Marijuana Boom (2020)

Cover of the paperback edition, University of California Press, 2020.

Cover of the paperback edition, University of California Press, 2020.

Marijuana Boom

The Rise and Fall of Colombia's First Drug Paradise

Publication

Author	Lina Britto
Publisher	University of California Press
Place	Oakland, California
Published	2020
Pages	352
Language	English

Coverage

Subjects	Bonanza marimbera, Cannabis history, Drug trafficking, Drug policy, Colombia, Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, La Guajira
Relevance	A history of the 1970s marijuana export economy of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and the Guajira, built on oral history and archives, with a chapter on how the crop was grown, graded and sold and an account of how the Santa Marta Gold of the export trade came about.

Access

ISBN	978-0-520-32547-0

Marijuana Boom: The Rise and Fall of Colombia's First Drug Paradise is a 2020 history of the bonanza marimbera, the export of marijuana from northern Colombia to the United States in the 1970s, by the Colombian historian Lina Britto. It was published by the University of California Press. The book covers the Greater Magdalena, the region of the present departments of La Guajira, Magdalena and Cesar around the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, from the early 20th century to the mid-1980s.

Britto argues that the export trade grew out of the region's older traditions of contraband and of tropical export crops, and that it collapsed after the Colombian and United States governments criminalised its growers and traders and militarised the region between 1978 and 1980. A Spanish translation, El boom de la marihuana: auge y caída del primer paraíso de las drogas en Colombia, was published in Bogotá in 2022 by Crítica with the Universidad de los Andes.

Author

Lina Britto was born and raised in Medellín; her father's family came from San Juan del Cesar, in La Guajira, one of the towns at the centre of the boom. She trained in journalism, anthropology and history. She began the research as a master's thesis in anthropology at the Universidad de la Cordillera in La Paz, Bolivia. It became a doctoral dissertation in history at New York University; she turned the dissertation into the book at Harvard University and at Northwestern University, where she teaches in the Department of History.

The fourth chapter is abridged from her article "Hurricane Winds: Vallenato Music and Marijuana Traffic in Colombia's First Illegal Drugs Boom", published in the Hispanic American Historical Review in 2015.

Background

Britto first visited the region as a child in 1988 and returned in 2004 to collect testimony on the boom; she went back each summer for the following decade, a period in which paramilitary groups held the Sierra Nevada and the peninsula. She describes her method as a combination of journalism, anthropology and history: interviews with participants and witnesses located across the region, participant observation that included listening to songs from the marijuana years, and research in public archives, family collections, the Colombian and United States press and libraries in both countries. An appendix sets out the methods and protocols of the oral history. Her acknowledgments name the Archivo General de la Nación and other libraries in Bogotá, regional archives and libraries in Santa Marta, Riohacha and Valledupar, the National Archives at College Park, the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and the National Security Archive.

Britto explains her choice of words in the introduction. She writes marijuana and not cannabis because it was the term used by the people who took part in the boom or lived through it. She also uses marimba, the coastal name behind bonanza marimbera and marimberos, which she derives from mariamba, a name for hemp among people of African descent on the Caribbean coast.

Argument

The book follows the boom in three parts, "Ascendance", "Peak" and "Decline". The first part traces how the region's contraband trade and its export crops, bananas, coffee and cotton among them, laid the ground for the new export sector. Smugglers from the rural popular classes who had shipped coffee to the United States outside the legal channels switched to marijuana in the late 1960s, at first knowing nothing about the crop.

The second part covers 1972 to 1978, when crops grown only for export turned the traffic into a full export sector. Britto holds that growers, intermediaries and exporters regarded their trade as legitimate, though they knew it was illegal. In her account the trade ran on kinship, compadrazgo and codes of honour among men. The marimberos, the new class of marijuana merchants, sought standing by sponsoring vallenato music and its parties.

The third part covers 1978 to the mid-1980s. Britto reads the joint campaign of the two governments in the Guajira and the Sierra Nevada, launched in November 1978 and known in diplomatic circles as the Two Peninsulas campaign, as the first chapter of the "war on drugs". In her account, militarisation deepened rivalries among traffickers and broke the codes that had kept violence in check; the export business collapsed. She sets this explanation against accounts that put the decline down to the ordinary course of boom and bust or to the rise of cocaine.

The crop in the book

The third chapter, "Santa Marta Gold", reconstructs how marijuana was grown, bought and graded. Buyers judged the crop by colour, smell, cleanliness, humidity and maturity. The best was yellow, dry, clean, aromatic and mature. It cost twice the lowest grade; "gold" was the top of it, flowers with no leaves. Below it came concha de coco, mango biche, rayada, negra and cafuche, all of them exported. Britto treats these grades as the result of growing conditions and of how the plants were handled and watered as they matured, not of genetic difference.

For the origin of Santa Marta Gold, the chapter relies on the agronomist Ariel Martínez, who had worked for the Santa Marta branch of the national natural-resources institute, Inderena, in the early 1970s. Martínez's hypothesis is that a native high-quality marijuana grew in only two places, at Quebrada Seca near Tucurinca and on the Tapias River near Dibulla. In his account growers crossed it with strains from Hawaii and Sonora with the help of United States buyers; the cross, in his account, was Santa Marta Gold. The same chapter takes up the story that Peace Corps volunteers started the trade. Britto traces it to José Cervantes Angulo's La noche de las luciérnagas and to a 1984 letter by a former ambassador to the United States. She sets against it the testimony of volunteers who served in Dibulla in the 1960s; she concludes that United States buyers took part in improving and expanding the local crop but did not start the business.

Britto states that the Indigenous peoples of the Sierra Nevada have not grown or used marijuana. In the second chapter she reports the story that cannabis indica seed imported from India for textiles in 1947 seeded the crops of the Sierra Nevada and the Cauca valley; she writes that she found no evidence to prove or disprove it.

Contents

The introduction, "A Forgotten History", is followed by six chapters in three parts.

Part one: Ascendance

1. Wheels of Progress: Tropical Commodities and Regional Formation
2. Coming from the Mountain: Coffee Contraband and Marijuana Smuggling

Part two: Peak

3. Santa Marta Gold: Technological Adaptations and Boom
4. Party Animals: Vallenato Music and Cultural Negotiation

Part three: Decline

5. Two Peninsulas: Narcotics Diplomacy and the War on Drugs
6. Reign of Terror: Criminalization and Violence

A conclusion, "A Remembered History", and an appendix, "Comment on Oral Sources", close the book, followed by the notes, a bibliography and an index.

Reception

Reviewers of the English edition praised its combination of archival work with oral history. Wil G. Pansters, in the European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, called it an important book that brings forward a regional history eclipsed by the later cocaine industry. He found that it shows how studies of the social organisation of the drug trade and studies of its discourses and cultures can be joined; he allowed that some readers may find it ranges over too many fields. Jane M. Rausch, in the Revista de Estudios Colombianos, called it a significant accomplishment written with a journalist's flair. Sharika D. Crawford, reviewing it with eight other books on Colombia in the Latin American Research Review, read it as setting Colombia back in the Caribbean and Atlantic world and as bringing the state back into the story of the drug trade. Franklin Reynel Bonivento, in the anthropology journal Maguaré, judged that it moves beyond long-standing exoticising views of the boom and called it a starting point for new work on the subject.

Some reviewers raised objections. Julián Gómez-Delgado, in Historia Agraria de América Latina, found the book persuasive but argued that its own evidence points to a violent, state-sanctioned form of law, where Britto at times writes of lawlessness or a legal vacuum. Javier Guerrero Castro, in Trashumante, credited her access to participants with dispelling the story that Peace Corps volunteers started the marijuana crop and trade, but held that she accepts the participants' accounts too readily and does not criticise her sources enough. Reviewing the Spanish edition in Cuadernos de Historia, Rubén Darío Molina Palacio argued that it underplays the marijuana crops of the Andean interior and the eastern plains and the intermediaries from those regions, while agreeing with the historian Eduardo Sáenz Rovner that it is set to become a classic of the history of illegal drugs.

The English edition was also reviewed in the Hispanic American Historical Review, The Americas, The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, the International Criminal Justice Review and The American Historical Review, and the Spanish edition in Historia y Sociedad and the Banco de la República's Boletín Cultural y Bibliográfico.

See also

• Bonanza marimbera – the export trade the book is about
• Contrabandistas, marimberos y mafiosos (1994) – an earlier social history of Colombian trafficking
• La noche de las luciérnagas (1980) – the boom-era reportage the book discusses
• Mango biche – one of the export grades
• Santa Marta Gold – the trade name whose origin the third chapter examines
• Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta – the growing area at the centre of the book