Talk:Talamanca

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Talamanca is the cannabis growing area of the canton of Talamanca, in Limón Province, Costa Rica: the growing that United States reports placed in the Cordillera de Talamanca from 1989, and the plantations eradicated in the canton, most of them in the district of Telire, from 2006 to 2023. The Pacific side of the range (Pérez Zeledón, Chirripó, La Amistad) and the canton of Osa are outside this page. Costa Rica's law on cannabis and its national figures are treated on the country page.

Data verification

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Discussion

Why Talamanca is a growing area

The State Department's narcotics reports place cannabis growing in the Cordillera de Talamanca from the report on 1989 (March 1990, p. 172: cultivation "centered on the more inaccessible areas of the Talamanca Mountain Range") to the reports on 2001 ("in the Caribbean region near Limon and Talamanca"). The report on 1994 (April 1995, p. 127) estimates some 800 hectares "scattered about the Cordillera de Talamanca region on the Atlantic coast".
The Drug Enforcement Administration's country briefs of April 2000 and December 2003 name Sixaola, the Valle de la Estrella and the Talamanca mountains near the Panamanian border, and say the plots are numerous "especially in the Talamanca Region".
The Instituto Costarricense sobre Drogas gives eradication by canton: in 2016 Talamanca had 1,680,570 of 2,122,922 plants (79.2 per cent) and 155 of 225 plantations (report for 2016, p. 24, table 4); in 2017 it had 1,312,581 of 1,919,179 plants (68.4 per cent) and 129 of 215 plantations (report for 2017, p. 36, table 6). The UNODC threat assessment of 2012 (p. 34) puts 80 per cent of Costa Rica's cannabis production in Talamanca.
The press reports eradication in the canton in 2006, 2010, 2014, every year from 2015 to 2021 and in 2023. Many of the sites named are communities of the Cabécar territory of Telire listed in the 2011 census (Alto Bley, Piedra Meza, Arco Iris, Guayabal, Monte Verde, Butubata).

How the border is drawn

The map border is the canton of Talamanca as OpenStreetMap draws it (admin relation 5708170), about 2,790 km²; the infobox figure is rounded from it. The canton is the unit in which the drug institute reports eradication, and every place the sources name for the growing (Telire, Alto Bley, Piedra Mesa, Tortuga, Sixaola, Gandoca, Manzanillo, Cahuita) lies inside it.
The map line's outer edge was checked for ground above 4,000 m, bare or sparse ground, snow and ice and open water. It moved by less than 0.5 per cent, so the border keeps the canton line.
The State Department writes of the Cordillera de Talamanca, which also runs onto the Pacific side (Pérez Zeledón, Buenos Aires, Coto Brus) and into Panama. The border does not follow the whole range: the reports for the Atlantic side point to Limón and Talamanca, and the sites on the Pacific side (cerro Ena and San Jerónimo in Pérez Zeledón, La Amistad) come from separate reports of 2014 to 2024.
The point in the infobox is the centre of the canton as OpenStreetMap gives it, not a field.

Growing status

Active: police and press reports run from 2006 to 2021, and Diario Extra (18 January 2024) gives 340,000 plants destroyed in Telire and nearby places in 2023. No source says the growing has ended.

The Telire territory

The article keeps two kinds of account apart. Iturriza (The Tico Times, April 2012) reports what residents of Alto Telire and the director of the Talamanca health area told him, and a Cabécar resident and Geiner Blanco speak for themselves in La Nación (relayed by The Tico Times, June 2013). The statements of the Ministries of Education and Public Security, and Diario Extra's account of traffickers hiring indigenous people, are the officials' and the paper's and are attributed to them.
Iturriza's article also describes the Cabécar in terms ("semi-nomadic", "civilization starts at Vesta and Gavilán") that the article does not repeat.
The Ministry of Education's statement of August 2012 and the figure of 300 children come through La Nación, relayed by The Tico Times.
The district of Telire and the indigenous territory of Telire are not the same unit: the 2011 census places communities of the Talamanca Bribrí and Talamanca Cabécar territories (Amubri, Yorkín, Alto Cohén and others) in the district of Telire, besides the eleven communities of the Telire territory.

Source discrepancies

Share of the eradication. The drug institute's report for 2016 gives Talamanca 79.2 per cent of the plants eradicated in 2016; its report for 2017 gives 68.4 per cent of plants and 60 per cent of plantations for 2017, and its summary says that historically more than 60 per cent of plantations have been eradicated in Talamanca and Osa, with 60 and 16.7 per cent, figures a footnote dates to 2017; a later report, as quoted by Diario Extra (30 November 2019), gives 78.3 per cent of plantations over the years. Each figure is given with its year and source.
UNODC 2012. The threat assessment (p. 34) places Talamanca "on the Nicaraguan border"; Talamanca borders Panama. Only its figure of 80 per cent is used.
Total for 2017. The drug institute's table 6 sums to 1,919,179 plants, and its summary gives 1,921,297; the Ministry of Public Security gave 1,922,645 (CRHoy, 22 May 2018). The article uses the table, with Talamanca's share as printed.
June 2012. The Tico Times (13 June 2014) gives over 562,000 plants destroyed "in the mountainous Caribbean region" in June 2012, in a paragraph on Talamanca; the article keeps the paper's wording for the place.
Spellings. The sources write Piedra Mesa and Piedra Meza, Monte Verde and Monteverde, Arco Iris and Arcoíris, Butubata and Botubata, Sey and Sei, Spiri and Sipiri. The census uses Alto Piedra Meza, Monte Verde, Arco Iris and Butubata; the article keeps each source's spelling where it lists that source's sites.

Sources

Instituto Costarricense sobre Drogas, Informe de Situación Nacional sobre Drogas y Actividades Conexas, editions for 2016 (published 2017) and 2017 (published 2018). Both are issued under a Creative Commons licence; the copies cited are hosted by the Global Women's Network (2016) and by COPOLAD, the EU–CELAC drugs policy programme (2017). The eradication figures in both come from the drug control police.
INEC, Territorios Indígenas (2013). Census of 2011: the list of communities by territory, canton and district (table 1, pp. 27–31) and the population of each territory (table 2, p. 34).
Drug Enforcement Administration country briefs. DEA-20010 (April 2000) and DEA-03045 (December 2003), in the National Archives' harvest of the DEA website of 2004.
Herbarium specimen. MNCR 51823 (GBIF occurrence 44509432) gives Talamanca, Limón, January 1973 and the collector "Guarda de Asistencia Rural", with no locality text and no note on cultivation, so it shows only that cannabis was collected in the canton in 1973.

Other reports

A specimen collected by J. F. Morales and R. J. Abarca (no. 4937) on 21 October 1995 in Cahuita National Park, in primary forest and coastal vegetation near Punta Cahuita, is a plant found in the wild, not a record of growing, and is not used.
Diario Extra (20 January 2021) gives 3,147,051 plants destroyed "solamente en la cordillera de Talamanca" between January 2018 and January 2021; the sites in the same report (Villa Colón, Cerro Ena, Cerro Jalisco) are on the Pacific side, so the figure covers more than this canton and is not used.
The seed company Pura Vida Seeds sells a feminised line named "Original Bri Bri", made, in its account, after years of visits to the mountains of Talamanca. Its description is the seller's and is not used.

Open questions

Whether William E. Carter's Cannabis in Costa Rica (1980) names Talamanca among the areas of production is open.
Eradication figures for the district of Telire on its own, as distinct from the canton, would show how much of the canton's growing lies in the indigenous territories.