Contrabandistas, marimberos y mafiosos (1994)

Cover of the first edition, TM Editores, 1994.

Cover of the first edition, TM Editores, 1994.

Contrabandistas, marimberos y mafiosos

Historia social de la mafia colombiana (1965–1992)

Publication

Author	Darío Betancourt and Martha Luz García
Publisher	TM Editores (Tercer Mundo Editores)
Place	Bogotá
Published	1994
Language	Spanish

Coverage

Subjects	Drug trafficking, Organised crime, Bonanza marimbera, Cocaine, Opium poppy, Colombia
Relevance	A social history of Colombian trafficking organisations whose section on the Caribbean coast describes the marijuana crop of the Sierra Nevada and the Guajira in the 1970s: the growing areas, the planting, harvest, drying and grading of the crop, and the people who worked on it.

Access

ISBN	958-601-481-9

Contrabandistas, marimberos y mafiosos: historia social de la mafia colombiana (1965–1992) (Smugglers, marijuana traders and mafiosi: a social history of the Colombian mafia, 1965–1992) is a 1994 book by Darío Betancourt and Martha Luz García, published in Bogotá by Tercer Mundo Editores. It traces the trafficking organisations of Colombia from the smugglers and marijuana traders of the 1960s and 1970s to the cocaine and heroin organisations of the early 1990s.

Its section on the Caribbean coast gives an account of the bonanza marimbera, the marijuana export trade of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and the Guajira in the 1970s.

Authors

Betancourt and García had earlier written together on the violence of western Colombia between 1946 and 1965, in Matones y cuadrilleros (1990), and on the regional centres of the mafia, in an article of 1991 in Folios, the journal of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the Universidad Pedagógica Nacional. They thank the students of their courses at that university for discussing the arguments of the book. Betancourt, a professor at the Universidad Pedagógica Nacional, disappeared in Bogotá on 30 April 1999; his body was found near the city that September.

Background

The research was supported by Colciencias, the research centre Cinep and the Institute of Political Studies and International Relations of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, whose director Gonzalo Sánchez, through his project on actors and regions of present-day violence in Colombia, made much of the study possible. The authors also took part in Cinep's project on violence in the Andean region. The prologue is by Rodrigo Uprimny, then a professor in the law faculty of the Universidad Nacional, who describes the book as a social history of the Colombian mafias built mainly on documentary sources.

The section on the coast draws on the Colombian press, the weekly Alternativa among it, on the boom-era reportage of José Cervantes Angulo, La noche de las luciérnagas, and on a 1988 sociology thesis by G. Daza Sierra on marijuana, society and the state in the Guajira. The authors call Daza's and Cervantes's works the two fullest studies of the subject and the region.

Argument

The authors start from a continuity of violence in Colombia: in their thesis, the activities that ended in a cocaine mafia revived one of the figures of the Violencia of the 1950s, the hired killer. They define a mafia as a group bound by economic, social, political and cultural interests that settles its conflicts through its own armed agents and not through the courts. They find in the Colombian case a mixture of the three types they describe abroad: the old Sicilian mafia, the urban Italian-American mafia and a discreet Mediterranean European form.

In their account the Colombian mafia grew out of the economic and social crisis of regional elites around 1970. It formed in five regions, each hit by the crisis of its main industry: the Caribbean coast (cotton), Antioquia (textiles), the Valle (sugar), the emerald zones of Boyacá and Cundinamarca, and the eastern border with Venezuela. These became the five initial "foci" of the mafia. The authors explain why the mafia formed around cocaine and not marijuana by the short life of the marijuana business, under ten years, its weakness, and the difficulty of moving so bulky a drug into the United States.

Marijuana in the book

The coastal "focus" is the book's account of the marijuana boom. Before it, in the authors' description, marijuana was used by Indigenous communities, rural day labourers and small urban groups linked to brothels and to crafts such as shoemaking and carpentry. They date the first contacts with buyers from the United States to 1968–1970 and the large-scale boom to the 1970s, and they cite the head of the national security department in the Guajira for the statement that by 1974, 80 per cent of the department's farmers grew marijuana. The crisis of cotton, undercut by smuggled synthetic cloth, freed land and labour for the crop.

The section names the growing areas on the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and the Montes de Oca, from Palomino, which became known as the "Mecca of marijuana", to San Juan del Cesar, Villanueva, Urumita, Fonseca and Barrancas. It describes the year's work: labourers cleared the slopes with machetes at the start of the year, seed was scattered on the cleared ground and a further crew tended the crop for four to five months until the first harvest. Buyers advanced half the value of the crop. The harvest was dried on racks (trojas), pressed, packed in fique sacks and graded A, B or C, grade A being "Red Point o Santa Marta Gold". The book puts the decline of the trade from 1978–1979, when growers in the United States began to supply their own market. It states that repression in the coastal departments from 1979–1980 moved growers from marijuana to coca.

The chapter on opium poppy states that marijuana reached Colombia in the 18th or 19th century, and that its spread followed the import of Indian hemp seed in 1947, under the government of Mariano Ospina Pérez, for the textile industry.

Contents

After the acknowledgments, the prologue and the introduction, the book has five chapters:

1. La mafia y la sociedad (the Sicilian, North American and Mediterranean European mafias; mafia, crime and illegality; mafia, "drugs" and "drug trafficking")
2. Los cinco focos mafiosos iniciales (the coastal, Antioquian, Valle, central and eastern nuclei; the production and routes of coca and cocaine)
3. Estado, economía e ilegalidad en Colombia
4. Tres tendencias en la mafia colombiana de la cocaína
5. Los cultivos y las mafias de la amapola en Colombia

Conclusions follow, then two annexes: a periodisation and chronology of the mafia, with its sources, and a table of paramilitary, hired-killer and self-defence groups.

Reception

The book was reviewed in 2007 in Cultura y Droga, the journal of the Universidad de Caldas, by Catalina María Arango, whose review summarises its definition of the mafia and its account of the mafia's origins in the regional crises of the 1970s.

Lina Britto, in Marijuana Boom, cites the book for the argument that the recession of the 1970s opened room for private actors, drug traffickers among them, to find alternatives to the slump. She also lists its pages on the coast among the influential works that present Peace Corps volunteers as the pioneers of the marijuana and cocaine trades, a view she rejects.

See also

• Bonanza marimbera – the marijuana export trade of the coast
• La noche de las luciérnagas (1980) – the reportage the coastal section draws on
• Marijuana Boom (2020) – a later history of the boom
• Santa Marta Gold – the trade name the book gives for the top grade
• Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta – the main growing area of the boom