Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It Read Online Free PDF

States.
    During the 1960s, the explosion in demand for cannabis in the United States prompted a vast increase in the number of large marijuana plantations in Mexico and Jamaica. However, by the end of the decade the White House had implemented a sweeping anti-drug campaign; poisonous herbicides were sprayed over marijuana fields in Mexico, resulting in an urgent need for new growing regions — a void that Colombian farmers were more than happy to fill. Owing to its isolation, favourable climate, and relative proximity to the American market, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta provided a number of good reasons for US cannabis entrepreneurs to relocate their business. By the time herbicide spraying in Mexico was drawing to a close, 75 per cent of all the grass smoked in the United States was being cultivated along the Caribbean coast of Colombia.
    In the early stages of this relocation, the American cannabis pioneers who visited the mountains assisted the poor farmers by providing them with seeds and other resources necessary for the initial cultivation. Yet after just a few years, Colombian upstarts were able to take control over the plantations and edge out the Americans in production and export. But los gringos , the Yanks, maintained control of the main market, the United States. In 1972 in Santa Marta, the city by the foot of the mountains, newspaper articles began circulating about strange men who had been boasting openly about the money they were earning from illegal marijuana sales. News of the lucrative green crop quickly spread, and by the end of the 1970s large marijuana fields had popped up all over the country. In whichever region this took place, two common features were present, and they would be crucial to the success of the next drug boom in Colombia: these regions were recently settled and they were out of the reach of governmental authorities.
    The export organisations at the time, the precursors to the Medellín and Cali Cartels, were relatively simple in terms of composition. They consisted mainly of farmers — indigenous people, the descendents of slaves, or mestizo settlers in search of land — who tilled the soil for a local exporter, who often owned a few runways or a small port and had made an agreement with an importer on the other side of the Caribbean. Most growers around the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta already had roots in this area, and many opted to stop cultivating cannabis after a few lucrative harvests made it financially possible for them to return to legal agriculture without compromising their comfortable lifestyles. The marijuana rush, la bonanza marimbera , is today romanticised in Colombian folklore as a wild and carefree era — probably more because it stands in stark contrast to the violence that was to follow than because it was a particularly glorious period in itself.
    The green boom differed from the white boom that was to come in one important cultural respect, which was integral to the fact that Colombia would become one of the most violent places in the world in the 1980s, and also probably contributed to the era’s rose-tinted reputation: it was aristocratic. The rural parts of Colombia, such as those along the Caribbean coast, have always been essentially feudal, where landowners with deep pockets and cultural capital maintain a peaceful reign over the politicians and the economy, and control the peasants and the infrastructure. If these landowners were not mayors, governors, presidents, or any other sort of elected officials, they were the neighbours, cousins, business partners, or friends of those in la clase política , the political class, which has ruled the Colombian countryside with strategic violence for centuries. Soon after the profits from the cannabis boom started rolling in, the local ruling elite consolidated their control over drug activity, and the gap widened between the poor mountain farmers and those working in transport, trade, and export ( los