CannaFish
Well-known member
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Previously produced along the Andean coffee axis in the western cordillera, and in the area around the United Fruit Company plantations on the southeastern foothills of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombian marijuana crops were not intended for export.17 Historian Eduardo Sáenz Rovner has found that since the 1950s, sailors and other mobile workers had been exporting Colombian marijuana to the U.S. and other neighboring countries in small quantities, therefore the steady growth of marijuana cultivation during the 1950s and 1960s did not respond to the export business, however, but to the expansion of the local consumption markets. By the mid-1960s, when the Peace Corps program began –and the Colombian chapter was the first one launched in South America– young Americans came to Colombian rural areas with dreams of political change, eager to escape home, and carrying new habits of consumption, marijuana consumption and production were well-established as parts of Colombia’s internal market.18 According to one environmental activist who has lived in the Sierra Nevada since the late 1960s following some years studying in universities of the U.S. West Coast, young Americans and young Colombians shared values and counter-cultural life-styles, which provided the ideal space for these first illegal transactions:
At the time [mid to late 1960s] we didn’t have any marijuana. There was marijuana in Colombia, but the marijuana export business did not exist yet... Out of the blue a lot of small ships from the U.S. started to arrive. Those people brought LSD to exchange for marijuana. But we did not have marijuana crops. Red Point was cultivated in the Andean region [coffee axis] and Colombian Gold did not exist yet.
So they traveled to the Andean region to buy it, and then brought it to the coast in order to export it from here. It was the easiest way. Some of them arrived in sailing boats, and some in small airplanes. All of them looked like hippies. They were not businessmen, they were not looking for big quantities, but they were many, and many more... Then it was a boom.19
By the late 1960s variegated clandestine networks for production in the Andean region established routes through the natural ports of the Caribbean Guajira peninsula.20 These represented short-term, ad-hoc alliances between Americans and Colombians to transport it from the coffee axis in the Andean interior in order to export it from the coast. It was then introduced to the U.S territory in sailing boats and small aircraft operated by veterans of the Cold War in Southeast Asia.21 K. “Hawkeye” Gross, one of those young American pilots with experience in counter-insurgency, explains why his generation was so quick to get involved in the business:
It hit me like a smack in the mouth: smuggling was what I’d been trained to do. The jet training, the survival schools teaching me crash survival and torture resistance, the battle experience in Vietnam, the flying in and out of dirt roads in Cambodia, the ragtag charter flying for Exec Air. Shit, I hadn’t been training to be an airline pilot, I had been training to be in the smuggling business.22
The first period of marijuana traffic in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and the Guajira peninsula, which took place from the late 1960s until around 1972, operated along the same lines as marijuana/hashish trafficking within Europe,and from Europe to the U.S.,which INTERPOL signaled as a growing tendency: “large increase in LSD traffic, closely tied to cannabis traffic.”23 This spontaneous traffic resulting from the growing demands of North Atlantic consumers, and from the initiative of marijuana consumers who became dealers in order to support their habits and make a small profit, increased so rapidly that international drug control organisms, such as the U.N. Commission of Narcotics Drugs considered the region, during the 24th session of 1971, as one of “two additional areas of particular concern because of the potential for increased trafficking.”24 In its Plan for Concerted Action Against Drug Abuse, the U.N. Fund for Drug Abuse Control, FDAC, noted that these amateur traffickers were “not, initially, professional criminals. Some of them are trying to supply themselves or their friends. Large proportion are young people, some of them ‘hippies’ or others in a state of protest against society, others more conventional tourists.”25
Previously produced along the Andean coffee axis in the western cordillera, and in the area around the United Fruit Company plantations on the southeastern foothills of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombian marijuana crops were not intended for export.17 Historian Eduardo Sáenz Rovner has found that since the 1950s, sailors and other mobile workers had been exporting Colombian marijuana to the U.S. and other neighboring countries in small quantities, therefore the steady growth of marijuana cultivation during the 1950s and 1960s did not respond to the export business, however, but to the expansion of the local consumption markets. By the mid-1960s, when the Peace Corps program began –and the Colombian chapter was the first one launched in South America– young Americans came to Colombian rural areas with dreams of political change, eager to escape home, and carrying new habits of consumption, marijuana consumption and production were well-established as parts of Colombia’s internal market.18 According to one environmental activist who has lived in the Sierra Nevada since the late 1960s following some years studying in universities of the U.S. West Coast, young Americans and young Colombians shared values and counter-cultural life-styles, which provided the ideal space for these first illegal transactions:
At the time [mid to late 1960s] we didn’t have any marijuana. There was marijuana in Colombia, but the marijuana export business did not exist yet... Out of the blue a lot of small ships from the U.S. started to arrive. Those people brought LSD to exchange for marijuana. But we did not have marijuana crops. Red Point was cultivated in the Andean region [coffee axis] and Colombian Gold did not exist yet.
So they traveled to the Andean region to buy it, and then brought it to the coast in order to export it from here. It was the easiest way. Some of them arrived in sailing boats, and some in small airplanes. All of them looked like hippies. They were not businessmen, they were not looking for big quantities, but they were many, and many more... Then it was a boom.19
By the late 1960s variegated clandestine networks for production in the Andean region established routes through the natural ports of the Caribbean Guajira peninsula.20 These represented short-term, ad-hoc alliances between Americans and Colombians to transport it from the coffee axis in the Andean interior in order to export it from the coast. It was then introduced to the U.S territory in sailing boats and small aircraft operated by veterans of the Cold War in Southeast Asia.21 K. “Hawkeye” Gross, one of those young American pilots with experience in counter-insurgency, explains why his generation was so quick to get involved in the business:
It hit me like a smack in the mouth: smuggling was what I’d been trained to do. The jet training, the survival schools teaching me crash survival and torture resistance, the battle experience in Vietnam, the flying in and out of dirt roads in Cambodia, the ragtag charter flying for Exec Air. Shit, I hadn’t been training to be an airline pilot, I had been training to be in the smuggling business.22
The first period of marijuana traffic in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and the Guajira peninsula, which took place from the late 1960s until around 1972, operated along the same lines as marijuana/hashish trafficking within Europe,and from Europe to the U.S.,which INTERPOL signaled as a growing tendency: “large increase in LSD traffic, closely tied to cannabis traffic.”23 This spontaneous traffic resulting from the growing demands of North Atlantic consumers, and from the initiative of marijuana consumers who became dealers in order to support their habits and make a small profit, increased so rapidly that international drug control organisms, such as the U.N. Commission of Narcotics Drugs considered the region, during the 24th session of 1971, as one of “two additional areas of particular concern because of the potential for increased trafficking.”24 In its Plan for Concerted Action Against Drug Abuse, the U.N. Fund for Drug Abuse Control, FDAC, noted that these amateur traffickers were “not, initially, professional criminals. Some of them are trying to supply themselves or their friends. Large proportion are young people, some of them ‘hippies’ or others in a state of protest against society, others more conventional tourists.”25