Peace Corps’ drug war
Film tracks pot trade from Colombians’ perspective
THE Colombian drama “Birds of Passage” is about the genesis of a marijuana empire in the country’s northern Guajira Peninsula region in the 1970s. But it’s not a calculating drug lord behind the scheme, a la “Narcos,” the popular Netflix series about Pablo Escobar. Here is a far unlikelier culprit: the Peace Corps.
A young local man named Rapayet (José Acosta), who wants to earn enough to pay the dowry for a wife (Natalia Reyes) from the indigenous Wayuu tribe, spots an opportunity when a longhaired American guy — one of a number of Peace Corps volunteers in the region — asks him where to buy weed. Soon, Rapayet and his wild friend Moisés (Jhon Narváez) are running an expanding marijuana business that eventually, inevitably, leads to violence.
The movie is fictional, but it’s based in truth, say the Colombian co-directors of the film, Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego, whose 2015 collaboration “Embrace of the Serpent” earned an Oscar nomination. “There was no touristic development there at the time; most of the foreigners in the regions were with the Peace Corps,” says Guerra. “It’s demand that begins a trade. The Wayuu [a local tribe] were not exactly well-connected — [Peace Corps volunteers] just needed someone to ask for marijuana.”
The plant, which was grown locally, wasn’t used recreationally by the Wayuu; they would sometimes make a topical cream out of it to treat pain, Guerra explains. But the Americans were willing to pay for it, and the business soon grew into exporting. “It’s funny, a lot of people in the region remember this as a golden age, even though it brought tragedy and desolation,” says Guerra. “It was a period of economic growth they never saw before and never saw since.”
“Birds of Passage” is a standout in the sprawling drug-empire genre, showing the effects of the trade on locals and refusing to romanticize the family at its center. “When we started the project, ‘Narcos’ was not on the radar,” says Gallego. “[That show] glorifies the violence — it glorifies the idea of these kinds of antiheroes and crime. And we were very uncomfortable with that representation.”
The co-directors are hoping audiences come away with a different image of their country’s people, their relationship to the drug trade and the role Americans played in the industry’s creation. “We are just hoping that people hear the Colombian side of the story, and understand they have heard so far only one side,” says Gallego. “We are hoping that people get to hear our side.”