Armed rebels who control large swathes of the Amazon have threatened next week’s COP16 biodiversity summit in Colombia, calling into question Bogota’s chosen theme of “peace with nature” as the country deployed thousands of police and soldiers.
Activists from a faction of the left-wing rebel group Estado Mayor Central launched attacks in the western hamlet of El Plateado last weekend, injuring 17 people and blocking highways days before the neighboring town of Cali welcomes 14 heads of state and dozens of ministers and diplomats.
The EMC warned delegates not to attend the summit which begins on Monday, in a message since removed from social media.
“Do not participate in this mercantile event,” the group wrote on X, in capital letters. “COP16 is a fiasco! The group previously pledged not to carry out attacks in Cali during the summit.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro – an outspoken environmentalist who seeks peace deals with the country’s myriad armed groups – sent 11,000 police and soldiers to Cali last weekend, and another 1,400 to ensure control of El Plateado. “The security of COP16 is guaranteed,” Petro posted on X at the time.
Armed groups in the country’s Amazon region are committing environmental crimes to politically pressure the government, analysts say.
Members of the 3,800-strong EMC can increase deforestation “at will,” says a report released Friday by the International Crisis Group. The EMC is by far the main culprit, but others, including some fronts of the National Liberation Army (ELN) rebel group, are also involved in forest destruction.
Deforestation has allowed business interests, political elites and guerrilla commanders to use land for livestock grazing, but it has also been timed to exert political pressure, analysts say.
María Victoria Llorente, executive director of the Bogotá-based think tank Fundación Ideas para la Paz, said: “As they (EMC) were negotiating with the government last year, there was a significant drop in deforestation, and now they are fighting against deforestation. , it went back up.
Bram Ebus, co-author of the Crisis Group report, said: “Even though Colombia’s slogan for COP16 is ‘peace with nature,’ it is painful that its main natural asset, the Amazon, is increasingly under the control of armed groups.
“Who controls the Amazon dominates the discourse, and at the moment, it’s not the government.”
Petro is pursuing a policy dubbed “total peace,” which aims to secure demobilization agreements with some 11 armed groups. Some, like the EMC, trace their origins to left-wing guerrillas, while others are descendants of counter-insurgent paramilitaries.
All are deeply involved in illicit activities, including drug trafficking, illegal mining, migrant smuggling and protection racketeering.
The western region surrounding Cali has long held strategic value for criminal organizations, its access to the Pacific making it a natural hub for trafficking cocaine, marijuana and gold, all produced nearby. Historically disadvantaged rural and urban communities have provided a constant supply of recruits for armed groups and gangs.
Petro’s ambitious policies have largely failed to produce results. Talks with the 6,000-member left-wing guerrilla group, the National Liberation Army, were suspended last month after its fighters attacked a military base, killing two soldiers.
The EMC split into two factions in April, one supporting the negotiations and the other opposing them. The latter faction launched the attacks in El Plateado last weekend and also operates in the Amazon.
The EMC was founded by former members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) who rejected the 2016 peace agreement between that group and the government.
Petro’s approach has not won popular support: a poll released Tuesday found that 82 percent of respondents preferred tighter security measures to continued negotiations with illegal armed groups.
But Foreign Minister Luis Gilberto Murillo said the government would continue to seek peace.
“We prefer to emphasize peace rather than war,” Murillo told the Financial Times, adding that the presence of armed groups in ecologically sensitive regions complicated the government’s ability to protect biodiversity. Colombia is the most biodiverse country in the world per square kilometer.
Nearly 200 countries are expected in Cali to discuss biodiversity, essential to life on earth. Healthy ecosystems help provide clean air, water and food, while playing a vital role in disease control and climate regulation.
“There is obviously a correlation between inequality, poverty, violence and the presence of rebel groups, and these are in areas of considerable natural wealth and biodiversity,” Murillo said.
Colombia’s conflict, fought between left-wing guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries and the state, cost around 450,000 lives between 1958 and 2016, according to Colombia’s Truth Commission.
The 2016 agreement with the Farc was intended to allow the state to expand its presence in rural areas, but its implementation has been uneven, according to a study published in May by the Kroc Institute for International Studies on peace.
Llorente said that while the peace process had allowed part of the country to open up, notably to the development of ecotourism, the demobilization of the Farc – which prohibited the felling of trees so that they could move under the jungle canopy – also led to deforestation.
“We have started to see the pressure that armed groups like the EMC can exert in the Amazon,” Llorente said.
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