How an illegal plant has acquired meaning as medicine, income, and a symbol of civil disobedience in a country where the law lags behind lived reality
In this well reported investigation, journalists Guillermo Garat and Romina Cáceres trace how cannabis has moved from the shadows of illegality into the centre of everyday survival in Paraguay. What emerges is not a story about drugs as vice, but about marijuana incorporated into the tradition of Pohã Ñana (denoting medicinal herbs in Guaraní), and as an economic lifeline in a country where poverty and repression leave few alternatives.
The article opens with an interesting scene inside Paraguay’s Congress: lawmakers, police officers, and staff openly pocketing cannabis flowers, oils, and creams handed out by activist growers during a public hearing. No one asks about legal limits. Instead, they ask how to apply it, where it eases pain best, and whether they can take more. The moment is emblematic of an essential contradiction in Paraguay: cannabis cultivation and distribution remain criminalised under a 1988 law, yet its medicinal use is broadly tolerated, informally shared, and socially understood as necessary.
At the centre of this uneasy truce is Nicolás Bernié, a “solidarity grower” who has spent nearly a decade producing and distributing cannabis oil for free. Bernié and others like him notify prosecutors and police before holding cannabis fairs, register users through the state’s medicinal cannabis programme and even share harvests with authorities. They have never been arrested. Garat and Cáceres show that the law is less absent, than selectively ignored.
Nowhere is this contradiction sharper than in San Pedro, one of Paraguay’s poorest and most heavily policed rural departments. Here, cannabis has become the only reliable crop for thousands of small farmers after cotton, sesame, and other traditional livelihoods collapsed. Soy monoculture dominates the land but creates little employment. Cannabis, by contrast, pays school fees, medical bills, roofs, and groceries. As one agronomist puts it bluntly, no trucks come to pick up the produce of small-scale, family-run gardens unless it is for cannabis.
The article follows Eulalio López, a peasant leader who once fiercely opposed marijuana cultivation, fearing it would breed violence, corruption, and social breakdown. Over time, however, he watched neighbouring settlements prosper while his own stagnated. Eventually, he changed course. Today, he oversees a meticulously managed medicinal cannabis plantation, run collectively and openly, framed not as criminal enterprise but as successful agronomy. For López, legalisation is no longer a moral debate but a practical one. Without it, farmers remain trapped between poverty and extortion by public officials.
That extortion is systemic. Growers describe routine bribery by police, intelligence agents, and anti-drug authorities, who charge per plant for “peace.” Those who cannot pay are forced out or pushed deeper into debt. Meanwhile, large landowners cultivate cannabis at scale with impunity. The authors underline a bitter irony: that small farmers are criminalised for survival while the state quietly tolerates an industry it refuses to regulate. Garat and Cáceres also trace the rise of a parallel, semi-legal movement pushing cannabis into public view. Groups like Granja Madre and Mamá Cultiva organise open planting events, street markets, and public notifications to authorities. Mothers testify about children whose epileptic seizures have been eased through cannabis oil that the state is legally obliged to provide – but fails to. Activists frame their work as civil disobedience born of care, not defiance.
Throughout, the reporting resists romanticising cannabis. Violence, secrecy, and exploitation persist, particularly in smuggling routes to Brazil, where farmers often go unpaid. Yet the authors insist on what is most striking is the obvious reality that cannabis has already been socially legalised. What remains unfinished is the acknowledgement of that fact in the law itself.
By weaving together congressional farce, rural economics, maternal care, and activist persistence, Garat and Cáceres reveal cannabis as a mirror of Paraguayan society itself, a plant that exposes institutional hypocrisy, class inequality, and the distance between law and life. In a country where seven out of ten people lack health insurance, marijuana is not an ideological cause but a practical answer.
This original source article ‘Marihuana en Paraguay: por el imperio de la necesidad’ by Guillermo Garat and Romina Cáceres, was published in Spanish in El Surti on 11 March, 2025.
It available here.
El Surti is an independent Paraguayan news outlet producing investigative, cultural, and socially engaged journalism.
Summary by ZN
