The narco history of Colombia’s security forces | Part 1: Santa Marta

Colombia’s security forces have been involved in the drug trade since the beginning. On the Caribbean coast, cops began extorting marijuana traders in the 1960s and ended up being their enforcers.

Colombia’s Caribbean coast was introduced to pot in the 1920’s, probably by United Fruit Company workers, but it wasn’t until around 1970 that exports to the US triggered a “marijuana boom” around the port city.

The local police were almost as quick to make a buck out of the trade as the smugglers themselves. At one point, almost all cops and soldiers working in the region were making money off it, one trader told Magdalena University investigators.

Former marijuana trafficker

Medellin liberals and American hippies

During “La Violencia,” a period of extreme partisan violence between 1948 and 1958, a lot of liberals fled the conservative city of Medellin to the Sierra Nevada to settle.

People from Santa Marta were mainly working in the banana sector or in the ports while the people from the neighboring La Guajira province had been smuggling without much regard for Bogota laws for centuries.

When the marijuana trade began picking up between the 1950s and the 1970s, the local peasants found their crop and the population tripled.

Magdalana University

Police racket 1: bribery

As more people arrived in the area, so did the police, like flies to shit.

Within no time, mafia bosses had the police commander in Perico Aguao bribed. Whenever a shipment was coming through the village, the commander took his men for a walk, allowing the mules to pass through the village unhindered.

Former marijuana trafficker

The police subsequently convinced police inspectors to also take bribes, making the whole department working for the marijuana mafia.

When shipments came in from inland, truck drivers carried enough cash and made sure they knew how many police stops there would be, so they wouldn’t get stuck at the last.

If the cops caught wind of a large shipment coming through, they would try to catch it as soon as it entered their precinct in order to demand a bribe. Other cops would then set up roadblocks further down the road to demand more bribes.

Magdalena University

Some cops would even escort shipments all the way to the docks, the former truckers told the university investigators.

Police racket 2: robbery

The peasants growing the marijuana were the lowest in the pecking order, who often had to arm themselves to prevent the local mafia from stealing their produce instead of buying it.

What the local cops would do was go to the marijuana farm, confiscate whatever weapon they found and later sell it back to the same peasant.

In Guachaca, cops would simply confiscate marijuana and sell it to the mafia leaving the farmer with nothing.

Police racket 3: protection

This constant stealing turned the marijuana trade grim quickly and the “marimberos” sought armed support, which they allegedly found with the police and other state agencies.

Alfredo Molano

By the end of the 1970s the violence got out of hand and the American authorities demanded an end to the trade and Bogota had to step in.

If only the gringos knew then that a Medellin-based criminal, Pablo Escobar, had already given up marijuana for cocaine and the drug trafficking business of Colombia’s security forces was only just beginning.

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