Colombia: Photos: Colombia’s “Lost City of Marijuana”

Apr 8, 2016 | Anne Campoy, Quartz
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Colombia’s 50-year civil war devastated this region. Fighting between the Colombian army and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) displaced 8,800 people in the municipality of roughly 30,000 inhabitants, and killed nearly 300, according to the government’s victim registry. 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. The so-called “lost city of marijuana” has been documented by various journalists, including Nicolas Enriquez, a photographer who spent nearly two months shooting life in Toribío.