Losing the Connection Between the Andes and the Amazon: A Price of Peace in Colombia

The South American country, where the biodiversity of the Andes meets that of the Amazon, is losing the great natural wealth of some 1,500 square kilometers of forest each year, mainly in areas formerly under guerrilla control
March 19, 2024 by Knowable Magazine



By Pablo Correa

In 2016, the same year the Colombian government and guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) agreed to end a war that had lasted almost half a century, the forests that make northwestern South America one of the most biodiverse places on the planet began to vanish. The demise of a conflict that had claimed the lives of at least 450,664 people marked the beginning of an environmental tragedy: In 2016 alone, deforestation increased 44 percent over the previous year.

“Colombia is now experiencing the consequences of the power vacuum left by the FARC over large parts of its territory,” warned ecologist Nicola Clerici of the University of Rosario in Bogota and colleagues in 2018. For decades, the war had slowed colonization in the south of the country and impeded deforestation — a phenomenon termed “gunpoint conservation.” After the peace agreement, the dynamics changed.

Colombia is now losing an average of 1,500 square kilometers of forest each year, an area 25 times the size of the island of Manhattan. About 65 percent of this is Amazonian forest. The forests are replaced by land for cattle ranching and agriculture, or they are simply set on fire so that the land can be fenced and sold. In 2018 alone, fires in biodiversity hotspots increased sixfold over the previous year.

Most of this deforestation is concentrated in the areas formerly controlled by the FARC, which include a 500-kilometer-long strip of land where the foothills of the Andes Mountains and the Amazon lowlands meet — a place that is a passageway for thousands of species, an area for genetic exchange between different populations of the same species, and a region supporting an extensive network of rivers that flow down from the mountains to feed the Amazon basin.

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