Amazonia, the accidental victim of the Colombian peace agreement

The high burning season is approaching in the Colombian Amazon.

Near the township of El Capricho in the south of the country, cows graze among tree trunks in a strip of shattered rainforest. A land that is noticeable was razed less time ago seems flaked, full of branches that await the burning of the fire.

If there is dry weather in the coming weeks, fires will start to clear the chainsaw-sawn land so it can be turned into pasture, said Angélica Rojas, a local environmentalist.

Much of the world’s attention is focused on Brazil’s dismal record in terms of protecting the rainforest; however, in neighboring Colombia, swaths of the Amazon are becoming a mosaic of parts of jungle interspersed with extensive cattle ranches.

Unlike Brazil, this does not result from the tacit approval of the authorities; it is the unintended consequence of a peace agreement between the Colombian government and the Marxist guerrillas that has accelerated deforestation.

A few minutes up an uncovered road from El Capricho, in the department of Guaviare, is a settlement occupied by some 200 demobilized combatants and their families. They used to be the law throughout the country; now they spend their days raising pigs and producing honey.

By laying down their arms, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, inadvertently opened up the region to those who want to take over land and ranchers who are razing the forest at a record rate.

Last year 140,000 hectares of the Colombian Amazon were destroyed, which is equivalent to about 20 soccer fields every hour, according to data compiled by the University of Maryland. That’s more than triple the level in 2015, the year before the FARC agreed to put aside half a century of fighting.

The belt of land where Colombia’s warm cattle grasslands meet rainforest was the heartland of the FARC, where many of its top brass were based.

These guerrillas, who were once elusive, are now quite a familiar scene; They ride up and down the muddy roads near El Capricho on motorcycles, shopping for groceries and taking their children to medical appointments.

Before the peace agreement, they imposed punishments on the local farming community for violating their rules. Crimes they considered particularly serious, such as spying for the Army, were punishable by death.

The presence of a very feared guerrilla group with a penchant for kidnapping was a brake on economic activity of all kinds, including livestock (environmentally catastrophic) that is now booming. In addition, the FARC imposed a ban on felling trees without permission and took its enforcement seriously.

For unauthorized deforestation, a person could be fined or forced to do community work such as repairing roads, said Julián Gallo, a former member of the FARC’s seven-member ruling council.

The FARC’s defense of the Amazon was not simply driven by an altruistic desire to preserve the habitat of jaguars, tapirs, and tree frogs.

The jungle concealed their movements from the army and the abundance of the forest served as a strategic food bank, Gallo said in a telephone interview. He added that they managed to survive during long periods of military operations with economic blockades thanks to the reserves of fish and wild meat. Gallo now has a Senate seat under the terms of the peace agreement.

After Gallo and his companions surrendered their weapons, the government did not exercise the same degree of authority over the Amazon region. The FARC government was not replaced by control of Bogotá, as promised; it was replaced by something closer to anarchy.

A local army unit described the area around El Capricho as a “red zone” due to the presence of illegal armed groups, and advised against traveling there last month. Several police officers were injured near the city in an attack.

About a tenth of the Amazon is in Colombia, where it has suffered less damage than in Brazil, at least so far. From 2001 to 2019, Colombia lost 2.7% of its rainforest, while Brazil lost 7%, according to data compiled by the NGO Rainforest Foundation Norway.

In 2019, the government of President Iván Duque launched Operation Artemis, named after the Greek goddess of nature, which involves more than 20,000 soldiers and police officers in an offensive against environmental crimes.

At the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow last month, Duque pledged to protect Colombia’s forests and assured that 30% of the nation’s territory would be covered by protection status for next year.

Large areas of Colombia already have that status. However, the protected status has not prevented them from destroying their forest cover and filling it with livestock.

Part of the blame can be attributed to so-called FARC dissidents, who became disillusioned with the peace process and returned to the conflict. In the absence of state control, they grew rapidly, their expansion driven by profits from the cocaine trade.

While the former FARC kept large-scale farming at bay, the explosion of ranching in the Amazon gives dissidents a chance to get more money through extortion. And since they move in smaller groups than the FARC, they have less need for forest cover.

The number of livestock in eight key areas where the Amazon is experiencing high levels of deforestation nearly doubled to 2.1 million last year from 2016, according to a study by Rojas’ environmental group, the Foundation for Conservation and Sustainable Development.

Last year, environmentalists in parts of the Amazon began receiving death threats in pamphlets allegedly from FARC dissidents.

These threats should not be taken lightly: 65 environmental defenders were killed last year in Colombia, the most of any country in the world, according to a report by Global Witness, a London-based NGO.

Livestock is a favorite means of laundering drug smuggling proceeds, due to its cash transactions and lack of traceability, said Juan Ricardo Ortega, former director of DIAN, Colombia’s tax agency.

In Guaviare, locals say that some of the larger farms are owned by cocaine traffickers, although their names generally do not appear on any property documents.

Certainly, coca, the raw material for making cocaine, used to be the main source of income for the area around El Capricho. Locals released her under the terms of the peace accord, but say the promised financial assistance did not appear.

As a result, “farmers have gone further into the forest to cut down more trees and plant more,” coca, said Richar Ortiz, himself a former coca grower who now sells ice cream from a cooler attached to a motorcycle.

The biggest damage, however, is done by the growing demand for beef, according to Pedro Arenas, a former Guaviare congressman who founded the NGO Viso Mutop to promote sustainable development.

In November, the agriculture ministry announced that Colombia had overcome regulatory hurdles to start exporting live cattle to Saudi Arabia, and the additional demand will boost prices across the country, he said.