Talk:Ariari

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Page scope

Ariari treats the Ariari region of the department of Meta, in eastern Colombia, as a cannabis growing area: the marijuana planted around the Serranía de La Macarena in the 1970s, and the fields reported and eradicated in Lejanías and its neighbours since 1999. The department as an administrative unit is treated at Meta Department, and Colombia's law on cannabis at Colombia. Coca, which replaced marijuana in the area from the late 1970s, is part of this page only where a source ties it to the marijuana crop.

Data verification

Record source conflicts, dating problems and sources not used here. Keep narrative content on the article.

Discussion

Why the Ariari is a growing area

• Several sources describe marijuana grown in the area in the 1970s. Molano (Selva adentro, 1987, pp. 58–59 and 95) gives the oral history of its spread in the Serranía de La Macarena, the piedmont and the river flats of the Güejar and the Ariari, and names Vistahermosa. Cubides (1989, p. 73) cites a 1974 report of the director of the DAS on its spread inside the Macarena reserve. Arcila (1989, p. 76) describes hundreds of hectares cleared in the reserve. Torres (2021, p. 204) places the first plantations in Vistahermosa.
• Fields since 2000 are reported by the press and the police in Lejanías: the vereda Cafetales (El Tiempo, 13 January 2016), the vereda Barcelona (police, 28 February 2017) and the vereda Las Delicias (police, 30 April 2017).
• The Ministry of Defence's open dataset lists marijuana eradicated in Meta in five municipalities only, Lejanías, Mesetas, El Castillo, Vistahermosa and La Macarena, between 2007 and 2018. The regional study of the Ministry of Justice and UNODC gives a first eradication of marijuana in Lejanías in 1999.
• The status is Active: the press, police and eradication reports run from 1999 to 2018. No source read says growing in the area has ended. The end of the 1970s boom is the end of that boom, not of growing in the area, which the sources report again from 1999.
• The name: Torres (2021) writes of "la región del Ariari", and her bajo Ariari is the settlements around the Serranía de La Macarena; El Tiempo (2016) calls Lejanías "esta región del Ariari"; a police bulletin of 11 October 2017 speaks of "la región del Ariari del departamento del Meta" for Mesetas, Puerto Lleras, San Juan de Arama, Uribe, Lejanías and Vista Hermosa. Meta's planning subregion of the Ariari, as drawn in OpenStreetMap, contains all five municipalities of this page.

Extent and border

• The map border is the union of the five municipalities in which the sources place the crop, as drawn in OpenStreetMap: Lejanías, Mesetas, El Castillo, Vistahermosa and La Macarena. It is about 19,200 km², and the infobox figure is rounded from it. Most of it is La Macarena (about 10,800 km²) and Vistahermosa (about 4,800 km²); Lejanías, where nearly all the eradicated area lies, is about 820 km².
• La Macarena is included because the 1970s sources place the crop in the Serranía de La Macarena and the Ministry of Defence lists eradication there in 2018. Its southern part, along the Guayabero, lies outside the Ariari basin proper.
• Municipalities named by the sources only for coca, for seizures or for joint coca-and-marijuana figures are left out: Granada, Puerto Lleras, San Juan de Arama, Uribe and Puerto Rico. Meta's planning subregion of the Ariari is much larger (about 47,000 km² in OpenStreetMap) and is not used as the border, because the sources do not place the crop across it.
• The point in the infobox is a point inside the border, in the Serranía de La Macarena, not a field.

Sources

• Ministry of Defence, Erradicación (open dataset). Read in the rows for Meta with crop type marihuana (77 rows, May 2007 to October 2018), downloaded on 20 October 2026; the portal gives the last update of the data as 16 September 2026. Each row gives a date, a municipality and an area in hectares, and no vereda. The totals on the page are sums of those rows: Lejanías 220.1 ha (64 rows, December 2010 to April 2017; 47.0 ha in 2012, 144.7 in 2013), Mesetas 8.2, El Castillo 5.5, Vistahermosa 4.2, La Macarena 0.95.
• Ministry of Justice and UNODC, regional study of Meta. The PDF carries no date; its data and web consultations run to December 2016. Its eradication series comes from the drug observatory's SIDCO system and starts earlier than the Ministry of Defence dataset (four hectares in Lejanías in 1999, where the dataset's first Meta row is Vistahermosa, May 2007). It gives Lejanías 8.6 ha in 2014; the dataset sums to 7.0 ha for that year. Both agree on 144.7 ha in 2013.
• Molano, Selva adentro. Read in the fourth reprint (1999) of the first edition (El Áncora, 1987), pp. 58–59 and 95. The account on p. 95 is that of two informants, Carlos and Luis Eduardo, about Vistahermosa in the 1970s.
• Dating the boom and the arrival of coca. Arcila (1989) puts the crisis around 1977 and the arrival of coca a year later; Torres (2021) follows him (1977; coca "hacia 1978"). A 2024 summary of the SINCHI institute on Vistahermosa puts coca at the beginning of the 1980s. A 2015 interview in CONtexto Ganadero with an official of the territorial consolidation unit puts the marijuana boom in the 1980s, with coca in the 1990s; it is not used.
• Who brought the seed. Molano's informants (p. 95) name specialised traders and some local cattle ranchers as financiers, and Molano (p. 58) describes pilots handing out seed. The Ministry of Justice and UNODC study (p. 44) names self-defence groups linked to Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha. The page gives both, each attributed.
• El Tiempo, 13 January 2016. The sub-headline says that Meta was not traditionally considered a marijuana-producing department; the 1970s sources say otherwise, and the line is not used.
• Police bulletins of 2017. The 12 hectares in Las Delicias are given as "more than 12,000 plants", as printed.

Sources not used

• Reports that give coca and marijuana as one figure are not used for the marijuana crop: police bulletins of 9 November 2014 (six hectares in Lejanías and Puerto Gaitán), 22 March 2017 (22 hectares in Puerto Lleras, Lejanías and Vista Hermosa) and 11 October 2017 (118 hectares in the Ariari).
• Seizures are not used as evidence of growing: 1.7 tonnes of marijuana in two storage sites in Lejanías (police, 13 January 2017), and an English-language report of February 2014, relaying El Tiempo, of about five tonnes seized in Lejanías with 4.9 hectares of crop (the El Tiempo article itself was not found). Marijuana seized in Villavicencio in 2021 and said to be bound for Lejanías and other towns is market evidence only.
• Marijuana fields reported in 2024 in Mapiripán, in eastern Meta, lie outside the Ariari and outside this page.
• A family memoir published by the National Centre for Historical Memory mentions occasional marijuana on a farm near Mesetas around 1973, and a timeline of the Macarena special management area lists a marijuana boom in today's Tinigua park in 1976–1979; neither is used, as the first is a single passing mention and the second gives no source beyond a park management plan that was not read.
• A 2006 lecture by Molano speaks of a short-lived experience of large marijuana crops in the Llanos Orientales without naming a place; it is not used.
• No source read gives a name for a cannabis variety of the Ariari. El Tiempo (2016) names the kinds found at Cafetales as "creepy", "punto rojo" and the traditional plant.