz y coca: una modernización desigual y violenta en el Ariari, Colombia, 1950-1990". Análisis Político (in español). 34 (103): 193–224. doi:10.15446/anpol.v34n103.102174.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Molano, Alfredo (1999) [1987]. Selva adentro: una historia oral de la colonización del Guaviare (in español). Bogotá: El Áncora Editores. ISBN 958-9012-02-7.
- ↑ Observatorio de Drogas de Colombia (June 2019). Experiencia en la recolección de información sobre oferta y consumo: ODC. Taller para Fortalecer a los Observatorios Nacionales sobre Drogas de América Latina y el Caribe: Cuarta Edición (in español). Comisión Interamericana para el Control del Abuso de Drogas, Organización de los Estados Americanos. slide 21. Retrieved 20 October 2026.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Ministerio de Defensa Nacional. "Erradicación". Portal de Datos Abiertos de Colombia (dataset) (in español). Retrieved 20 October 2026.
- ↑ Cubides, Fernando (1989). "Colonización depredadora". Revista de la Universidad Nacional (in español) (21): 71–74.
- ↑ Arcila N., Oscar H. (1989). "Coca, guerrilla, colonización y narcotráfico en la Macarena". Revista de la Universidad Nacional (in español) (21): 75–80.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 Ministerio de Justicia y del Derecho; Oficina de las Naciones Unidas contra la Droga y el Delito. Caracterización regional de la problemática asociada a las drogas ilícitas en el departamento del Meta (PDF) (Report) (in español). Bogotá: Ministerio de Justicia y del Derecho. Retrieved 20 October 2026.
- ↑ "En Meta, cultivos de coca dan paso a la marihuana". El Tiempo (in español). 13 January 2016. Retrieved 20 October 2026.
- ↑ "En Lejanías la Policía Nacional ubicó y destruyó cultivo y centros de acopio de droga" (in español). Policía Nacional de Colombia. 28 February 2017. Retrieved 20 October 2026.
- ↑ "Avanza "Plan Institucional todos contra el Narcotráfico" en el Meta" (in español). Policía Nacional de Colombia. 30 April 2017. Retrieved 20 October 2026.