A one hectary marijuana plantation in the mountains of Cauca, Colombia, April 30.
The mountains of Colombia’s southwest Cauca province are far from the reach of the law and just as far from market. Dirt-poor peasants say it’s almost impossible to scrape a living selling legal produce so they rely on Marijuana plantations. Once the plants are picked and dried, peasants sell it to middlemen. The weed is pressed into 25-pound bales, mostly using a simple iron press and a car jack. The FARC don´t run the drug trade in northern Cauca, peasant farmers here say. But the rebels do charge traffickers what they call a «war tax» of about $7 on every pound of marijuana trucked out of these hills.
