By Aiuri Rebello and Santiago Torrado
RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – (El Pais) There is a new drug in the Brazilian illegal drug market that is progressively gaining space among dealers and users nationwide. It is Colombian marijuana, known as “Colombia,” “colombinha,” “colom,” “cripa,” or “creepy,” depending on the producing region.
The drug coming mostly from regions controlled by armed groups that operate in the neighboring country’s Pacific Ocean Corridor looks different, is of better quality, stronger, and more expensive than the Paraguayan marijuana that traditionally supplies most of the country.
While a gram of Paraguayan marijuana in São Paulo costs about R$5 (US$0.90), Colombian marijuana costs between R$20 and R$30 per gram, according to users, dealers, and the Federal Police (PF). The product has attracted the attention of suppliers – it is increasingly common today for Paraguayan and Colombian products to be offered in parallel. The higher purity and the more potent effects, in turn, have attracted consumers.
This domestic market interest is reflected in the seizures of Colombian marijuana conducted by the Federal Police (PF) in recent years. According to an unprecedented 26-year record, from 1995 to 2014 there were virtually no marijuana seizures on the border and river routes used by criminal gangs such as the ‘Primeiro Comando da Capital’ (“First Command of the Capital” – PCC) and ‘Comando Vermelho’ (“Red Command” CV) to bring cocaine from Colombia to Brazil through the Amazon.
In 2014, however, the PF seized the first ton of Colombian marijuana brought through the route. The 1,342 kilos were almost 10 times more than the 143 kilos seized the year before, in 2013. Between 2014 and now, never again has less than a ton been seized annually through the area.
In 2018, a record so far, seizures reached nearly 10 tons (9,420 kilograms). In 2020, amid the pandemic, seizures closed just under 2 tons, according to the PF.
“I remember the first time I went to buy marijuana and the trafficker had Colombian to sell, it was in 2017,” says Alonso* (all names of traffickers and users used in this report have been changed), a 32-year-old physical education teacher who works as a personal trainer in São Paulo.
“I thought it smelled good, much better than the traditional one, and I took a gram to try it. I loved it and today I confess that I don’t even smoke pressed anymore,” says Alonso, who uses the drug to relax after intense workouts. Alonso says that although it is more expensive, the Colombian drug is much stronger and is now available from the same dealers as the Paraguayan version.
According to a dealer who works in a middle-class neighborhood in São Paulo’s South Zone, he buys the two different kinds of marijuana from the same suppliers, larger dealers than himself. He says that in São Paulo there is only one way for a new product to enter the market this way and become part of the city’s regular supply.
“It’s the faction, for sure,” he says, referring to the PCC. “As much as it could be several different gangs making the run, they at least authorize it,” he believes.
The trafficker also sells genetically selected organic marijuana such as “skunk,” similar to that sold legally in the Netherlands and the United States, produced in São Paulo by a drug dealer friend: “Colombian marijuana is somewhere between ‘skunk’ and pressed in terms of quality and price,” says the criminal.
High added value
“It is an enriched marijuana, differentiated, with high THC content, the way it is produced is different, the way it is carried is different,” says Detective Inspector Elvis Secco, director of the Federal Police’s Coordination of Repression of Drugs, Arms and Criminal Factions. “There is no need to carry large loads, we have no record of a single seizure with 5 tons of creepy [Colombian marijuana], for example, because it is highly valuable, so it pays off to transport smaller volumes, which also makes seizures more difficult,” says the officer.
“They’re using the route in the north of the country, which is mainly through the Amazon and its tributaries, to traffic marijuana from Colombia to Brazil,” he says.
Secco says that large criminal factions and smaller gangs use the same Amazon river routes, boats, personnel, and infrastructure used to smuggle cocaine from Colombia, which is the main business. “This special drug comes through the gap in the route used to traffic cocaine. It is very common for the same cocaine traffickers to traffic Colombian marijuana, which is not the case with Paraguayan marijuana. The guy who specializes in trafficking Paraguayan marijuana doesn’t have the logistics for cocaine and vice versa.”
“We need to dig deeper into this Colombian marijuana issue. We requested our attaché at the embassy in Colombia to provide us with more information about this phenomenon on the Colombian side,” says the detective. “I don’t know how this production is controlled there, we need more intelligence about this. Are these plantations authorized or illegal? I wonder what Colombia is doing to fight this trafficking on their side of the border. We don’t know anything about that.”
Across the rivers
In early March, Colombian army troops conducted what they described as “the largest seizure of marijuana to date in the entire Amazon region.” The shipment of 75 ‘creepy’ sacks, weighing about 3.5 tons, was being transported in two boats on the Yarí River, between the Colombian states of Caquetá and Amazonas, and belonged to one of the dissidents of the now-defunct FARC guerrilla group that disbanded in the peace process.
As with most of creepy, it came from the Cauca region, a place ravaged by the violent actions of several armed groups active in the Pacific Corridor. The destination of the cargo, valued by the authorities at approximately US$1.7 million, was Brazil, where it would enter through an intricate river network.
This type of drug is also called high-octane marijuana in Colombia because of its high concentrations of THC, the plant’s main active substance. About five years ago reports began from across the border about the existence of sophisticated greenhouses used to grow creepy plants that light up the mountains at night in Cauca.
Growers use the lights to speed up growth. The “golden triangle” comprising the municipalities of Miranda, Caloto, and Corinto in this region account for about 60% of the illegal marijuana planted in Colombia. In mid-2019, the region drew the attention of all of Colombia when the country’s authorities applied a much-criticized strategy to fight illegal plantations: cutting off electricity to these populations with the aim of tackling illegal cultivation, but it was unable to break a production chain that thrives in the shadow of cocaine trafficking.
Colombia is now by far the world’s leading producer of coca, the raw material for cocaine, with 154,000 hectares cultivated by the end of 2019, according to the latest annual information available from the United Nations’ Integrated Illicit Crop Monitoring System.
“The share of creepy marijuana in drug trafficking is relative. We don’t have satellite monitoring of marijuana production, we know very little about the area and its size, but compared to the areas dedicated to coca it is a marginal economy,” says Daniel Rico of C-Análisis, an applied criminology firm. “Marijuana doesn’t need as many intermediaries, it’s not such a big logistic chain and it doesn’t require as many supplies and conditions, the process is much simpler. So as much as the price is lower, the profitability is higher,” the expert analyzes.
“For the United States government, which puts the resources and defines a good part of the agenda to fight drug trafficking in Colombia, creepy marijuana is not a problem because it doesn’t get there,” he says. This explains why the issue is not a priority.
Undeterred, the cultivation and trafficking of creepy marijuana is a considerable source of income for illegal groups such as FARC dissidents, explains Jeremy McDermott, deputy director of InSight Crime, which conducts a variety of research on the subject. In addition to supplying the domestic market, special marijuana is also exported to several countries.
“We find creepy in Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela, Brazil and even Trinidad and Tobago. Obviously, there is a well-established export system,” he says. Marijuana is proportionally much heavier than coca, and that causes it to be difficult to hide and carry.
So the big shipments use the established coca routes -many to Pacific Ocean ports- but a large part goes to Brazil through the Amazon region. To get the drugs into the neighboring country, traffickers rely on the help of FARC dissident groups led by Gentil Duarte, a former guerrilla commander, who control the rivers from the plains up into southern Colombia. Both the cocaine base paste and the packages of marijuana are shipped through these river corridors.
Trafficking routes
According to the Federal Police, Colombian marijuana enters Brazil through other routes used by drug traffickers to bring cocaine. One leaves Colombia, goes through Venezuela and enters Brazil through the border with Roraima. Another one descends in the direction of Peru and Bolivia and enters Brazilian territory through the states of Acre, Mato Grosso, and Mato Grosso do Sul.
From there, it is distributed nationwide by gangs associated with various criminal factions, mainly the PCC, which dominates drug trafficking in São Paulo, the main national consumer market, and the CV, predominant in Rio de Janeiro (second largest drug market in the country).
As of 2014, the PCC began its expansion throughout the country. After establishing the entire cocaine distribution route to Europe and Africa from the port of Santos, the faction became dominant in key locations on the border with Paraguay and Bolivia, where the marijuana and cocaine produced in the two countries reached, respectively.
In 2016, the fifteen-year PCC alliance with the CV was severed, and the São Paulo criminal faction began to dispute territory. After a number of prison massacres in Brazil’s North and Northeast regions, with dozens of deaths amid the faction war caused by the expansion of the PCC into these regions, the situation settled down somewhat from 2019.
According to the director of the Federal Police’s Coordination of Repression of Drugs, Arms and Criminal Factions, for at least two years there has been a kind of peace agreement or truce between the PCC and other factions operating in the Northern region, such as the ‘Família do Norte’ (“Northern Family” – FDN) and the CV.
“There was a large expansion of the PCC, which managed to establish itself in the Northern region and in virtually the whole country, and today has more influence than the other factions,” says detective Secco. “The CV also operates on the Amazon route, as do several regional factions with which the two big ones have alliances,” he says. The period coincides with the beginning of the influx of Colombian marijuana into Brazil in large quantities.
In practice, the abundant production in the neighboring country, coupled with the distribution network and wide acceptance in the consumer market in Brazil, has consolidated “colombinha” as another profitable product for the two countries’ narco-traffickers.
Source: El Pais