Marijuana Boom by Lina Britto

Author:Lina Britto [Britto, Lina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Latin America, General
ISBN: 9780520325470
Google: A33HDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2020-03-24T01:11:34+00:00

FIGURE 16. Ernesto Samper Pizano, director of the National Association of Financial Institutions, delivers a keynote speech at ANIF’s conference on legalization of marijuana, March 16, 1979. El Espectador photographic archive, Bogotá.

Like Matallana, a group of young technocrats made legalization of marijuana a topic of political debate. On March 15 and 16, 1979, the National Association of Financial Institutions (ANIF), Colombia’s most respected think tank, held a conference in Bogotá attended by Colombian and US government officials, diplomats, scientists, and the press.138 During his keynote speech, US ambassador Diego Asencio stated firmly that legalizing marijuana unilaterally would turn the country into “a pirate nation.” He then praised President Turbay for “his bold stance,” and assured the audience that “the Two Peninsulas campaign has been a success and will continue to be one; there is no need to get bitter because of the traffickers’ excesses; it is possible to eradicate this problem from Colombia.”139 Finally, using the fieldwork conducted by engineer Rodrigo Echeverri’s Inderena team, along with DEA satellite information, ANIF bombarded the public with statistics.140 According to Hernando Ruiz, ANIF’s lead researcher, the annual value of marijuana exports were equal to 83 percent of Colombia’s coffee exports and constituted 39 percent of the country’s total exports. The Caribbean coast produced 60 percent of the total, and traffickers exported 85 percent of Colombia’s marijuana through the natural ports and desert plains of the Guajira.141 Also at the ANIF conference was its chair, Ernesto Samper Pizano. A twenty-nine-year-old lawyer and economist from a reputed family, he would later become president (1994–98) amidst the greatest scandal in the country’s history due to the cocaine cartels’ financial patronage of a political campaign. At the 1979 conference, Samper Pizano delivered one of its most controversial addresses, arguing that the social and political costs of repressing marijuana “at the source” was producing costly economic side-effects that could be converted into gains if the state regulated production and commercialization. Samper Pizano asked governments to create a bilateral commission to study production in Colombia and consumption in the United States in order to provide recommendations on how to proceed with legalization in both countries simultaneously.142

The ANIF chair’s proposal was unorthodox in many ways, but one feature stands out in particular. The exclusive focus on marijuana overlooked cocaine entirely, despite the fact that the latter was the drug coming from Colombia that most concerned the Carter administration. Hernando Ruiz explained to me in his office in Bogotá that ANIF disregarded cocaine because they considered marijuana to be “the vehicle for the gestation of macrosocial, macroeconomic, and macropolitical dynamics.” In other words, “marijuana was very suitable to our [Colombia’s] productive idiosyncrasy because we are not used to producing value added.”143 Building upon tradition, marijuana cultivators and merchants established linkages between Colombia and the United States that produced unprecedented profits. To ANIF’s economists, this represented as dramatic a turning point in Colombia’s history as the shift that had taken place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with coffee.144 The

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