Colombia is the worlds second-most biodiverse country after Brazil. Central Colombias Macarena region, in particular, is important for biodiversity as it serves as a transition zone between three major biomes: the Amazon rainforest, the eastern savannah, and the Andes mountains. Further, the isolated mountain range is home to three national parks: Sierra de la Macarena, Cordillera de los Picachos and Tinigua.

But underlying this biological richness are large petroleum deposits that beckon to oil companies. Meanwhile, cattle ranchers and farmers are stripping habitat for pasture and cropland, and large-scale landowners are expanding their holdings into pristine forest once untouchable due to FARC presence.

Conservationists and scientists are concerned that Macarenas exceptional biodiversity may fall victim to economic interests. Lucas Barrientos, professor of Evolutionary Biology at Rosario University, told Mongabay the region is highly important from a conservation standpoint because it serves as a biological corridor through which wildlife and their genes can pass from one ecosystem and population to another.

On one hand, there are so many species in this region that we havent even had a chance to discover them for science. More than that, this region serves as a corridor for genetic flows, which means populations dont remain isolated from each other, Barrientos said. These can be small organisms like insects or amphibians as well as large mammals. This flow of genetic diversity is important to keeping the populations healthy.

Barrientos went on to explain that the region is made of dry rainforest habitat, which is Colombias most endangered ecosystem. He said there are endemic species that are supremely specified and adapted to thrive in this particular ecosystem.

Last month, authorities extinguished a fire in the Sierra de la Macarena National Park that nearly reached the banks of the Cao Cristales river. A well-known tourist attraction, the Cao Cristales provides habitat to a sensitive species of underwater plant called Macarenia clavigera, which explodes into a living rainbow of gold, olive green, blue, black and red for a few months every year.

The Colombian Ministry of Defense and Reuters reported the blaze was set by FARC guerrillas who have rejected the peace process, known by the government as FARC dissidents, as they attempted to expand coca cultivation in the region. However, local sources consulted by Mongabay say the authorities version of events is unlikely because the region is unattractive for large-scale coca growing compared to other regions of the country. While coca is cultivated for traditional purposes, its also grown to produce cocaine.

Local tour guide and biologist Jhon Muoz, who resides in the nearby town of La Macarena, told Mongabay it wasnt necessarily the guerrillas who set the fire. Instead he suspects small farmers called campesinos or cattle ranchers set the fires to protest the governments recent anti-deforestation operations that have been blamed for the displacement of families residing within the countrys national parks. Nevertheless, he said it was unclear who set the fire, and nobody knows the exact reasons why it was started.

The Defense Minister reported that it was the FARC dissidents trying to plant coca. That is completely false because Cao Cristales sits on hard, rocky land, Muoz said. That fire could have been set by campesinos as reprisal for the forced evictions that are taking place in the parks.

The United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime monitors coca cultivation in Colombia by satellite. Comparison of data from 2015 before the FARC demobilized and 2018 shows there has been a significant decrease in coca crop density in the region since the peace agreement was signed. An expert on Colombias armed conflict consulted for this article confirmed coca inside the park has been uncommon for around a decade.

Since the demobilization of the FARC in 2016, deforestation has skyrocketed in the region, most notably in Tinigua Natural National Park. Deforestation shot up 400% in Tinigua between 2017 and 2018 based on satellite data from Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP), an initiative of the organization Amazon Conservation.

Colombias Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology and Environmental Studies (IDEAM) found the La Macarena municipality registered a 26% increase in deforestation in 2018, the greatest increase in deforestation anywhere in the country. Almost half of the loss of forest came from the Tinigua Park, Rodrigo Botero, director of environmental non-profit FCDS, told Mongabay Latam.

Deforestation in the park looks set to jump again in 2020, with data from the University of Maryland showing much heavier tree cover loss between January and March this year than during the same period in 2019.

In March 2020, a study published in Nature found there has been a dramatic increase in deforestation in the majority of Colombias protected areas and buffer zones following the demobilization of the FARC in 2016. The study said armed groups, especially FARC dissidents, are consolidating within national parks such as Tinigua, assigning land to farmers and promoting livestock and coca crops as an economic engine of the colonization process.

These groups are reactivating old tracks used during the past conflict and opening new ones, to create a political-military transportation network, the studys authors write. This territorial-control strategy allows consolidating a social basis for these armed groups, economic inputs for rearmament, and a population exploiting this territorial security, which also represents a source of recruitment for the guerrillas.

In Colombia, park rangers are killed on a relatively regular basis. A total of 12 rangers were killed between 1994 and 2020, according to Semana Magazine.

Colombia is a dangerous place for many people. This is particularly true for indigenous and community leaders who routinely face the threat of assassination at the hands of mercenaries paid by powerful landholders exerting territorial and economic control, as well as by illegal armed groups operating with impunity in many of the countrys remote regions.

Non-profit conflict monitoring organization Indepaz reports 817 social leaders and human rights defenders were killed in Colombia in the little more than three years between ratification of the Peace Agreement between the government and the FARC in November 2016 and February 28, 2020.

Estefania Ciros is an academic investigator who grew up near the Macarena region in Caquet, a department that sits in the foothills region where the Amazon rainforest meets the Andes mountains. Ciros, who works for the Colombia Truth Commission, told Mongabay that the indigenous and campesino communities of the Macarena have long suffered as an epicenter of U.S. drug prohibitionist and extractivist policies that began at the turn of the 20th century. She said the extractivist and anti-drug policies promoted by the U.S. were carried out in cooperation with Bogotas adversarial agenda against the regions campesinos.

Extractive industries such as rubber and petroleum companies arrived at the beginning of the 20th century, Ciros said. Later came the process known as the tigrillero where people from Bogota and foreign countries paid people to go into the forests to get skins from the tigrillos. The tigrillo, or oncilla (Leopardus tigrinus), is a small spotted cat native to Central and South America; it is listed as Vulnerable by the IUCN.

Alongside the extractivist activities, carried out with support from North American companies, the Colombian state promoted colonization of the region. By the middle of the century, a violent civil war between Liberals and Conservatives led to another wave of colonization when Liberals fled to the Macarena to escape violence.

The liberals who fled the violence ended up politicizing the campesinos in the region, which ended up seeding the armed uprising, the very basis of what would become the FARC, Ciros said. In the years that followed, drug traffickers, elites and people from other regions came introducing marijuana and coca to the campesinos who lacked access to markets and were struggling to maintain basic material necessities of life.

With the region inundated with illicit crops, interests arising from the U.S. found the right justification under the War on Drugs to intervene in the region. Plan Colombia, signed in 1998 under President Bill Clinton, combined with former President Alvaro Uribes 2002 Democratic Security initiative, provided billions of dollars to spend on the anti-insurgent campaign in the region, Ciros said.

Plan Colombia cost the U.S. over $10 billion and experts say it failed to lower coca growing and cocaine trafficking in the country in the long-term. The foreign aid provided the government with advanced military technology such as Black Hawk helicopters, while paramilitaries decimated villages and political leaders that were sympathetic to the insurgency. Even with the billions of dollars in military aid, however, the government was unable to defeat the insurgents on the battlefield, and negotiations to find a peaceful exit to the conflict began informally under former President Uribe between 2008 and 2010.

By 2016, the FARC and the government under former President Juan Manuel Santos reached a historic peace agreement after four years of negotiation. The FARC demobilized by the end of the year, turning over thousands of weapons to the United Nations and moving their demobilized soldiers into reintegration camps.

While the FARC committed a great number of human rights abuses against campesinos during the half-century of armed conflict, the rebels considered themselves to be an armed uprising of the campesino rural class. As such, the rebels worked closely with communities to produce coexistence manuals that created clear rules and regulations on many issues, including farming practices, environmental protection, and criminal conduct.

With the reincorporation of the FARC, the coexistence manuals and community regulations were left up in the air. The state didnt think to hold up or strengthen the communal action committees, but rather did the opposite, Ciros said.

Barrientos added that the FARC had a vested interest in maintaining the forest cover to keep the drug-trafficking routes they supported hidden from the authorities who patrolled the skies.

While the upper echelons and thousands of foot soldiers were demobilized from the FARC, critics say current President Ivan Duque has largely turned his back on the peace agreement, instead accommodating far right conservative elements who reject the concessions made to end more than half a century of violence. Since his election in 2018, Duques government has been locked in nearly constant scandals with investigations underway for ties to mafia figures, vote buying and Uribes role in the formation of a paramilitary group in the 1990s.

With the lure of record-breaking drug trafficking revenue still on the table combined with a lack of basic security guarantees for demobilized rebels, thousands of guerrillas under the command of non-conformist rebel commander Gentil Duarte have returned to the battlefield and have wrested, or rather failed to surrender, territorial control to the State in Colombias northern Amazon and La Macarena.

Large-scale landholders, a Latin American rural class known as latifundios, were once afraid of investing in the northern Amazon region because they feared extortion, kidnapping and infrastructure attacks. However, Ciros said the latifundios viewed the peace agreement as an opportunity to expand their holdings by buying up small holdings and encouraging further colonization of rainforest lands that can be converted into productive cattle pasture.

Ciros says multinational oil companies are moving in at the same time, buying sympathy in the communities by paying for road infrastructure improvements that will lower costs for campesinos by facilitating trade with external markets.

The entry of large-scale property holders and extractivists into the region explains the majority of the increases in deforestation Under Gentil Duarte there has been permissiveness toward large-scale property that didnt exist under the previous FARC, Ciros said. I cant say with certainty, but its possible hes trying to shore up local support and legitimacy.

In April 2019, President Duque launched an offensive against deforestation in the northern Amazon called Artemisa, in cooperation with military, police and public prosecutors, and accompanied by the Ministry of Environment and National Natural Parks of Colombia. Nicacio Martnez Espinel, Colombias top army commander, said 10 percent of the armys resources would be redeployed to target environmental crimes, particularly illegal deforestation.

For Ciros and other sources in the Macarena consulted by Mongabay, the military operations against campesino farmers who are accused of deforestation followed in the same stream of the hardline anti-drug, anti-insurgent policies of the previous decades.

With Artemisa, Duque declared the protection of water and forests as a matter of national security. But what does this mean? It doesnt mean stopping billion-dollar dams like Hidroituango in Antioquia or taking serious action against illegal mining, Ciros said. It means an exercise of force against a highly vulnerable population of campesinos living on land that was demarcated as a protected area in Bogota.

Human rights organization Parks with Campesinos released a statement criticizing the governments treatment of social-environmental problems in the region: Since 2017 the Government opted to take the road of violence and broken promises as a solution to the socio-environmental conflict in the territory.

The Colombia Natural National Parks authorities declined multiple requests for interviews.

Biologist Lucas Barrientos told Mongabay that the Ministry of Mines has green-lighted petroleum exploration in the Tinigua and Picachos national parks. He added that although there is political controversy over these actions in Bogota, the petroleum interests have the advantage of greater resources and more lawyers than the parks.

The government entities are separate from each other, Barrientos said. The petroleum agencies are interested in petroleum. They dont care about biodiversity.

Banner image of Cao Cristales by Gicaman via Wikimedia Commons (CCBY-SA 4.0)

Editors note:This story was powered byPlaces to Watch, a Global Forest Watch (GFW) initiative designed to quickly identify concerning forest loss around the world and catalyze further investigation of these areas. Places to Watch draws on a combination of near-real-time satellite data, automated algorithms and field intelligence to identify new areas on a monthly basis. In partnership with Mongabay, GFW is supporting data-driven journalism by providing data and maps generated by Places to Watch. Mongabay maintains complete editorial independence over the stories reported using this data.

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National parks pay the price as land conflicts intensify in Colombia - Mongabay.com