Compelling and engaging, this book meticulously traces the complex and forgotten history story of marimberos—Colombian marijuana traffickers who, according to the author, were “pioneers of the drug trade” from Colombia's northern Guajira and Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta region. Marimberos established early drug trading routes for marijuana decades before suppliers like Escobar in Medellín did the same with cocaine. The marimbero is a bridge that “not only connected the coffee republic and the narcotics nation in terms of political economy, but also ushered in the transition toward a new national culture and identity (11).

Britto suggests that in many ways the rise of marijuana cultivation mirrors that of coffee and other export crops; she situates the marijuana boom in the broader context of Colombia's efforts toward constructing a unified nation-state, often through agrarian development, and attempts by central governments to control regions geographically, politically, socially, and culturally distinct from each other. She proposes that it became increasingly challenging for central governments to negotiate internal conflicts as it tried to appease increased US pressure to regulate the growing drug traffic to the United States. As US policy redefined drug-trafficking as security threat, marimberos faced increased criminalization and the industry and region itself became progressively militarized. Direct intervention on the part of regional leaders, at the behest of the central government, led to the downfall of the marijuana trade.

Bold and creative in its multifaceted theoretical framework and its approach to the forgotten history of the marijuana boom in Colombia's national development, this book uses archival sources, recordings, and oral, visual, and documentary evidence to reconstruct the beginnings of the marijuana trade. In her study, Britto integrates “multiscale perspective on local, regional, national and international developments; a commodity studies approach; and methods of political, cultural and diplomatic history” (4). She unpacks a multilayered and innovative theoretical framework in a series of chapters that creates a rich portrait of the region and its players, traces the rise of the marijuana boom, and charts the policies that led to its inevitable decline.

Each section consists of two chapters, each using a different analytical framework as a way to move through the unique character of the northern Guajira and Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, some of its vivid inhabitants, and the ways marijuana cultivation shaped the landscape, politics, and culture of the region. The chapters explain and evaluate the complex systems of the marijuana market, the role of the United States, and the role of local and national authorities to regulate it. Many chapters include the voices and experiences of those who lived through this time. For example, the second section includes a chapter that discusses the ways that vallenato music and the grand parties thrown by marimberos “marked the rhythm of marijuana's cycles of production and trade” and were the realm where “complex hierarchies of masculine exchanges and relations were negotiated within the social sphere of a new export economy and where regional and national popular culture were reshaped” (117). The analysis is shaped by interviews conducted by the author and ‘audiomemoirs’ recorded by singers, artists and the marimberos who often organized and paid for the celebrations at which they performed.

Britto also connects her findings to the ongoing struggle of dealing with drug violence. Indeed, traces of nostalgia for the bygone era of the marijuana boom, as articulated in different chapters, serve to highlight the ways that the cocaine trade “exploded like a car bomb” in the 1980s. The book reframes the beginnings of Colombia's central role in the international drug trade, thus presenting a compelling and original analysis of the social, cultural, and political history of the marijuana economy in Colombia. By revealing lesser known aspects of drug-trafficking, the author reframes the beginnings of Colombia's central role in the international narcotics market.

This well-researched book will appeal to scholars and policy-makers wishing to develop solutions for the challenges posed by narcotics-trafficking by understanding its complex history.