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Deforestation rates are rising in Colombia, after government negotiations with guerrillas who control swathes of the Amazon stumbled. Reviving the talks is the best way to stop more trees from falling, but Bogotá will also need to assert the state’s authority in these remote areas.
What’s new? Colombia’s government has made environmental protection a priority. But armed groups control large parts of the endangered Amazon rainforest, making that goal hard to achieve. One group in particular, the Central Armed Command, or EMC, has shown it has the power to slow or accelerate deforestation at will.
Why does it matter? Armed groups’ tightening grip on the Colombian Amazon has further jeopardised the health of a forest that plays a crucial role in the planet’s climate. People living under these groups’ yoke have been left vulnerable to the whims of criminals bent on expanding their illicit businesses.
What should be done? Colombia’s government should pursue negotiations with armed groups and plot ways to curb deforestation. But it should also assert its authority in the Amazon through development programs fostering livelihoods that do not harm the environment, efforts to combat large-scale environmental offenders and reinforced coordination of security, peace and environment policies.
I.Overview
Colombian President Gustavo Petro has put protection of the environment at the heart of his plans for government, but armed groups’ sway over the Amazon has complicated his bid to stop deforestation. Remote parts of Colombia’s Amazon, where the state’s writ has long been feeble, are under the control of the so-called Central Armed Command (EMC), a splinter of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), most of which demobilised starting in 2016. From the outset of Petro’s government, this guerrilla faction displayed the power to curb forest razing, using it as a good-will gesture during incipient negotiations with state officials. But with those talks stumbling and infighting plaguing the EMC, deforestation rates have shot up again. Bogotá should strengthen its efforts to bring all the country’s armed groups to the negotiating table, and add to its pledge to invest in rural areas, with a robust, carefully crafted security strategy that protects the Amazon and its residents before further irreversible environmental damage is done.
Deforestation rates in Colombia, the world’s second-most biodiverse country after Brazil, have risen greatly over the last decade. The FARC had historically enforced protection of the tree canopy, which concealed its movements from aerial surveillance; two years after the guerrilla started talks with the Colombian state in 2012, land razing picked up pace. The effects in the country have been alarming, including in terms of habitat loss, decline in species variety and climate destabilisation. The consequences of massive deforestation also resonate well beyond Colombia. As the world’s largest tropical rainforest, the Amazon serves as a pre-eminent carbon sink, absorbing substantial amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which makes it essential to containing climate change. Alongside land clearance in Brazil, Peru and other Amazon nations, Colombia’s deforestation puts world environmental stability and the availability of water in the region at risk. It also provides opportunities for criminal groups to prey on freshly cleared land and the communities located nearby.
One of these groups is the EMC, which appeared in 2016, when commanders of FARC’s First and Seventh Fronts said they would not be party to commitments made in peace negotiations in Havana and would stop following orders from the FARC’s central command. The group coalesced around these fronts’ leaders, based in the Amazonian department of Guaviare, and came to be known by its current name around 2021. The organisation’s growth from modest beginnings, as well as the extent of its control of the Amazon, became visible in late 2022, when it proclaimed limits on logging and clearing land and threatened those who disobeyed the edict with fines and community labour. As a result, deforestation dropped by 51 per cent in parts of the Amazon under its sway (and by roughly a third nationwide) between 2022 and 2023. These results generated a degree of appreciation for the outfit’s apparent intentions in government circles. They also seemed to augur well for both Petro’s environmental ambitions and his “total peace” policy, which seeks negotiations with all the country’s armed and criminal groups.
Amid growing tensions in the talks [with the EMC] in late 2023, armed group commanders loosened restrictions on cutting down trees.
Talks with the EMC have nevertheless encountered various snags, while progress toward stronger environmental protection has come unstuck. Amid growing tensions in the talks in late 2023, armed group commanders loosened restrictions on cutting down trees in regions under their control, such as Guaviare, Meta and Caquetá. Internal EMC divisions then led to a formal split, which was announced in April 2024: only a minority of fronts, those led by Alexander Díaz (henceforth referred to by his alias Calarcá), remain at the negotiating table, while those guided by Néstor Gregorio Vera (alias Iván Mordisco) have returned to fighting the state throughout the country.
The fraught negotiations are not Bogotá’s only worry. Deforestation rates appear to have increased sharply in the first half of 2024, and they may rise further when the traditional tree-cutting season begins in October. Meanwhile, the armed group has prohibited environment ministry and National Parks Service personnel from entering protected areas in the Amazon under its control.
Colombia’s authorities are struggling to respond to these setbacks, let alone to knit together their twin goals of environmental protection and peace. In the immediate future, negotiations with the EMC may be the best – and possibly only –means of reducing deforestation in the country’s Amazon regions. But over the long term, the state will need to craft a security strategy that curbs environmental destruction and provides state protection and services to people living in the asphyxiating grip of armed groups. The Colombian government has a unique opportunity to help shape a set of policies linking the environment, peacebuilding and the quest to assert state authority throughout the country. The cost of failure will be paid by the forest and its endangered inhabitants.