Colombia’s marijuana farmers want out of the shadows. Will the government ever legalize their harvest?

By Stefano Pozzebon

Cajibio (CNN) — On a recent Friday morning, about 200 coca and marijuana farmers gathered in the small town of Cajibio, southwestern Colombia, to hear the government out.

Colombian’s government was still licking its wounds after an initiative to legalize recreational marijuana had sunk in Congress less than 10 days before.

At the meeting, officials from the Justice Ministry laid out plans for how to tackle the country’s burgeoning production of illicit crops: build better roads and bridge to connect the farmers with legal markets, so that licit crops can be sold at a larger profit and keep people off from growing drugs; a government push to legalize land titles to formalize the farmer’s rights to the land they work on, and a new initiative to legalise pot.

Gloria Miranda, the director of drug policy at the Justice Ministry, stressed the government wanted to make it right to the farmers, but Yulier Lopez, a 48-years-old single mother who represents a group of about 800 marijuana farmers and who harvests about 250 plants of cannabis, was not much interested in listening.

It is time to start acting, Lopez said.

More than 200,000 farmers of drug crops live in criminality in Colombia because their harvest is illegal, according to COCCAM, a workers’ union representing farmers involved in cocaine and marijuana production.

As Colombia has been a frontline in the global war on drugs for the last fifty years, farmers have often been on the receiving end of repressive drug policies from lawmakers. In 2020, former president Ivan Duque tried to revive indiscriminate glyphosate fumigations as a strategy to combat coca production, although the Colombian constitutional court banned the practice a decade ago due to the health risks for farmers.

Most farmers who were present at the meeting in Cajibio said they were forced to sell their crop to international drug cartels because of lack of other opportunities, and that they were afraid of both retaliation from their criminal clients and law enforcement officials who could prosecute them for growing coca.

Unlike farmers who harvest coca leaves, the base ingredient of cocaine – the Andean country is the world’s largest source of the drug, whose production, commerce and consumption is forbidden under Colombian and international law – marijuana producers like Lopez move on more uncertain terrain.

Maijuana consumption was decriminalized in Colombia in 1994 and every Colombian resident is allowed to harvest up to 20 plants for their own use. But selling weed remains illegal outside of the pharmaceutical and textile industries, which are inaccessible to small farmers like Lopez.

“To be honest, it’s a bit ridiculous: imagine you’re a farmer in a country where growing grapes is not illegal, and drinking wine is not illegal, but winemaking is criminal.. that makes no sense,” she told CNN.

Colombian progressive president Gustavo Petro has denounced repressive policies from before he took office. On the campaign trail, he pledged to ban forced eradication of coca field and to create a legal market for recreational marijuana that could allow farmers to enter the formal economy. His time in office however has proven more testing.

On June 20, a constitutional reform to legalise the commerce of marijuana failed by just one vote, one of several reforms supported by Petro which were brought down in Congress this year.

For Juan Carlos Losada, a senator for the Liberal party and one of the signatories of the proposal, it felt like losing a World Cup final at the last penalty. He blames Petro’s government for not pushing the reform in Congress forcefully enough, but says that simply arriving at a final vote in the Senate still counts as a great achievement.

“Of course I don’t regret anything! The constitutional reform was the right path and we will come back to it: we have a crucial month ahead of us to understand who we can count on and who can help us achieve our goal,” Losada told CNN.

Colombia will hold regional elections at the end of October, which means that most lawmakers will spend the fall in their constituency campaigning for local allies, and Losada feels the clock is ticking to present a new constitutional reform before his colleagues left.

Opponents of legal marijuana, like rightwing opposition leader German Vargas Lleras, say legal weed would only push more people into drug consumption, and celebrated the collapse of the latest regulation effort.

‘We are not drug traffickers’

At night, the hills in the famed ‘weed triangle’ of Colombia’s Cauca province are lit up by thousands of high intensity light bulbs, used to speed up the maturation of the seedlings.

Caloto, where Lopez farms, is one of five municipalities in the area renowned for marijuana production. Figures are hard to come by, but Losada’s team believes that more than 80% of Colombia’s marijuana production comes from those five municipalities.

Some of the largest marijuana fields count on tens of thousands of plants, but most farmers who are part of Lopez’s group prefer to stick to a locally-agreed quota because that allows them to be part of COCCAM, the national workers’ union, for legal representation.

Smaller harvests mean higher prices per unit because the focus can pass onto better quality and environmental practices, Lopez says, again citing winemaking as an example.

“We know that as soon as we are legal, the real challenge will be for market appeal: organic weed is the future, and with us the consumer can be sure our product is 100% natural,” she told CNN.

Running what is effectively a protected designation of origin in an illegal business can be tricky, however.

Lopez hopes that within a few years her product could be sold on the legal market, but right now she still relies on unlawful channels to sell. Saying she can’t explain with too much detail how the harvest is sold to international drug trafficking organizations, she told CNN a network of ‘backpackers’ work around the Caloto area and buy dry flowers and hashish from the producers.

“We are not drug traffickers,” she told CNN, confessing the only time she tried to smoke her produce she experienced an allergic reaction that has kept her away from pot: “If I was a narco, would I be speaking to you? Would I come here to see the government? The reality is that, despite everything, we can still only sell to them, that’s why legalisation is so important.”

Lopez agreed to use her real name for this piece, trusting that the police won’t prosecute a vocal marijuana farmer, but expressed fears that drug cartels or criminal organisations might try to make an example of her, as community leader trying to effort a change in an area with deeply-rooted criminal presence.

According to Human Rights Watch, 77 social leaders have been killed across Colombia in the first six months of 2023. Of the eleven killed in June, four were from Cauca.

‘This is not about me or you getting high’

Luis Cunda, 31, believes the biggest benefit of legalisation would not be security, but material. “If my business was legal, I could declare taxes, go to a bank, and put my savings in a bank account rather than keeping them in cash with me… I could finally make an investment in real estate,” says Cunda, who is from the municipality of Miranda, a short ride north of Caloto.

Like many farmers in rural Colombia, Cunda says he doesn’t have a legal title over the land he grows. “I inherited it from my father, and that land is mine, but there’s no piece of paper that can block anyone from coming and taking it from me,” he told CNN.

Cunda said that he has not been able to formalise his claim over the land – or even open a bank account – because his source of income is illicit, an obstacle he shares with hundreds of pot sellers in the United States who also are barred from traditional banking services.

The example of a growing number of US states that have legalised recreational weed in recent years, as well as Uruguay in Latin America, is a constant stimulant for the Colombian activists.

Lopez says she is in close touch with weed farmers in Uruguay, where recreational marijuana is legal for all citizens and residents under state monopoly, while lawmakers are looking north rather than south for lessons on regulation.

In 2021, a delegation of Colombian lawmakers traveled to Denver to learn more from the legalisation in Colorado; among them was Miranda, the Colombian justice ministry official. Losada, the senator, worked with the office of New York State cannabis ‘czar’ Chris Alexander when he drafted his constitutional reform proposal.

Another thing they share is that neither Miranda, Lopez nor Losada actually consume. “This is not about me or you getting high, it’s about the farmers and the producers,” Miranda told CNN.

In Cajibio, Miranda announced the government would “soon” present a new drug policy that included plans to legalise marijuana sales by executive action, while supporting legislative actions in Congress like the bill sponsored by Losada.

Last week, justice minister Nestor Osuna welcomed representatives from coca and marijuana farmers’ associations to Bogota to share the results of twenty five ‘conversation spaces’ like the one in Cajibio, a sign that the government intends to push forward despite the defeat in Congress in June.

Lopez, who was part of the delegation, was flattered at the idea of drug producers talking face to face with the justice minister, dispensing optimism that grassroot activists like her could convince lawmakers to support legislation to the final stage.

The task won’t be easy: in recent weeks, the Petro government has been plagued by a series of defections and personnel scandals that have blocked the reformative push and exacerbated divisions in the government coalition.

Tending the field and self-regulating illegal productions may already be more manageable than turning proposals into laws.

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