La noche de las luciérnagas (1980)
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| Author | José Cervantes Angulo |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Plaza & Janés Editores Colombia |
| Place | Bogotá |
| Published | 1980 |
| Language | Spanish |
| Subjects | Bonanza marimbera, Drug trafficking, Journalism, La Guajira, Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia |
|---|---|
| Relevance | Reportage published during the marijuana boom of the Guajira and the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, which reprints much of the Colombian and foreign press on the trade and keeps the beliefs and trade names of the time, among them the "night of the fireflies" that gives the book its title. |
La noche de las luciérnagas (The night of the fireflies) is a 1980 book of reportage on the marijuana trade of northern Colombia by the Colombian journalist José Cervantes Angulo, published in Bogotá by Plaza & Janés in March 1980.[1] Its cover presents it as everything the reader wanted to know about the traffic in Colombian marijuana, from the first shipment to the birth of a new socioeconomic class, the marimbera.[2]
The book reports on the bonanza marimbera, the export of marijuana from the Guajira and the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta to the United States. Alongside the author's own narrative it reprints many articles by other writers, a large share of them translated from the United States and French press.[3]
Author
The back cover describes Cervantes Angulo as a journalist born in Barranquilla in 1945 who spent a year investigating the trade, interviewing members of the agencies fighting it, growers, transporters and bosses, and who visited the plantations.[2] He worked for the Barranquilla newspaper El Heraldo for 23 years and was the correspondent of El Tiempo for ten years, until 1982. He died in Medellín on 3 October 1995, while awaiting a second heart transplant.[4] In a note to the reader he states that every episode in the book is true and that the cases and the names of those involved are on file with the Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies in Colombia and the United States. He writes that he consulted those files, interviewed witnesses and people involved. He names the places he visited: the Guajira, Barranquilla, Santa Marta, Cartagena, the Sierra Nevada, Miami, New York and Las Vegas. He thanks the commanders of the Colombian Army's Second Brigade, reporters of the Miami Herald and Washington Post and the Colombian consul in Miami.[5]
The book
A frame story runs through the book: it opens with a stranger forcing his way into the author's small newsroom office one Sunday; the last chapter returns to that incident.[1] Between them, the second chapter reconstructs a smuggling flight of DC-3 aircraft to clandestine airstrips between San Juan del Cesar and Villanueva,[6] and the third profiles the traffickers and describes the crop.[7] The fourth chapter, on Colombian marijuana as a "world figure", reprints in Spanish articles from the Miami Herald, the Washington Post, Esquire, Paris Match, L'Express, Time and The Boston Globe, together with Colombian columns and the address of Ernesto Samper Pizano, president of the financial institutions' association ANIF, to its forum of 15 March 1979 on the legalisation of marijuana, which ANIF supported.[3] The fifth chapter, on the "myth and reality" of the marimberos, reprints reports on the new rich of the Guajira and an article by the journalist Carlos Antonio Herrera Fernández from the magazine Guajira.[8] An appendix written as the book went to press reports the arrest of the United States trafficker Jamiel Chagra and the seizure of a large marijuana cargo at a farm near Barranquilla.[9]
Marijuana in the book
The title comes from a passage on the harvest in the Sierra Nevada. The book calls the "night of the fireflies" the moment when marijuana of the "Red Point" or "Santa Marta Gold" type, after long spraying with panela water, reaches its peak and the leaves give off reddish glints that make the plants look like fireflies in the tropical night.[7] Herrera Fernández's reprinted article gives a different account, in which the glints are the resin of punto rojo and the source of the legend. The same article describes Santa Marta Gold as the traditional type, commonly called la mona or amarilla, and red point as a stronger and more resinous one.[8]
On cultivation, the third chapter describes the crop dried on trojas, the racks used for coffee, packed in fique sacks or plastic bags, and graded A, B or C at the hidden stores called caletas; it reports coffee and marijuana planted side by side with cassava and plantain between them as cover.[7] The fourth chapter summarises a Santa Marta student thesis on the crop, with a calendar of clearing and seedbeds in January and February and transplanting from April to June. It also reprints the Time report that named a "mona" grown at higher altitudes and a "Mona Cielo Azul" said to come from Thai seed.[3] Press reports and interviews reprinted in the book place new growing in the late 1970s in Córdoba, Sucre, the Valle del Cauca, Cauca, the Darién and the eastern plains.[7][3]
The first chapter tells how two American hippies found the quality of the marijuana grown in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and carried it home, and how United States traffickers then sent botanists and agronomists to the Sierra.[10]
Contents
After the author's note, the book has six chapters, an epilogue and an appendix:[1]
- El incidente
- Una operación aérea perfecta (de Vietnam a Macondo)
- Los hombres de la marihuana
- La marihuana colombiana, personaje mundial
- Mito y realidad de los marimberos
- Final del incidente
Reception
Darío Betancourt and Martha Luz García, in Contrabandistas, marimberos y mafiosos (1994), named Cervantes Angulo's book and a 1988 thesis by G. Daza Sierra as the two fullest studies of the trade and the region. They drew on it for their account of the coast.[11]
Lina Britto, in Marijuana Boom, describes the book as a collection of Cervantes Angulo's newspaper articles on the workings of the marijuana belt. She notes that its story of the hippies and the traffickers' agronomists rests on unnamed sources. She traces to it the idea, later spread by politicians, that Peace Corps volunteers started the trade, which she rejects.[12]
See also
- Bonanza marimbera – the trade the book reports on
- Contrabandistas, marimberos y mafiosos (1994) – a social history that draws on the book
- Marijuana Boom (2020) – a later history that discusses the book
- Mona Cielo Azul – a name reported in the Time article the book reprints
- Punto rojo – the type whose resin the reprinted Guajira article links to the title
- Santa Marta Gold – the trade name of the Sierra Nevada's export marijuana
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Cervantes Angulo, José (1980). La noche de las luciérnagas (in español). Bogotá: Plaza & Janés.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Cervantes Angulo, José (1980). La noche de las luciérnagas (in español). Bogotá: Plaza & Janés. Front and back covers.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 Cervantes Angulo, José (1980). "La marihuana colombiana, personaje mundial". La noche de las luciérnagas (in español). Bogotá: Plaza & Janés. pp. 121–278.
- ↑ Redacción El Tiempo (4 October 1995). "Murió José Cervantes Angulo". El Tiempo (in español). Bogotá.
- ↑ Cervantes Angulo, José (1980). "Advertencia del autor". La noche de las luciérnagas (in español). Bogotá: Plaza & Janés.
- ↑ Cervantes Angulo, José (1980). "Una operación aérea perfecta (de Vietnam a Macondo)". La noche de las luciérnagas (in español). Bogotá: Plaza & Janés. pp. 33–50.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 Cervantes Angulo, José (1980). "Los hombres de la marihuana". La noche de las luciérnagas (in español). Bogotá: Plaza & Janés. pp. 51–120.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Cervantes Angulo, José (1980). "Mito y realidad de los marimberos". La noche de las luciérnagas (in español). Bogotá: Plaza & Janés. pp. 279–308.
- ↑ Cervantes Angulo, José (1980). "Apéndice". La noche de las luciérnagas (in español). Bogotá: Plaza & Janés. pp. 325–327.
- ↑ Cervantes Angulo, José (1980). "El incidente". La noche de las luciérnagas (in español). Bogotá: Plaza & Janés. pp. 21–23.
- ↑ Betancourt, Darío; García, Martha Luz (1994). "Los cinco focos mafiosos iniciales". Contrabandistas, marimberos y mafiosos: historia social de la mafia colombiana (1965–1992) (in español). Bogotá: TM Editores. pp. 43–102. ISBN 958-601-481-9.
- ↑ Britto, Lina (2020). "Santa Marta Gold: Technological Adaptations and Boom". Marijuana Boom: The Rise and Fall of Colombia's First Drug Paradise. Oakland: University of California Press. pp. 89–115. ISBN 978-0-520-32547-0.