"Here, the worst deforestation started about five years ago," community leader Luis Calle told AFP, standing next to what he calls a "cemetery" of dead trees. There has also been a recent explosion of illegal land tilling - ever-expanding plantations of corn, bananas and rice in what was until recently virgin forest. In the so-called "Amazon deforestation arc" - stretching across the central regions of Meta, Guaviare, Caqueta and Putumayo - the livestock herd increased by 60 percent from 2016 to 2019, according to the Foundation for Conservation and Sustainable Development (FCDS). Government data shows that some 925,000 hectares of Colombian forest have been destroyed since 2016, an area about the size of Cyprus Raul ARBOLEDA AFP
Livestock herding is a major source of deforestation. Since 2019, authorities have detained 96 people in raids. The government conducts anti-deforestation operations, but the area is vast, remote, and hard to police. People caught cutting down trees in the protected reserve, or sponsoring such destruction, risk up to 15 years in prison. "I was able to cut down a hectare a day," he told AFP.Īn aerial view offers a devastating panorama of the destruction in Guaviare: ever-expanding patches of freshly-cleared land, crops, pastures and cow herds amid shrinking tree cover. One local told AFP he himself deforested about 200 hectares before giving up for fear of arrest.
People caught cutting down trees in the protected reserve, or sponsoring such destruction, risk up to 15 years in prison Raul ARBOLEDA AFPĪs the guerillas left, land thieves moved in with hired men armed with chainsaws and machetes, carving out large expanses of land for themselves and erecting fences with the wood of the felled trees.
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