Polígono da Maconha

Polígono da Maconha
ActiveRecorded as grown here since 2000
⛶
Location	Brazil
Coordinates	-8.477, -38.917
Country	Brazil
Provinces/States	Pernambuco
Area	20,900 km²
Climate	Semi-arid
Primary Rivers	São Francisco River
Growing history
Conservation
Populations	none documented yet

Polígono da Maconha ("Marijuana Polygon") is the name used by police, the press and researchers for the cannabis-growing area of the São Francisco River valley in the semi-arid north-east of Brazil.^: 20 The name has no agreed boundary.^: 3 The growing region is drawn on the 13 municipalities of the sertão of Pernambuco in which the Federal Police recorded the cannabis fields it destroyed between November 2010 and June 2018, together with their islands in the river. Of those fields, 72.74 per cent were on the islands.^: 7 The Bahia bank of the river, which some sources include in the Polígono, lies outside it.

Geography

The 13 municipalities lie in two of Pernambuco's mesoregions, the Sertão Pernambucano and the São Francisco Pernambucano; the second takes in the islands of the São Francisco between Pernambuco and Bahia. Both mesoregions are in the Brazilian semi-arid zone, which the development agency Sudene defines by an average annual rainfall of 800 mm or less and a daily water deficit of 60 per cent or more over the year.^: 2 The native vegetation of the semi-arid interior is the caatinga, a thorny scrub.^{: 22, 24}

Three hydroelectric dams were built on the São Francisco, at Itaparica (the Luiz Gonzaga Dam), Paulo Afonso and Xingó. Several towns were flooded. In 1986, after years of protest by the displaced, 6,000 families of rural workers were resettled on irrigated land.^: 18–19 Irrigated fruit farming expanded on the river from the 1970s.^{: 19, 21}

Salgueiro, in the north of the region, is where the BR-232 and BR-116 highways meet. It is about equally distant from the state capitals of the north-east. Eight of the nine north-eastern capitals lie within 550 km of the Pernambuco growing area.^: 3

Name and extent

Paulo Fraga and Jorge Iulianelli write that the Médio and Submédio (middle and sub-middle) São Francisco came to be called the Polígono da Maconha because of the quantity of the plant grown there.^: 20 Lilian da Rosa and Fraga date the name to the 1980s and 1990s, when the Submédio became the largest producing area in the country.^: 240: 190

Fraga and Joyce Silva place the producing centre where Bahia, Pernambuco, Alagoas and Sergipe meet. They add that the Federal Police had recently included Ceará.^: 138 A report by Agência Pública in 2017 listed Salgueiro, Cabrobó, Orocó, Petrolina, Carnaubeira da Penha, Belém do São Francisco, Betânia, Floresta and Santa Maria da Boa Vista in Pernambuco and Juazeiro, Paulo Afonso, Glória and Curaçá in Bahia. Rhassanno Patriota, Lucilene Sá and Simone Sato used the Federal Police's georeferenced data to fix which Pernambuco municipalities belong to it. The fields destroyed from November 2010 to June 2018 lay in Belém do São Francisco, Betânia, Cabrobó, Carnaubeira da Penha, Floresta, Inajá, Manari, Mirandiba, Orocó, Parnamirim, Salgueiro, Santa Maria da Boa Vista and Tacaratu.^{: 3, 7}

Orocó, Cabrobó and Belém do São Francisco together held 81.23 per cent of the 2,227 fields destroyed in that period. Orocó, the second-smallest of the 13 municipalities, had the most, 812; Cabrobó had 677, Belém do São Francisco 320, Santa Maria da Boa Vista 157 and Carnaubeira da Penha 119.^: 9 Of all the fields, 1,620 were on islands in the São Francisco, chiefly in Santa Maria da Boa Vista, Orocó, Cabrobó and Belém do São Francisco. The fields on the mainland lay near water mains, seasonal streams, public and private reservoirs and small rainwater stores in the hills.^{: 7, 9} The islands are federal land.^: 12

Cultivation history

Before the federal operations

In the 19th century the explorer Richard Burton judged the banks of the São Francisco suited to growing hemp for fibre.^: 18 In the 1950s the sociologist Donald Pierson, working in the valley for the federal government, counted at least five riverbank communities that planted cannabis. He found it smoked in groups and traded to Salvador, Santos and Rio de Janeiro, with little policing.^: 20

The Diario de Pernambuco reported police action against cannabis, destroying fields or seizing the drug, in 67 municipalities between 1947 and 1981, mostly in Alagoas and Pernambuco. Until 1958 the reports came from the border between the two states. From 1971 to 1978 they spread across Pernambuco, to the banks and islands of the São Francisco and to the Ipanema, Moxotó and Pajeú valleys. In the 1970s the fields reported held 1,000 to 30,000 plants.^: 193–194 Cultivation had become constant in Cabrobó, Belém do São Francisco, Serra Talhada and Floresta by the mid-1970s. The river islands were already planted then, for their fertile soil and because they made eradication harder.^{: 240, 246}

Federal Police operations and trials, 1978–1999

In Operation Jaguar, in February 1978, the Federal Police found eight fields with 40,000 plants in Belém do São Francisco and Cabrobó; the officer in charge said the quantity amounted to 40 per cent of the cannabis consumed in the country.^: 196–197 The newspaper's reports of 1979 to 1981 centred on the Submédio São Francisco, in Floresta, Belém do São Francisco, Betânia, Serra Talhada and Cabrobó.^: 194

Fraga and Iulianelli write that before the second half of the 1980s the police acted against the fields only sporadically, so that the São Francisco crop grew with little hindrance.^: 20–21 Planting intensified in the 1980s to meet a growing domestic market. Farmers who worked on the islands in those years told Fraga and Iulianelli that the fruit trade begun in the 1970s helped, because cannabis travelled by road with the fruit. A retired farmer said that the smell of mangoes hid the smell of cannabis and that in Orocó "todo mundo plantava" ("everyone planted").^: 21 People they interviewed and the report of the Pernambuco state assembly's inquiry into drug trafficking in 2000 linked the growth of the crop in the mid- to late 1980s to the dams that displaced whole towns and to old family feuds that turned into fights for control of the planting.^: 17

In the 1980s the state began to prosecute cannabis farmers more forcefully, by opening criminal cases against them.^: 240 Seven cases opened at Belém do São Francisco between 1982 and 1989 were never judged and lapsed after two decades. In five of them the plants stood near streams and reservoirs; one field was watered with a suction pump. Two of the cases each concerned around a million plants or more.^{: 241, 246–248, 253}

Eradication became intense in the 1990s.^: 240 Operation Mandacaru, from November 1999 to January 2000, brought about 1,500 agents of the army, the Federal Police and the Federal Highway Police to the region; it destroyed 544,424 plants in 255 fields and arrested 204 people.

The Salgueiro station and the islands, since 2000

The plan of Operation Mandacaru included a Federal Police station at Salgueiro, which has led the investigation of the trade since the 2000s. Salgueiro matters for moving the crop because federal and state highways link it to the north-eastern capitals.^: 23

Fraga and Iulianelli write that fields seen near the roads in the 1980s had moved into the caatinga and onto the river islands.^: 22 Fraga and Silva place the move to the islands, mainly in Orocó and Cabrobó, and to federal land in the caatinga in the late 1990s and the 2000s.^: 146 Rosa and Fraga date the use of the islands to the 1970s.^: 246

Of the fields destroyed in Brazil from 2000 to 2007, 95 per cent were in the north-east, above all in the sertão of Bahia and Pernambuco and in Maranhão. A study of 2006 estimated that about 40,000 country people were involved directly or indirectly in planting and that the crop put about R$100 million a year into circulation in the Polígono.^: 22 Repression pushed planting into towns of Ceará and Sergipe that the Federal Police had not counted as part of the Polígono.^: 23 In 2017 the head of the Federal Police station at Salgueiro said that the police had destroyed 9.4 million plants in the Polígono over the previous ten years.

In December 2020 an operation found 56 fields with 164,000 plants and 400,000 seedlings on islands in the Orocó, Cabrobó, Carnaubeira da Penha, Floresta and Belém do São Francisco area. Five operations that year destroyed 1,468,218 plants. In the Pernambuco sertão the Federal Police eradicated 1,604,000 plants and destroyed 320 plantations in 2022, 618,000 plants and 168 plantations in 2023 and 1,372,000 plants and 260 plantations in 2024. In May 2024 an operation destroyed about 448,000 plants in 78 fields, one of them in Inajá with 142,000 plants. Between April and May 2025 an operation destroyed about 434,000 plants in 69 fields in Salgueiro, Cabrobó, Orocó, Belém do São Francisco, Ibimirim and Serra Talhada and in Manaíra in Paraíba, reaching some by inflatable boat. Between September and October 2025 another destroyed about 286,000 plants in 49 fields in Salgueiro, Cabrobó, Orocó, Belém do São Francisco, Santa Maria da Boa Vista, Betânia, Floresta, Ibimirim and Carnaubeira da Penha.

The Federal Police said in 2024 that constant eradication in the sertão left the region's traffickers no time to bring the crop to full growth, which had led to imports of cannabis from Paraguay. A police officer quoted in 2017 said that plants which once reached 2 m no longer grew to 1.5 m, because the police cut them before harvest.

Cultivation

A former grower told Fraga and Iulianelli that "A maconha não é uma planta da caatinga; ela precisa de água" ("Cannabis is not a caatinga plant; it needs water") and that growers look for islands or dry land with a reservoir.^: 28 Where there is no irrigation, water is carried to the field in 200-litre drums; fields near irrigated land draw water through cuts in the irrigation pipes. The crop takes three to six months.^: 29 A Federal Police officer put the time from sowing to harvest at 90 to 120 days in 2017.

Plants are set in pits (covas). Fraga and Iulianelli describe pits of about 1 m² with six to eight plants each.^: 29 In the fields destroyed from 2010 to 2018 the mean was 3.66 plants a pit and the commonest number three; pits with up to 15 plants were found, but that many do not reach maturity, since only the healthiest are kept.^: 9 In 2017 growers were reported to rotate their fields, hide the plants among cassava and set up scarecrows dressed as farm workers. They favoured public land, the islands and the woods, because under the drugs law land used to grow cannabis must be expropriated.

Fraga and Iulianelli describe several ways of organising the work. A family may plant public land at its own cost and sell the crop to middlemen, or a few farmers may club together to buy seed and plant land that belongs to none of them. A sharecropper (meeiro) receives seed and plants a plot with plenty of water; the profit is split at the end.^: 28–29 The grower usually gets seed without buying it.^: 32 Larger financiers, called patrões or grandes, pay for the food of the camps in which workers guard the fields for two or three months, hire watchmen (corujas) and hand the crop to middlemen (boiadeiros).^: 27 The harvest is pressed by machine, mixed with refined sugar, packed in polystyrene and buried. It can be kept for six to eight months until prices rise.^: 30

Farm workers and others in the valley said in earlier research by Fraga and his colleagues that there is no traditional use of cannabis in the region today; planting there was older, but had always been for sale.^: 21

Forensic studies

Stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes separated seized samples from the dry Polígono in Pernambuco and Bahia from samples from the wetter states of Pará and Mato Grosso do Sul. The elements in the plants and in the soil they grew in separated Polígono plants from plants grown indoors. A study of 2026 found nine microsatellite markers that told Polígono samples apart from samples from Paraguay, from Colombia and from the commercial strains common in the national trade.

Trade

The largest markets, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, draw on Paraguay.^: 16: 6 Fraga and Iulianelli write that the São Francisco crop supplies the rest of the national market;^: 16 Patriota, Sá and Sato write that it supplies only the north and north-east.^: 6 Estimates of its share of the national market differ. Fraga told Agência Pública in 2017 that the region produced 40 per cent of Brazil's cannabis at its height in the 1980s and 1990s. Some researchers estimated its share at about 30 per cent. Forensic researchers wrote in 2020 that it supplies the north-east and 30 per cent of the national market.

People interviewed by Fraga and Iulianelli said that most of those involved, from workers to financiers and middlemen, came from the region. Fraga's research found no link between the planting groups and national or international trafficking networks.^: 25–26 By 2017 Agência Pública reported that the powerful families who had used the crop to fund their political and territorial disputes shared the trade with organised groups from outside the north-east. It also reported that in north-eastern cities pressed cannabis from Paraguay was displacing the local product, called soltinho or camarão de Cabrobó.

Growing Areas

No growing areas documented yet.

Accessions

No accessions documented yet.

Recent news

No news items are recorded for this growing region yet.

See also

• Brazil
• Diamba
• Pernambuco
• São Francisco River