The Marihuana Axis: A Regional History of Colombia's First Narcotics Boom, 1935--1985

Before cocaine traffic became the most profitable and problematic industry of the Western Hemisphere, marijuana traffickers from the Colombian Caribbean coast had flooded U.S. cities and suburbs with the illegal weed, and resisted the "war on drugs" waged against them in the country that is today one of the world's principal sites for the manufacture and export of narcotics, and a model of anti-narcotics interventions worldwide. This dissertation demonstrates that the transnational marijuana export sector in the Colombian Caribbean in the 1970s constituted a phase of transition between the legal coffee economy of the early twentieth century and the illegal narcotics industry of today, and represented a turning point in hemispheric relations insofar as the region served as training ground for the "war on drugs" in South America. At the regional and national levels this dissertation focuses on the massive irruption of rural and urban workers as marijuana growers and intermediaries, and how they articulated a regional masculine identity manifested in popular expressions, such as vallenato music. It argues that this new regional identity in the marijuana zone was constructed through the daily practices of trafficking, and in discourses of masculine honor that celebrated mixed-race origins and plebeian virtues (i.e. flamboyance, generosity, and courage), which were voiced and disseminated through vallenato music—a genre that achieved national prominence, and constituted a vehicle for the socialization of marijuana traffickers' values within and without the region. At the international level it focuses on the implementation of the "war on drugs" in the Colombian Caribbean as a strategy that favored cross-fertilization between counter-insurgent and counter-narcotics interventions, which then became the norm in the Andean region in the following decades. It argues that the campaign against marijuana in Colombia worked as a tool for strengthening the power of states, both the U.S. and Colombia, and consolidating a new militarism aimed at aligning the Andean country with the U.S. government's foreign policy needs and strategies. It places the use of violence in the drug trade within the context of criminalization and prohibition, and contribute to making sense of how transnational illegal narcotics networks and organizations interacted with national states and their law enforcement apparatuses to turn what was once a relatively peaceful, albeit illegal, business into one whose astonishing violence has re-shaped the hemisphere.