Bonanza marimbera
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| From | Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Serranía del Perijá |
|---|---|
| By way of | Riohacha or Santa Marta |
| To | Florida, Miami, United States |
| How it travelled | Mixed |
| What moved | Marijuana |
|---|---|
| Carried by | Marimberos of the Guajira peninsula and the Sierra Nevada, many of them former smugglers of coffee and other goods; American buyers and investors |
| Scale | About 70 per cent of the marijuana entering the United States in 1978, 7,000 to 10,500 tons (Drug Enforcement Administration estimate) |
| Active | Late 1960s to the mid-1980s |
|---|---|
| Status | No longer in use |
| Legal status | Illegal |
The bonanza marimbera was the export of marijuana from northern Colombia to the United States between the late 1960s and the mid-1980s. The marijuana was grown on the slopes of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta[1]: 166 and later in the Serranía del Perijá.[2]: 10–11 It left from two terminals, Riohacha with the seaports near it and Santa Marta with its bay,[3]: 77 and went by sea and by air to Florida.[4]: 111–112 The traders, called marimberos, came from the Guajira peninsula and the Sierra Nevada and partnered with American buyers in the early 1970s.[3]: 1 The historian Lina Britto dates the peak of the trade to 1972–1978;[3]: 16 Colombia's truth commission dates the bonanza marimbera to 1975–1985.[5]: 14 The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) estimated that Colombia supplied 70 per cent of the marijuana moved into the United States in 1978,[3]: 255 and the United States General Accounting Office put Colombia's share of American consumption at 79 per cent in 1981.[6]: 30 From November 1978 the governments of Colombia and the United States ran a joint campaign against the trade in the Guajira and Florida peninsulas,[1]: 160, 171 and from 1984 Colombia sprayed the crop with herbicide from the air.[2]: 10–11 By the mid-1980s the export business had collapsed.[3]: 16
Name
Marimba, the name of a musical instrument, was used in Colombia for marijuana. Britto derives it from mariamba, the name that people of African descent on Colombia's Caribbean coast use for hemp; from it come bonanza marimbera (the marijuana bonanza) and marimberos, the men who ran the trade.[3]: 14–15 Because marijuana was known informally as marimba, the historian Franklin Bonivento van Grieken writes, the business came to be called the bonanza marimbera.[7]: 185
Origins
Marijuana left the Colombian Caribbean for the United States before the boom. A confidential report of the Colombian foreign ministry in 1952 said that Santa Marta had become an important source of marijuana sent to Florida ports on banana ships.[8]: 213–214 The historian Eduardo Sáenz Rovner finds Colombian traffickers already sending marijuana and cocaine to southern Florida in the 1960s.[4]: 107
Britto ties the trade to the rise of marijuana smoking in the American counterculture.[3]: 58 In 1969 the United States had a "marijuana famine", caused by summer droughts in Mexico, then its main supplier, and by the first chapter of the "war on drugs" along the Mexican border. Colombia was not yet a significant source, although smugglers in at least five regions of the country put small amounts of marijuana into their cargoes of coffee bound for the United States by way of Panama or Aruba.[3]: 77 Britto also links the start of the boom to the weakening of Mexico as a supplier by fumigation campaigns there and to the end of Cuba's place in the narcotics trade of the Americas after 1959.[1]: 161 The General Accounting Office dated Colombia's part in the marijuana trade to the mid-1970s, when production rose to fill the gap left by reduced growing in Mexico and Jamaica.[6]: 30
Smugglers who had long carried coffee began to add small quantities of marijuana to their cargoes,[3]: 58 and in the late 1960s the practice became regular for a few of them who had found buyers.[3]: 79 In Santa Marta young Americans arrived as tourists or sailors looking for marijuana for their own use; in Britto's account they were regular smokers supplying themselves and their friends.[3]: 79–80 Atlanta magazine wrote in 1978 that smuggling by air had begun about ten years earlier, with college students flying loads of a few hundred pounds home from Santa Marta.[9]: 97 A story told in Colombia credits former Peace Corps volunteers in the Sierra Nevada with organising the first export loads; Britto calls it a rumour repeated without documentary evidence (see United States and cannabis eradication abroad).[1]: 164
By 1972 the first crops grown only for export had appeared on the Guajira side of the Sierra Nevada, in its western and north-eastern foothills, financed and technically assisted by American and Colombian investors. Marijuana had been grown in the south-eastern foothills since the 1930s but was rarely exported because of its quality. The investors and growers came from outside the region, the growers mostly peasants driven from the Andean interior by La Violencia; the intermediaries were local men of the Guajira, where smuggling had long been the mainstay of the economy.[1]: 166 For Colombia's truth commission, marijuana was the answer to the crisis of cotton farming in La Guajira, Magdalena, Cesar and southern Bolívar: as cotton declined, marijuana was planted on the old estates. It had been sown in the Sierra Nevada since the 1950s.[10]: 85
The route
Britto describes two focal points that became the terminals of two routes: Riohacha and the seaports near it, and Santa Marta and its bay. The pioneers of Riohacha and its ports came from the criollo society of the Guajira.[3]: 77 Isolated natural seaports near Dibulla and Riohacha, beyond the end of the paved coast road, first served for small quantities of marijuana in coffee shipments to the islands of the Caribbean.[3]: 77–78 The smugglers used for marijuana the circuit they used for coffee. Marijuana from the Andean interior was picked up with coffee freights at Santa Marta or at Valledupar, where the two trunk roads of the coast ended. A journalist from Riohacha remembered that in the early years the marijuana was said to come from Corinto in Cauca, because that of the Sierra Nevada was not yet known.[3]: 79 A resident of the Sierra since the late 1960s told Britto that "Red Point" was then grown in the Andean coffee region and "Colombian Gold did not exist yet".[1]: 164–165 On the Santa Marta side, men who had smuggled goods off merchant ships into the port and the bay turned to supplying the young American buyers.[3]: 79
Once the Sierra Nevada was growing for export, the routes that had carried coffee and other goods took its marijuana to towns such as Codazzi, Becerril, Riohacha and Maicao, from where it was flown to the coast of the Florida peninsula, in Bonivento van Grieken's account.[7]: 184 Villanueva, just west of the Serranía del Perijá, received the produce of the range and became a place for moving and storing marijuana during the boom.[11]: 118
Most of the marijuana went by sea, in Sáenz Rovner's account, from the Magdalena–Guajira coast to the south of mainland Florida, the Florida Keys and the waters near the Bahamas. A small part reached southern Florida with couriers on commercial flights, and large loads were also flown from the north coast of Colombia to Florida and other southern states. Ships from the Gulf of Urabá, sent by traffickers from Antioquia, carried marijuana from the early 1970s.[4]: 111–112 Colombian marijuana reached Miami by air and by sea.[4]: 109 In February 1977 a ship carrying 53 tonnes of marijuana picked up in the Guajira was stopped 200 miles east of Miami, and the four men waiting to receive it were arrested in the city.[4]: 112 Newsweek wrote in 1978 that the Florida coast was the gateway for most of the marijuana entering the United States, and Colombia its main source since the crackdowns in Mexico and Jamaica.[9]: 114 In 1979 Time traced the network from Bogotá to the markets of New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.[12]
The two ends of the circuit, the Guajira and Florida peninsulas, gave their name to the joint campaign of 1978 against it.[1]: 160[13]: 3 The House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control reported that by 1983 production was shifting from the Santa Marta area to the Serranía del Perijá, along the border with Venezuela east of Valledupar; its delegation was told on a visit that year that about 15,000 hectares were under marijuana in that range alone.[2]: 10–11 In 1985 the director of Colombia's National Police told the committee that ten vessels had been seen leaving the Guajira between September and November 1984, against 80 in the same months of 1983.[2]: 22
Goods and traders
In 1979 Time called the crop of the Sierra Nevada "a luxurious marijuana of heady strength known as Santa Marta Gold".[12] An aide to a Colombian colonel told the Wall Street Journal in November 1978 that users knew the local crop as "Colombia Gold, or Santa Marta Gold" and prized it for its potency.[9]: 116 Britto calls "Colombian Golden or Santa Marta Gold" an improved-seed strain with a delicate flavour and a soft effect, developed for export in the early 1970s;[1]: 166, 174 Sáenz Rovner writes "Santa Marta Golden".[8]: 221 In Bonivento van Grieken's account the name came from the yellowish colour of its leaves, and consumers valued it as a "smooth" herb.[7]: 184 The Bogotá weekly Semana named two kinds of Colombian marijuana in 1982, "Mona" and "Red Point".[14] Local and American entrepreneurs at first gave seed to poor peasants and bought the harvest for American buyers.[15]
An unpublished study of the export sector by a team of the national natural-resources institute, Inderena, found that the first to work with marijuana were smugglers of liquor, cigarettes, appliances and coffee, who had the knowledge, the equipment and the men to export goods illegally.[3]: 77–78 In the truth commission's account some traffickers came from old smuggling groups that already had routes and equipment, and the category of marimbero took in smugglers, landowners and settlers; the commission calls the American mafias, which guaranteed the market, the real promoters of the business.[10]: 86 The governor of La Guajira told the Wall Street Journal in 1978 that North Americans organised in mafias had brought the money to start the planting.[9]: 118 Iván Rada Verdecia's study of Villanueva holds that the people of the Guajira and the coast handled growing, harvesting and transport within Colombia, while others ran the distribution networks.[11]: 80 In Miami a grand jury indicted 14 people on 1 May 1979 as members of a ring that imported large quantities of marijuana. Its American leaders were sentenced in 1980; a landowner of Santa Marta who worked with them could not be arrested because he was in Colombia.[4]: 112–113
Scale
The financiers' association ANIF valued the trade at 1.4 billion dollars by the mid-1970s, 39 per cent of the value of all Colombian exports, and at about 83 per cent of the value of coffee exports by the late 1970s.[1]: 160, 167 Semana put the country's income from it at 2.2 billion dollars a year at the height of the boom, more than coffee brought in, and wrote that half a million pounds left each week for the coasts of Florida.[14] Colombia's share of the American market was put at 70 per cent of the marijuana consumed in 1979 by the House Select Committee,[13]: 9 at three quarters in 1982 by the Central Intelligence Agency,[16] and at 90 per cent in 1978 by Semana, from what it called unofficial figures.[14] The National Narcotics Intelligence Consumers Committee estimated that Colombia supplied 57 per cent of all the marijuana available in the United States in 1982 and 1983, some 6,900 to 9,300 tonnes a year, and 42 per cent in 1984.[17]: 15–17 The House committee was told in 1979 that over 40,000 families lived on the trade;[13]: 3 Time wrote that some 70,000 families were believed to be involved.[12]
In 1978 the Colombian authorities estimated that some 240,000 acres (about 97,000 hectares) had been planted since the boom began, and a former Colombian finance minister told the Wall Street Journal to divide every figure heard in Colombia by ten.[9]: 117 After a helicopter survey in 1978 a Colombian official put the crop in the Guajira at about 250,000 acres (about 100,000 hectares), ten times the earlier reports.[12] The House committee was given about 15,000 hectares for the Perijá alone in 1983, when 17,000 hectares were reported for all Colombia, and later received estimates of up to 44,000 hectares for the whole country.[2]: 10–11 The price of a pound of marijuana in the Guajira rose from about 20 dollars to at least 60 in the years before 1978, Atlanta magazine reported.[9]: 97
Regulation and enforcement
Growing and selling marijuana had been a crime in Colombia since 1947, when a decree of President Mariano Ospina Pérez penalised the cultivation, distribution and sale of coca and marijuana and ordered crops destroyed.[3]: 74 On the coast the authorities did not enforce the law as they did in the Andean interior.[3]: 84 In 1977 President Alfonso López Michelsen set up a small unit to pursue the smugglers, with three helicopters given by the United States.[9]: 118 From December 1977 to February 1978 American agencies ran Operation Stopgap, a campaign to intercept Colombian marijuana at sea.[16]
Decree 2144 of 1978, one of the security statutes of the new president, Julio César Turbay, set up controls over the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and the Guajira peninsula to suppress the growing and transport of marijuana. The campaign began on 1 November 1978, administered by Battalion No. 2 in Barranquilla under the Ministry of Defence.[1]: 171 It was a joint initiative with the administration of Jimmy Carter, aimed at the Guajira, where the circuit began, and at Florida, where it ended; most of its resources went to the Colombian side.[1]: 160 The Colombian part was meant to complement a similar effort by American agencies along the Florida peninsula.[13]: 3 In April 1979 the Colombian defence minister told the House committee that the military had seized between 1,500 and 2,000 tons of marijuana. American and Colombian intelligence reported that the price on the beach had tripled in six months, but supply in the United States had not yet fallen.[13]: 3–4 Turbay's memoirs count, for the first eight months, 10,217 hectares of crops destroyed, about 2.6 million kilograms of marijuana seized and 1,127 Colombians and 188 foreigners detained. Britto argues that such figures became a political football on which American military and police aid depended.[1]: 171 The army was later withdrawn from the campaign amid allegations of corruption in its ranks,[6]: 18 and in 1980 Turbay created the first anti-narcotics unit outside the armed forces.[1]: 172 In the middle of the campaign the financiers' association ANIF, led by Ernesto Samper, concluded that the only viable solution was to legalise the production, trade and use of the plant in both Colombia and the United States.[1]: 173
Turbay told the House committee in 1979 that he was reluctant to begin spraying at once because of the international controversy over paraquat,[13]: 6 the herbicide then sprayed on marijuana fields in Mexico (see Herbicide spraying in Mexico).[12] Colombia resisted American calls for aerial spraying until December 1983, when the government approved limited trials, which began in April 1984. After the murder of the justice minister, Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, that month, the government decided on a spraying campaign in the north-coast region, which destroyed 3,400 hectares by the end of 1984.[2]: 10–11 Colombia chose glyphosate rather than paraquat.[18] The spraying destroyed about 6,000 hectares in 1985 and 9,700 in 1986, mainly in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and the Serranía del Perijá (see Herbicide spraying in Colombia).[19]: 17
Decline
The decline was long read as the natural end of a boom-and-bust cycle and as the result of the cocaine cartels' takeover of the country.[3]: 2 Britto argues that the criminalisation of growers and traffickers and the militarisation of the region between 1978 and 1980, a joint effort of the Colombian and American governments, explain it better. In her account eradication and interdiction pushed the traffickers into ferocious competition with one another and made the business costly and less viable,[3]: 3 and by the mid-1980s it had collapsed.[3]: 16 Bonivento van Grieken finds fewer shipments and lost harvests at the end of the 1970s under Turbay's security statute.[7]: 189 By the early 1980s, with state controls and falling prices, many marimberos had lost their money, and in 1982 the business was at its last breath.[7]: 194–195 In the 70 albums of vallenato music that he studied, every album of 1976–1978 carries at least one greeting to a marimbero; from 1979 to 1983 some artists stopped greeting them.[7]: 189
In 1982 Semana gave three causes of the decline. The first was the repressive alliance between the Turbay government and the United States State Department. The second, which it reported as something people said, was the traffickers' own practice of mixing sesame and other plants into the bales to meet American demand. The third was the marijuana that American growers now raised themselves, which it said supplied 40 per cent of American consumption; by its figures Colombia's share had fallen from 90 per cent in 1978 to less than 40.[14] The National Narcotics Intelligence Consumers Committee attributed the fall of Colombia's share in 1984 to more seizures and eradication and to more growing and trafficking in other countries; stronger American, Jamaican and Mexican marijuana was more widely sold.[17]: 14–15 In 1985 Mexico overtook Colombia as a source.[19]: 15 By late 1987, the State Department reported, Colombia had eliminated much of the crop in the traditional growing areas, while growing elsewhere in the country had increased.[20]: 5 By 1990 Colombia, once the main source of the marijuana available in the United States, supplied only a small share of the imports, and cultivation in the Sierra Nevada and the Perijá was much lower than before.[21]: 35
By the early 1980s the bonanza marimbera was over, and some of its leaders moved into the cocaine trade.[10]: 98 Some marimberos put their money into hotels or cattle; those who tried cocaine with the Antioquian cartels had little success, Bonivento van Grieken writes.[7]: 194 In 1993 the head of the anti-narcotics police warned of a new rise in marijuana growing in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the Perijá and Caquetá, by the same groups that had exported it in the 1970s.[22]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 Britto, Lina (2010). "A Trafficker's Paradise: The "War On Drugs" and the New Cold War in Colombia". Contemporánea: Historia y problemas del siglo XX. 1 (1): 159–177. ISSN 1688-7638.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control, U.S. House of Representatives (1986). Latin American Study Missions Concerning International Narcotics Problems (August 3–19, 1985) (PDF) (Committee print). Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office. SCNAC-99-2-1. Retrieved 19 October 2026.
- ↑ 3.00 3.01 3.02 3.03 3.04 3.05 3.06 3.07 3.08 3.09 3.10 3.11 3.12 3.13 3.14 3.15 3.16 3.17 3.18 3.19 3.20 Britto, Lina (2020). Marijuana Boom: The Rise and Fall of Colombia's First Drug Paradise. Oakland: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-32547-0.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 Sáenz Rovner, Eduardo (2011). "Entre Carlos Lehder y los vaqueros de la cocaína. La consolidación de las redes de narcotraficantes colombianos en Miami en los años 70". Cuadernos de Economía (in español). 30 (54): 105–126.
- ↑ Comisión para el Esclarecimiento de la Verdad, la Convivencia y la No Repetición (2022). Caso «Parcelaciones del Cesar: tierras campesinas tiznadas por el conflicto» (PDF) (Report) (in español). Comisión de la Verdad. Retrieved 20 October 2026.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 U.S. General Accounting Office (November 1988). Drug Control: U.S.-Supported Efforts in Colombia and Bolivia (PDF) (Report to the Congress). Washington. GAO/NSIAD-89-24. Retrieved 21 October 2026.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 Bonivento van Grieken, Franklin R. (2024). "De la hambruna de la marihuana al Premio Nobel de Literatura: bonanza marimbera y vallenato en el Caribe colombiano (1976–1985)". Anuario de Historia Regional y de las Fronteras (in español). 29 (2): 179–198. doi:10.18273/revanu.v29n2-2024008.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Sáenz Rovner, Eduardo (2007). "La "prehistoria" de la marihuana en Colombia: consumo y cultivos entre los años 30 y 60" (PDF). Cuadernos de Economía (in español). XXVI (47): 205–222.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6 Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate (1978). Stopping "Mother Ships": A Loophole in Drug Enforcement (Hearing on S. 3437, August 22, 1978). Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office. Retrieved 30 October 2026.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 Comisión para el Esclarecimiento de la Verdad, la Convivencia y la No Repetición (2022). Colombia adentro: relatos territoriales sobre el conflicto armado. Caribe (PDF). Informe Final, tomo territorial (in español). Bogotá: Comisión de la Verdad. Retrieved 20 October 2026.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 Rada Verdecia, Iván Alonso (2018). Cultivadores, comerciantes y marimberos. Historia social del municipio de Villanueva – Guajira, 1974–1986 (Licenciatura en Ciencias Sociales thesis) (in español). Bogotá: Universidad Pedagógica Nacional. hdl:20.500.12209/10543.
- ↑ 12.0 12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4 "The Colombian connection". Time. 29 January 1979. Retrieved 30 October 2026.
- ↑ 13.0 13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4 13.5 Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control, U.S. House of Representatives (1979). Factfinding Mission to Colombia and Puerto Rico (PDF) (Committee report). Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office. SCNAC-96-1-2. Retrieved 30 October 2026.
- ↑ 14.0 14.1 14.2 14.3 "Bonanza marimbera, adios!". Semana (in español). 1 November 1982. Retrieved 30 October 2026.
- ↑ Thoumi, Francisco E. (14 July 2002). "Illegal Drugs in Colombia: from illegal economic boom to social crisis". Semana. Retrieved 19 October 2026.
- ↑ 16.0 16.1 Directorate of Intelligence, Office of Global Issues (September 1982). Smuggling Colombian Marijuana: A High-Profit Venture (Intelligence assessment). Central Intelligence Agency. GI 82-10211. Retrieved 21 October 2026 – via CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room.
- ↑ 17.0 17.1 National Narcotics Intelligence Consumers Committee. Narcotics Intelligence Estimate 1984: The Supply of Illicit Drugs to the United States from Foreign and Domestic Sources in 1984 (With Near Term Projections) (PDF) (Report) – via National Criminal Justice Reference Service.
- ↑ Ledford, Joey (11 July 1984). "Colombia's decision to spray its marijuana with the herbicide..." UPI Archives. United Press International. Retrieved 21 October 2026.
- ↑ 19.0 19.1 National Narcotics Intelligence Consumers Committee (June 1987). The NNICC Report 1985–1986: The Supply of Illicit Drugs to the United States from Foreign and Domestic Sources in 1985 and 1986 (with Near Term Projections) (PDF) (Report) – via National Criminal Justice Reference Service.
- ↑ Bureau of International Narcotics Matters (1 March 1988). International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (PDF) (Report). United States Department of State. Retrieved 21 October 2026 – via National Criminal Justice Reference Service.
- ↑ National Narcotics Intelligence Consumers Committee (June 1991). The NNICC Report 1990: The Supply of Illicit Drugs to the United States (PDF) (Report). Retrieved 30 October 2026 – via National Criminal Justice Reference Service.
- ↑ "Prevén nueva bonanza marimbera". El Tiempo (in español). 7 June 1993. Retrieved 20 October 2026.