Mongabay Series: World Forests
In March 2020, when Bogota’s coronavirus began to be quarantined, the white smog hovered over the city because of fires in the Nukak National Nature Reserve, about 400 kilometers away, or 250 miles away.
Jenny Cueto heads the 855,000-hectare (2.1 million-acre) Nukak National Nature Reserve, located in the Colombian Amazon, which houses one of the world’s last nomadic tribes, the Nukak. In a telephone interview with Mongabay, Cueto said that former members of the disbanded FARC insurgent organization had been hostile to the directors of Colombia’s national parks and were now exploiting the areas.
“They encourage coca cultivation,” Cueto said. “Then they threatened us and told us we couldn’t get in. They stole our [work] items, a boat and an engine. From that moment on, we didn’t come back.”
The FARC, or the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, signed a historic peace agreement with the Colombian government in 2016, which also included a special inclusion for rural progression and coverage of herbal spaces. But the government was unable to fill the void left through the FARC and the lucrative illegal economies they controlled, adding coca cultivation, raw cocaine curtains. These were taken over by other illegal groups, adding former FARC rebels who refused to demobilize under the peace agreement.
Colombia’s Environment Minister Ricardo Lozano says 70% of the country’s deforestation comes from illegal activities, so he blames former FARC rebels and other illegal groups. Experts say that fires are used to burn Amazonian forests to grow coca and also for livestock, which is used as a front for land grabbing.
During the first month of quarantine, the Amazon Institute for Scientific Research (SINCHI) recorded 12,958 heat points, indicating fires, in the Amazonian departments of Colombia, an accumulation of 276% in the same year last year. Corpoamazonia, the government’s sustainable progress corporation for the southern Amazon, says it shows how illegal teams are taking credit for quarantine to continue operations.
Cueto is a sociologist through education and has been operating for more than 14 years with indigenous and peasant communities in the Nukak National Nature Reserve, a component of Colombia’s National Natural Parks (PNN) network. Colombia’s first national park was established in 1960, in the midst of the country’s civil war. At that time, the decision was made not to arm the NNP workers’ corps to maintain their neutrality in the conflict. Communication and engagement with communities are therefore the toughest weapons for NNP staff. Therefore, in areas where the government was not significant, Cueto and his team of 11 people, like other rangers in the Colombian Amazon, had become accustomed to running with the presence of armed groups.
But in an unprecedented move, armed teams now threatened NPN personnel, directly with firearms or leaflets, and forced them from February to abandon 10 Amazon national parks, covering approximately nine million hectares (22 million acres) and hosting approximately 43,000 discoveries. Species.
Clara Solano, director of the Natura Foundation, which promotes the governance of Amazonian forests, in close collaboration with the PNN and other environmental organizations, said in an appeal with Mongabay that her 25 years of paintings in the region, “cannot remember … even the clash was at its peak between the state, the army and the FARC, where we had a scenario where armed teams explicitly threatened the rangers to leave the protected areas.
Mongabay contacted PNN control for comment, but denied an interview.
“Right now, we are making statements on the issue because we are making progress on the issue with the appropriate authorities,” said Ana Maria Rocha, head of press and communication at PNN.
Almost all of the 48 million hectares (119 million acres) of the Colombian Amazon, about the length of Spain, are protected. NPN canopy 12 million hectares (30 million acres) and aboriginal reserves make up approximately 26 million hectares (64 million acres). The region also has two UNESCO World Heritage sites; Colombia’s largest national park, Chiribiquete, than one of those released through NNP staff; and the classic wisdom of Yurupar’s jaguar shamans.
The Colombian Constitution of 1991 is seen around the world as a “green constitution” because it emphasizes the problems of the environment, adding the need for a healthy environment not only for the survival of humans, but also for the survival of ethnic teams and how to the surroundings. and biodiversity are an applicable finish in itself.
The Colombian Constitutional Court also found that ecosystems inhabited only through indigenous teams have environmental situations and that their presence and culture are a vital detail of conservation in those regions. In Colombia’s six Amazonian departments, there are 185 indigenous reserves and 60 indigenous teams, each representing a completely exclusive language and culture.
Indigenous communities, who paint with PNN, play an important conservation role, however, COVID-19 has been devastating in communities of only a few hundred individuals, where every dying person is the burning of a library of wisdom and classical cultures.
The National Organization of Indigenous Peoples of the Colombian Amazon (OPIAC) criticized the government’s reaction to COVID-19 in the region. The National Indigenous Organization of Colombia (Onic) submitted a report to José Francisco Cali, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, noting that as of 15 June, 906 positive cases of COVID-19 had been reported in 33 indigenous groups. A series of thirteen of which are at risk of physical and/or cultural extermination.
Rodrigo Botero, director of the Foundation for Conservation and Sustainable Development (FCDS), explained in a video with Mongabay the severity of the PNN expulsions.
“Parks staff are sometimes the only state officials that you will find in certain places in the country,” Botero said. “In the Amazon they are critical for collecting information necessary to make urgent decisions, not only for protecting natural resources, but also for social conflicts or threats to ethnic or vulnerable groups.”
He added that NPN is also preparing processes to monitor herbal resources, threatened species and climate and hydrological information, which are important for decision-making and precautionary generation.
According to Botero, NPN’s presence also promises several projects, agreements and environmental coverage resources that are invested in local peasant and indigenous communities.
Botero also says NPN paints as a bridge between local communities and government in municipal, departmental and national degrees for fundamental services, adding aptitude and education. Botero says NPP “understands that the well-being of communities is reflected in the coverage or predation of herbal resources.”
Harold Ospino, regional coordinator for the Amazon of the Gaia Amazonas Foundation, has spent nearly 20 years in the Colombian Amazon, with a specific focus on conservation agreements and the resolution of socio-environmental conflicts. In a video interview with Mongabay, he talked about the bankruptcy that contributed to the Spanish e-book Protected Areas and their conflict workers.
“[It is] vital not to forget that the FARC maximum has surrendered and adheres to the [peace] agreement,” Ospino said. “But in a region like the Amazon, you don’t need to have a giant army so that teams of 8 or nine armed people, children, can walk along a river, threaten and then disappear again. This makes it very complicated for the government to force them to prevent them.
The scenario is now also more dangerous, according to Ospino, because with the FARC, there were transparent command structures and we knew who they were dealing with. These small armed teams have no constant structures and are more connected to drug trafficking and other illegal operations.
Ospino says that in many parts of the Amazon, the lack of governance creates a greater opportunity for public officials to be victimized, not through illegal operations, but also because political and state actors see conservation as an impediment to development, actively supporting activities such as mining, oil extraction and road construction. This can create new divisions between PNN and local communities.
Eugenia Ponce de León, a renowned Colombian environmental lawyer, also contributed to the book. In an appeal with Mongabay, he explained that “a public official who is there to protect a national park, to fulfill his duty to protect, preserve … he then also becomes a victim of the violent and corrupt movements of those teams. gates of the law, whether guerrillas or other corrupt equipment».
The e-book provides detailed accounts of victimization, adding direct harassment, kidnappings, theft, the presence of anti-personnel mines, the inability to explicit or move freely, and even worrying that their children will remain with them in case they are forcibly recruited. through corrupt groups.
Since President Duque took over in 2018, two rangers have been killed in Colombia, and Frontline Defenders has declared Colombia the most damaging country in the world in 2020 to be an environmental defender.
Environmental defenders, adding park rangers and indigenous communities, can gain advantages from the implementation of the Escaza Agreement, the first environmental human rights treaty for Latin America and the Caribbean.
Vanessa Torres, a lawyer and environmental researcher at the Association of Environment and Society, said in a call with Mongabay that the agreement is “fundamental in Colombia because there exists [a definition for] human rights defenders, community leaders, but environmental defenders have some specific characteristics, and Escazú supports this concept and furthermore it provides certain tools in how the government should protect them.”
Torres said the law was signed in December 2019, thanks in part to the environmental roundtable that emerged from national movements later this year. The law will be ratified through the Colombian Congress in March 2020 but delayed due to coronavirus.
“Global Witness has reported on the close link between the most biodiversity-friendly spaces and the spaces of armed conflict,” De Leon said, “and in the vast majority of cases, these conflicts are related to the land; adequate land and herbal resources in the spaces.”
In 2018, Colombia’s Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling pointing to Amazon’s issue of human rights and not quick and easy action for government coverage. De Leon says one of the e-book’s recommendations is to also take instances with NPN staff as victims in the Special Justice for Peace (JEP), a transitional justice mechanism that was a key detail of the peace agreement. This may be an opportunity to measure the environmental burden of violence in national parks.
Héctor Velasquez, director of the Cueva National Park in Los Gu-charos, Colombia’s first national park, has been operating for PNN for more than 25 years. It kept track of NNP movements over the past decade, adding threats and violence opposed to them, and says the NNP is preparing an offer for the PYD over the next year.
The departments of Putumayo, Caqueto and Guaviare, in western Colombia, where the Nukak National Nature Reserve is located, have been FARC strongholds for more than 50 years of armed confrontation in the country. The region is home to the largest human populations in the Colombian Amazon, basically colonizers from other parts of the country. It is also the region hardest hit by deforestation, coca expansion and threats from road expansion and the oil industry, which are creating new cities and bringing new waves of colonization.
NPNP and Aboriginal reserves also provide hot places to grow coca, as it is illegal in these protected spaces to spray glyphosate, the herbicide used to kill coca crops. Cueto says that the Nukak National Nature Reserve is greatly affected by coca cultivation and that much of his paintings have to do with interaction with farmers who have left other parts of the country to locate a piece of land or escape the violence of the country.
Before they were forced to leave, Cueto’s team was slowly advancing to build a true acceptance with those communities and negotiate to voluntarily prevent coca development and move from the park to a peasant special reserve area.
Existing Colombian management has been criticized for focusing too much on the army’s operations to combat deforestation and impose the eradication of coca plants, without capturing those who finance deforestation. Instead, it has addressed vulnerable farmers and contributed to the long-term instability of the spaces surrounding the NPN spaces.
These operations are carried out without consulting NPNP staff. Cueto says that in Nukak “unfortunately, a month after our entry, the army arrived to eliminate coca crops. In this area, all farmers have coke … there’s a rumor that [PNN] reported to the scene, and then it reached the dissidents.
FCDS director Botero said the government’s armed reaction may be useful and necessary, but that it can be clumsy and that illegal armed teams, such as dissidents, can gain political advantages from such actions.
Military operations are costly and unsustainable in the long run, and Botero says that in those spaces with very little state presence, if park guards will return to national parks and their revictimization is avoided, the military will have to provide long-term territorial support. -Presence of public facilities such as health, agriculture and infrastructure.
Colombia’s eastern Amazon was previously not as impacted by the armed conflict, and coca growing is not as big an issue in the region. Primarily made up of the departments of Amazonas, Guainía and Vaupes, these territories are almost completely covered by native forest and predominately inhabited by Indigenous communities.
Harold Rincon Ipuchima of the Tikuna indigenous community, anthropologist and general secretary of OPIAC, explained the organization’s relationship with the PNN in a video interview with Mongabay.
“Indigenous territories have … ecological protection,” he said. “Parks also have the same project and function … we have agreements in position to protect, monitor territories and, in some cases, are and lead to inter-administrative agreements.
In the Yaigojé Apaporis National Natural Park, on the border with Brazil, an indigenous network lobbied for the creation of a national park to help the dominance of a multinational mining company. And in Cahuinar National Natural Park, NPN staff worked with communities to help save the world’s largest river turtle from extinction. Cahuinar and Yaigojé Apaporis have been deserted since FARC dissidents expelled PNN staff.
Ipuchima says indigenous communities face demanding situations similar to those facing NPMs in terms of illegal savings, i.e. illegal mining.
Mercury is used to extract gold, and illegal miners in the Amazon release this poisonous chemical directly into rivers, affecting both humans and humans. NPNP studies have shown incredibly high levels of mercury in 66 Aboriginal communities.
On this basis, in November 2019, OPIAC announced a humanitarian crisis in the Amazon, also ratifying a legal and illegal position of mining rejection in the Amazon.
Although Aboriginal reserves are sometimes self-sufficient and self-sustaining, several systems require the technique and money of the NPT. In addition, giant Aboriginal network meetings and follow-up and control visits require the PNN to provide funds, fuel and resources.
“The most productive way to protect these territories and their biodiversity is to ensure the cultural practices of indigenous groups,” says Ipuchima.
Image of the banner: Military operations can be useful and opposed to illegal armed groups, but in the long run they are also expensive and unsustainable. Image through Rodrigo Botero.
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