Colombia’s "lost city of marijuana"
Now that a peace deal is close, many pot farmers fear their livelihood is about to be destroyed
Quartz (US)
Friday, April 8, 2016
Friday, April 8, 2016
The jungle around Toribío in southwestern Colombia is filled with vast pot plantations that stretch as far as the eye can see. At night, the greenhouse lights glow like a sea of fluorescent plankton. Colombia’s 50-year civil war devastated this region. But it also gave the residents a way to earn a living. The fighting turned the hilly terrain around Toribío and adjacent municipalities into a no-man’s land that government authorities dared not enter. The locals, most of them members of the Nasa indigenous people, tended the marijuana plantations while the army and the leftist guerrillas battled it out.
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