Talk:Provincia de Ocaña

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Discussion for: Provincia de Ocaña • View • Links • Related changes

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Page scope

Provincia de Ocaña treats the Provincia de Ocaña, the western subregion of the department of Norte de Santander in Colombia, as a cannabis growing area: the marijuana plantations reported there since 2014 and the marijuana eradicated there since 1998. The department as an administrative unit is treated at Norte de Santander Department, and Colombia's law on cannabis at Colombia. Coca, which is grown across the Catatumbo to the north and east, is part of this page only where a source reports it on the same farm as marijuana. Marijuana carried through the province or through southern Cesar is part of this page only where a source ties it to growing in the province.

Data verification

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

Discussion

Why the Provincia de Ocaña is a growing area

• The 2016 study of the Ministry of Justice and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime on Norte de Santander (pp. 15, 47, 155–156) reports marijuana eradicated in Ocaña in 1998 and in Cáchira, La Esperanza, Ocaña and Ábrego in 2013–2014, places marijuana crops with the second coca nucleus in La Esperanza and Cáchira, and gives the police's statement that many marijuana crops had appeared in Ábrego (and in Durania).
• Plantations are reported by the National Police: on a farm in the vereda La Allanada, corregimiento of Pueblo Nuevo, four hours from Ocaña (October 2014), and in the vereda Montenegro, rural Ábrego (January 2015). The police release of February 2015 on a processing site in Ábrego says the marijuana there had been grown before it was dried and pressed. La Opinión (March 2016) reports the spread of marijuana crops in rural Ábrego and a resident's account of the vereda Los Indios as a long-standing growing centre.
• The Ministry of Defence's open dataset lists marijuana eradicated in five of the province's ten municipalities between 2012 and 2018.
• At the scale of the department, a presentation of the national drug observatory (June 2019, slide 21), citing the anti-narcotics police, names Norte de Santander among the main producing departments.
• The status is Active: every plantation report and eradication entry cited is from 1998 or later, nearly all from 2012–2018, the latest from September 2018 (Ocaña). No source read says growing in the province has ended.

Name, extent and border

• The name is the one the sources use for the area. The departmental government calls its Subregión Occidental "also known as the Provincia de Ocaña" and lists its ten municipalities (rendering of accounts for the subregion, 2025, p. 3); the police and the 2016 study also use the name "Provincia de Ocaña".
• The map border is the union of those ten municipalities as drawn in OpenStreetMap, simplified: Ábrego, Cáchira, Convención, El Carmen, Hacarí, La Esperanza, La Playa de Belén, Ocaña, San Calixto and Teorama. It measures about 7,800 km², and the infobox figure is rounded from it. The departmental government gives the subregion as about 8,602 km²; the difference comes from the map data.
• The marijuana reported lies in the south of the province. Ábrego, Ocaña, La Esperanza and Cáchira hold all but one hectare of the ministry's entries for the province; Teorama has one entry (one hectare, January 2015); Convención, El Carmen, Hacarí, La Playa de Belén and San Calixto have none. The northern municipalities are drawn in because the sources name the subregion as one unit, not because marijuana is reported there.
• The northern municipalities of the province (Convención, El Carmen, Hacarí, San Calixto, Teorama) are also counted in the Catatumbo, the coca region of the department. Coca is not used as evidence for this page.
• Southern Cesar is not included. The ministry's dataset lists marijuana eradicated in the Cesar municipalities next to the province: Aguachica (17 hectares, 19 entries, November 2012 to December 2014), San Martín (21 hectares, 17 entries, April to May 2015), González (3 hectares, September 2016), Río de Oro (1.5 hectares, September 2018), La Gloria and San Alberto (under one hectare each). The Province of Ocaña created in 1849 included Aguachica and Río de Oro (Law 64 of 1849, as quoted in the Spanish Wikipedia's article on the province), but no source read treats these municipalities as one growing zone with the present province, and the press reports from southern Cesar concern marijuana in transit. The border therefore follows the department line.
• Durania, where the 2016 study and the ministry's dataset also report marijuana, lies outside the province and is not part of this page.
• The point in the infobox is the centre of the border, not a field.

Sources

• Ministry of Justice and UNODC (2016). A regional study of the drug problem in Norte de Santander, dated December 2016. Its marijuana series (p. 47) comes from the national drug observatory's eradication database, consulted in March 2016. It gives 10.5 hectares for 2013 (Cáchira and La Esperanza) and 15 hectares for 2014 (mainly Ocaña, Durania, Ábrego and La Esperanza), then a second figure "in 2014" of 20.8 hectares, 10.5 of them in Ábrego. In the Ministry of Defence's dataset, the department's entries for 2015 add up to exactly 20.8 hectares and Ábrego's to 10.5, so the second "2014" is read as 2015; the page gives the 2015 total from the dataset. The dataset's own entries for 2014 add up to 17 hectares, not 15. The statement on Ábrego and Durania (pp. 155–156) is reported from the department's police.
• Ministry of Defence, Erradicación (open dataset). Read in the rows for Norte de Santander with crop type marihuana (44 rows, December 2007 to September 2018, 61.72 hectares) and, for comparison, the rows for Cesar (102 rows, 143.26 hectares), downloaded on 20 October 2026. Each row gives a date, a municipality and an area; none gives a vereda, a method or a plant count. The totals by municipality and by year on the page are sums of those rows. For comparison, the same dataset lists 37,219 hectares of coca and 16 of poppy for Norte de Santander. The 1998 eradication in Ocaña is not in the dataset, which begins in 2007.
• National Police releases (2014–2015). The release of 8 October 2014 is datelined Ocaña and places the farm four hours by vehicle from the town of Ocaña; it does not name the municipality of the farm. The release of 16 January 2015 is headlined 2.5 hectares; its text gives a clearing of three hectares, which the page uses. The release of 9 February 2015 attributes the marijuana to a criminal organisation; the page does not repeat the attribution.
• La Opinión (2016). The March article reports seizures, not eradicated fields; the page uses it for what it says of crops in rural Ábrego, and quotes the resident's words. The April article is on coca in the department and gives no figure for the increase in cripy in Ábrego.

Sources not used

• Seizures of marijuana on the roads and in towns are not used as evidence of growing: 1.75 tonnes in rural Ábrego (January 2014, no crop mentioned), 983 kilograms on the San Martín–Aguachica road (November 2021) and about 3.2 tonnes in rural Aguachica (March 2026), the last said to come from the Catatumbo.
• A 2013 article by Alfredo Molano in El Espectador says buyers of marijuana and coca base from the Caribbean coast encouraged illicit crops in the Catatumbo; it names no municipality and no date, and is not used.
• Sáenz Rovner's history of marijuana in Colombia from the 1930s to the 1960s names no place in the province.
• No source read connects the province with the marijuana trade of the 1970s on the Caribbean coast.
• No source read gives a name for a cannabis variety of the province.