Marijuana Boom

The Rise and Fall of Colombia's First Drug Paradise

Lina Britto

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780520974265
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique latine et des Caraïbes

Before Colombia became one of the world's largest producers of cocaine in the 1980s, traffickers from the Caribbean coast partnered with American buyers in the 1970s to make the South American country the main supplier of marijuana for a booming US drug market, fueled by the US hippie counterculture. How did Colombia become central to the creation of an international drug trafficking circuit? Marijuana Boom is the story of this forgotten history. Combining deep archival research with unprecedented oral history, Lina Britto deciphers a puzzle: Why did the Colombian coffee republic, a model of Latin American representative democracy and economic modernization, transform into a drug paradise, and at what cost?

PART ONE

Ascendance

ONE

Wheels of Progress

TROPICAL COMMODITIES AND REGIONAL FORMATION

Those who are resistant to progress are crushed under its wheels.

GENERAL RAFAEL REYES, president of Colombia (1904–1909)

TRANSFORMING THE FERTILE AREAS of the Greater Magdalena in order to produce tropical commodities destined for the markets of the industrialized world was a dream that came about with the birth of the Colombian nation. Actually, the first sacks of coffee that the country ever exported in the early nineteenth century were produced in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta.¹ But environmental constraints, labor scarcity, and a lack of infrastructure—all of which had hampered commercial agricultural production since colonial times—obstruct the success of these enterprises, as did the tumultuous political conflicts that characterized the earliest decades of the republic. Despite these obstacles, many entrepreneurs embarked on the enterprise of utilizing the different altitudes of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta for the production of tropical export commodities.

Irrigated by seven rivers and located near the port of Santa Marta, the western watershed became a focal point for all kinds of agricultural endeavors in the last decades of the nineteenth century.² Ciénaga, the largest town in the area, was the main destination for European and Middle Eastern immigrants, as well as settlers from other parts of the Colombian coast looking for business opportunities.³ By the time the two principal political parties in the country, Liberal and Conservative, went to war at the end of the century and, after the War of a Thousand Days (1899–1902), the coffee republic was consolidated, producers in the Sierra Nevada’s intermontane valleys, foothills, and surrounding lowlands near Santa Marta were exporting coffee, tobacco, cacao, and bananas to Europe and the United States in modest amounts.⁴ While the perennial coffee bush grew in the highlands, tobacco, cacao, and bananas grew on the foothills and lowlands. During the following decades, other cash crops made stellar appearances in transient bonanzas that left long-lasting consequences. The marijuana export economy of the 1970s was one of those episodes in a longer history of agrarian modernization in Colombia.

MAP 2. The Greater Magdalena. Map by Bill Nelson.

In this chapter, I examine the main periods in which the cultivation and exportation of agricultural products allowed local interest groups to take advantage of national necessities and international demands. I argue that the difficulties and opportunities presented by the unique vertical geography of the territory—from the great valley, the peninsula, and the coast, to the mountainous hinterlands in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and Perijá—defined various patterns of economic development, while political competition and solidarity among landowners, commercial elites, and diverse popular sectors shaped the trajectory of each tropical commodity boom. In the process, a region emerged out of a disconnected territory whose physical and social fragmentation made it a dry-land archipelago. The circuits of production and exchange bonded the different sections of this part of the continental Caribbean by connecting its population to the social circles and political party structures of a Bogotá-centered nation. Moreover, these commodity booms integrated its geographies as peripheries and borderlands of the nation-state as well as distant satellites of the US hegemonic orbit in Latin America. The contradictions created by each of these historical periods erupted in the second half of the 1960s as localized feuds. This happened at a time when a new elite agreement between Liberals and Conservatives to put a stop to yet another civil war began to work toward agrarian reform to address the root causes of the mid-century conflict. This ideological opening at the top intensified the proliferation of responses at the bottom. All sectors with vested interests in the reform now had recourse to the law, making it difficult for the state to overlook their demands. The bonanzas of different tropical commodities not only failed to resolve but in fact exacerbated conflicts over land, labor, and markets, making the Greater Magdalena one of the most heated settings of modernization. In the following sections, I trace how these key moments contributed to the configuration of a region that served as a laboratory of agrarian development.

BANANAS AND MARKETS

On a certain day in the late nineteenth century, a Genoese young man born in a lineage of Freemasons arrived to the port of Santa Marta with chests of books in different European languages. His name was José De Andreis Blanchar. After fighting in Garibaldi’s army in his native Italy, he decided to settle in Ciénaga, a thriving tropical town in Latin America. Over time, his personal library earned him a reputation as a wise man, and his anticlerical views labeled him an atheist. More important, he became one of the forefathers of a powerful Liberal party dynasty in Santa Marta. The many branches of the Vives family, descendants of De Andreis’s daughter and the son of Salvador Vives Ferrer—another young radical European who arrived from Catalonia, Spain, at roughly the same time as De Andreis—played central roles in deepening the contradictions that brought the regional economy to a breaking point in the late 1960s. At their arrival, however, neither De Andreis nor Vives had any advantage over anybody else; they, too, resorted to retail commerce to survive the ups and downs of their agricultural ventures.⁵ As in other parts of Latin America, patterns of land tenure, precarious infrastructure, difficulties in labor mobilization and market organization, and the power of local elites in relation to the central state and other elites defined the success of investors in export crops.⁶ In the case of Santa Marta and its area of influence, landowners, most of them descended from colonial nobility and authorities, mobilized their political clout to pressure the Conservative government in Bogotá to donate public lands to foreign and local investors.⁷

The War of a Thousand Days (1899–1902) between Liberals and Conservatives sealed the fate of men like De Andreis and Vives. The violent conflict battered the coffee haciendas in Santander and Cundinamarca, on the eastern side of the Andean interior, contributing to the displacement of the country’s coffee belt to the west, in the departments of Antioquia and Caldas, where families of peasants colonized the slopes of the western and central cordilleras with their small coffee farms.⁸ After the parties at war signed the Treaty of Neerlandia, a peace accord named after the banana farm near Ciénaga where the pact was negotiated, the cultivation of the fruit began to fulfill its promises.⁹ With coffee growers in the Sierra Nevada highlands struggling with excessive rainfall, an absence of infrastructure, and low productivity, the new Conservative president, General Rafael Reyes (1904–9), focused his attention on the fertile lowlands along the western watershed.¹⁰ In contrast to coffee, the production of bananas was not capital intensive as it required no mechanization or technology. Consequently, banana profits were high as markets expanded rapidly in Europe and the United States, thanks to the aggressive practices of the recently created United Fruit Company.¹¹ Since the fruit had clear advantages over coffee, the new president began to use state resources to finance this budding sector.¹² Perhaps because he felt indebted to the Greater Magdalena for his electoral victory, or simply because he found a golden opportunity of political clientelism to favor war veterans and allies, President Reyes used concessions of lands, subsidies, and tax exemptions for investors to support the formation of la zona bananera (the “banana district”).¹³

The banana district was part of a larger design in which President Reyes inaugurated a new era in Colombian politics and economics.¹⁴ Although his electoral victory was marked by fraud, his presidency had clear achievements. During the heated electoral campaign that followed the end of the war, one of Reyes’s supporters, General Juanito Iguarán, a powerful indigenous authority of the Wayuu people of the Guajira peninsula, took advantage of the fact that the provincial capital of Riohacha voted without a formal assembly, and he filled out the electoral results with the number of ballots that Reyes needed to win.¹⁵ Known as the Registro Padilla—named after the Greater Magdalena province for which Riohacha served as the capital—the fraud proclaimed Reyes president-elect. A military commander who professed that “those who are resistant to progress are crushed under its wheels,” Reyes did not hesitate to speed up the locomotive of development.¹⁶ He reorganized public finances, stabilized the exchange rate, dissolved any trace of federalism by converting states into less autonomous departments, and finally led Liberal and Conservative elites in reaching an ideological and programmatic consensus on economic development.¹⁷ The political hegemony of bipartisan export-import interests consolidated during his administration.¹⁸

Much like other political leaders in Latin America, President Reyes viewed the United States as both a model to emulate and the source of capital to attract.¹⁹ Relations with the United States were strained, however, because of Colombia’s loss of the Panama territory in 1903, just one year after the end of the war and largely because of Washington’s military and political involvement. Although anti-American sentiments simmered in many sectors, dominant elites in both parties unanimously professed that the economic future of the country was predicated upon stabilizing diplomatic, commercial, and financial relations with “the polar star.” In time, Respice Polum (Look to the North) became Colombia’s foreign policy doctrine.²⁰ The Greater Magdalena’s banana district was thus an important setting in the effort to forge a more intimate relation with the Colossus of the North.

Along with the new eje cafetero (coffee axis) on the western side of the Andean interior, the zona bananera helped to bring Colombia into twentieth-century currents of development.²¹ In both sectors, small growers dominated production while a few exporters at the top channeled the products to foreign markets.²² The substantive difference was that the United Fruit Company was the sole buyer, exporter, and marketer of bananas in the Greater Magdalena, whereas in the Andean coffee region, a vast number of Colombian merchants bought and exported the bean.²³ Coffee offered significant new economic opportunities for Colombians in comparison to bananas: peasants and merchants received cash and capital from coffee production and commerce; entrepreneurs financed industries in the region’s urban areas; politicians financed their clienteles; and peasant units of production sheltered the national economy against the fluctuations of the international markets.²⁴ Coffee merchants and financiers became powerful political actors and interlocutors of the state.

In contrast, the sweet banana was a bitter fruit of discord. Popularly known as Yunai (the phonetic translation of “United”), the United Fruit Company used state patronage in the form of land concessions, subsidies, and tax exemptions to sponsor its own expansion.²⁵ By buying lands and building infrastructure—a railway, a telegraph line, a dock, and irrigation canals—the company created a land market where none had previously existed.²⁶ The company also offered credit and rental leases to a banana-growing clientele comprising members of the local landed elite and certain sectors of the merchant class that depended on the company’s monopolistic practices to market the fruit.²⁷ This tactic secured the support of the local elite when the company had to negotiate with or lobby the government, and by reaching out to families of e...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Forgotten History
• Part One Ascendance
• Part Two Peak
• Part Three Decline
• Conclusions: A Remembered History
• Appendix. Comment on Oral Sources
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index