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Abstract
Colombian directors Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra’s award-winning film Pájaros de verano (2018) has garnered praise for its genre-bending fictional account of Colombia’s 1970s marijuana boom but has not yet been the subject of scholarly analysis. The film’s production methods and ethnographic depictions of the Colombian Wayuu people give an appearance of social commitment to its Indigenous subjects. However, I argue that narratively, it reinforces a false account of the marijuana boom that absolves the mestizo Colombian state of its role in the displacement and marginalisation of the Wayuu people within the context of the Colombia’s drug war. This article critically analyses Pájaros de verano’s racialised representation of drug trafficking and its seemingly contradictory referentiality to both New Latin American Cinema and Hollywood Westerns, demonstrating the film’s ideological investment in upholding dominant narratives about Colombian drug trafficking and the displacement of Indigenous communities.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Anne Garland Mahler for providing generous feedback throughout the preparation of this article, Samuel Amago for an insightful conversation about this film, and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 By audiovisual narco-narratives, I refer to a broad corpus of film and television series that share a thematic focus on drug trafficking. Drug trafficking has been the focus of many Colombian films and television series, particularly from the 1990s onward. For more on Colombian audiovisual narco-narratives, see Benavides (Citation2008), Pobutsky (Citation2021), and Suárez (Citation2009).
2 All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.
3 In 1973, Jamacia, which had been the second-largest exporter of marijuana to the United States behind Mexico, collaborated with the United States in a similar marijuana eradication campaign known as “Operation Buccaneer”, further contributing to Colombia’s marijuana boom (Britto Citation2020, 198).
4 This discursive situation of La Guajira at the margins of the nation is rooted in the historical construction of Colombia through a centre-periphery paradigm, in which its Andean interior is characterised by a strong state presence, and its peripheral regions by state absence (Ramírez Citation2015, 37). In the nineteenth century, theories of environmental determinism were used to support the claim that the tropical climate of La Guajira conditioned the primitive nature of its Indigenous and Afro-descendent inhabitants, reinforcing racial and spatial colonial divisions between the nation’s civilised criollo Andean interior and its presumably uncivilised peripheries (Serje Citation2011, 115–133). This racialised construction of La Guajira continued into the twentieth century. Literary representations of La Guajira, such as Eduardo Zalamea’s novel Cuatro años a bordo de mí mismo (1934), depict the region as inhabited by violent Wayuu populations, much like representations of the bonanza marimbera in the 1980s and 90s.
5 This 126-episode series, La mala hierba (Citation1982), ran for one season on Caracol Televisión. According to an article published in the Colombian newspaper Semana, “Mala hierba nunca muere” (Citation1982), the Sociedad Colombiana de Toxicología y Farmacodependencia permitted the show to air with the condition that the drug trafficker protagonists face an unhappy ending.
6 When citing dialogue spoken in Spanish, I will include the original Spanish quote followed by an English translation. When referencing Wayuunaiki dialogue, I will cite from the film’s English subtitles.
7 The tendency to indigenise these conflicts in fictional representations of the marijuana boom is likely influenced by the adaptation of these honour codes by non-Wayuu marimberos. Non-Indigenous contrabandistas in the Guajira “adopted the Wayuu code of honor for conflict resolution, eliminating the phases of negotiation and reparation that were central to Indigenous people, and making ‘blood price’ the first and only option” (Britto Citation2020, 70).
8 The production budget of El abrazo de la serpiente was roughly US$1.4 million (De la Fuente Citation2016), while that of Pájaros de verano was roughly US$5 million (Gallo Citation2018).
9 Lina Britto mentions this detail in a brief review of the film (2018, 13). Because the eight languages used in El abrazo de la serpiente were not written languages, “Indigenous protagonists did not follow a written script, but rather translated ideas communicated by the filmmakers” (D’Argenio Citation2018, 138).
10 Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (Citation1845) popularised this dialectic in Facundo: Civilización y barbarie, positioning the “uncivilised” inhabitants of Argentina’s rural peripheries in opposition to the modernity and progress associated with the country’s urban centres.
11 For more on this history, see Barrera Monroy (Citation2000) and Orsini Aarón (Citation2007).
12 In 2001, local police and national soldiers forcibly displaced 350 families from the Afro-Colombian village of Tabaco to clear additional land for El Cerrejón (Paley Citation2014, 67–68). This mine is currently owned by Glencore/Xstrata (Switzerland), BHP Bilton (UK/Australia), and Anglo American (UK/South Africa) (Avilés Citation2019, 1754).
13 Historically, La Guajira has been a region of global geopolitical interest. In the early twentieth century, it was home to numerous United Fruit Company banana enclaves. Then, during World War II, it became of great importance to the Allied powers given its access to oil pipelines that ran between Venezuela and the Panama Canal. Its proximity to the Dutch islands also made it of interest to US president Roosevelt, who feared the possible expansion of German military presence into the region (Britto Citation2020, 32).
14 Berman-Arévalo and Ojeda (Citation2020) and Escobar (Citation2004) have noted similar patterns of armed conflicts facilitating displacement and land seizures along these resource frontiers.
15 In Colombia, roughly 25% of the displaced population is Afro-Colombian and 7% Indigenous (Paley Citation2014, 71). These percentages signal a disproportionate rate of displacement as only 9.34% of Colombian citizens self-identify as Afro-Colombian and only 4.4% as Indigenous, according to the 2018 DANE Censo Nacional de Población y Vivienda.
16 While El Cerrejón currently uses 17 million litres of water daily, residents of La Guajira are limited on average to only 0.7 litres a day (Avilés Citation2019, 1757).
17 To date, the Wayuu community has not issued an official statement on this film.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Lauren Mehfoud
Lauren Mehfoud is a PhD Candidate in the University of Virginia’s Department of Spanish, Italian, & Portuguese. Her dissertation focuses on racial politics and state formation in twentieth-century Mexican and Colombian drug prohibition discourses.