With the War Over, a Drug Is Legal
CORINTO, Colombia — For years, Blanca Riveros has had the same routine: After fixing breakfast and taking her son to school, she heads home to a large plastic trash bag filled with marijuana.
She trims the plants and gets them ready for Colombian drug traffickers. After school, her son helps cut more.
The business was long overseen by the country’s largest rebel group, which dominated this region, taxed its drugs and became internationally notorious for trafficking in billions of dollars in illicit substances. But when the government signed a peace deal with the fighters last year, the state swept in and reclaimed this remote mountain village, threatening to end the trade.
“How am I supposed to feed my family?” Ms. Riveros asked.
She now has an unlikely option: growing marijuana with the government’s blessing.
A Canadian company called PharmaCielo is working to produce the drug legally in Colombia and is looking to hire.
Colombia has received billions of dollars in American aid to eradicate the drug trade. But in the coming weeks, the government says, it will begin processing licenses for a small number of companies, including PharmaCielo, under a 2015 law that allows the cultivation of medical marijuana.
Rarely has a country taken an illegal drug overseen by a criminal organization and tried to replace it with the same crop produced legally, sold by corporations.
“Here we have an entirely new opportunity,” said Alejandro Gaviria, Colombia’s health minister, whose agency is issuing the licenses.
Mr. Gaviria said legal drugs could become an important economic tool for postconflict Colombia.
More than 220,000 people were killed as the rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia waged 52 years of war against paramilitary groups and the government, displacing the state entirely in some places. In the final decades, guerrillas moved into narcotics.
The logic now: What if those profits were put into the hands of the government and peasants instead?
PharmaCielo’s directors include former executives of Philip Morris and Bayer. The company sees a future in which the legal drug industry is controlled by the same kind of multinational corporations that the Marxist- Leninist guerrilla movement aimed to drive out.
Here in Corinto, the company has already signed a deal with a workers’ cooperative.
“The peasants were forced to produce these plants,” said Federico Cock- Correa, who heads the Colombian subsidiary of PharmaCielo and promises to pay his growers far more than their wartime earnings.
For years, the indigenous Nasa people of the Central Andes were terrorized by the rebels, who not only taxed the marijuana trade, but also extorted from legal businesses in towns like Toribío.
During a visit from Mr. Cock- Correa, Mauricio Caso, Toribío’s deputy mayor, recalled the rebels planting a car bomb in a bus that passed a crowded market in 2011, killing five people. Mr. Caso also seemed skepti- cal of his visitor.
“We Nasa walk slowly but safely,” Mr. Caso said. “You men from Medellín tend to be crafty and fast.”
Not all local leaders were as cool to PharmaCielo. Edward García, the mayor of Corinto, estimates that twothirds of his town of 32,000 people depend on cannabis for a living.
“That people can even pay their taxes is because they are growing marijuana,” he said.
Ms. Riveros says the profits of the illegal trade have fallen by more than half since the FARC stood down. Experts say the peacetime market has been flooded with cannabis that can move more easily now.
“It would be a miracle for us,” she said of PharmaCielo’s plan.
But for now she still cuts cannabis for the mafia groups that come by Corinto. She pulled out a half-filled sack and started trimming, using scissors with an index finger that had grown crooked after years of the same work. Her son, 8, sat next to her, watching Colombian show horses on YouTube, using a wireless router bought with the marijuana money.
At one point, prospective clients pulled up in a car to her small adobe home. “It will be much more technical with the company,” she said, referring to PharmaCielo.
It was getting to be evening. Ms. Riveros strolled through a field of her own plants.
As the sun set, the villagers were turning on the lights that speed the plants’ growth, plot by plot. Before long, the entire hillside seemed lit up. The other mountains were, too. The lights of the high-rises of Cali shimmered in the far distance.
“Isn’t it all just beautiful?” Ms. Riveros asked.