The story
On 25 September 1987 fishermen at Maricá, on the coast of Rio de Janeiro state, pulled 18 sealed tins from the sea. Each held about a kilo and a half of cannabis. They took them to the military police. Over the following months thousands more came ashore, and Brazil named the season after them: the Verão da Lata, the summer of the tin.
A cargo thrown overboard
The tins came from a ship. According to the account on record, the Solana Star had left Panama, loaded in Australia and was bound for the United States. Fearing that the Brazilian navy had seen it, the crew threw the cargo into the sea, and the ship later put in on the Brazilian coast for repairs.
The investigation and the charges fell on the crew of a vessel named Tunamar, which American intelligence had been watching. Of its seven crewmen only one was caught: the cook, Stephen Skelton. He spent about a year in detention in Brazil and was then extradited to the United States. The size of the cargo rests on his testimony.
How much there was
| Tins | Weight | |
|---|---|---|
| Estimated cargo | more than 13,000 | about 22 tonnes |
| Recovered by police | about 2,543 | about 3,650 kg |
| Never accounted for | about 10,000 | — |
Each tin held between 1 and 1.5 kg. They were found along a very long stretch of coast, from Cabo Frio in Rio de Janeiro state down to Praia do Cassino in Rio Grande do Sul. Three states published figures for what their police collected; Santa Catarina and Paraná did not.
The police assumed that the missing tins had been found by civilians, picked up by traffickers, sunk, or carried by the sea to other countries.
The rush to the beaches
People went to the coast to look for tins. Street sellers began offering empty ones, which confused the police trying to follow the real ones.
The cannabis was better than what was sold locally, and for a while that weakened the domestic trade. The source records what happened next: Brazilian traffickers improved their own product, and once the tins ran out the trade grew again.
Why the index did not move
The summer of the tin changed no law. Possession for personal use was a crime in Brazil under the 1976 drug law, with six months to two years of detention, and it stayed one until 2006. The episode is in the history because it shows the other side of that law: a single lost cargo, about six times larger than everything the police managed to seize from it.[1]
Listed for context. No score change is recorded for Brazil here.
References
Checked. The date and the event were compared with a source that was read.