Ten years on from peace agreements with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, deforestation is thriving in the rainforest.
Smoke from burning vegetation rises through the remaining trees, and clandestine tracks cut through pastures once thick with forest. Observed from our 14-seater plane passing above the Serranía de Chiribiquete national natural park in December, these fires signal the start of deforestation season in the Colombian Amazon.
Farmers set these fires to clear trees during the dry season and, in the months that follow, the burnt stumps will give way to pastures of coca. The plant is used in the traditional medicine of Andean Indigenous peoples, but, particularly in Colombia, it now also supplies a vast illegal cocaine network. Seen from the sky, the coca bushes look like green cotton balls, perfectly aligned in small rectangular patches nestled within the forest.
These fields explain much about the modern history of Colombia. Coca cultivation boomed in the 1980s and 90s, driven by the rise of drug cartels exporting internationally. The boom made violence and insecurity a feature of life in the country. In a bid to halt the violence, as well as the deforestation the industry drives, successive governments have pushed farmers to switch to other crops and activities, including cattle ranching.
This year marks a decade since the signing of a landmark peace agreement between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), then the country’s main guerrilla group. However, the power vacuum created by FARC’s disbanding, combined with weak state enforcement, led to the emergence of splinter groups. They began to occupy public lands in the Colombian Amazon, often converting them into pastures or coca fields.
According to environmentalists, government support for cattle farming, combined with the failure to deal with armed groups, have compounded deforestation. Between 2015 and 2024, Colombia’s Amazon region lost almost 800,000 hectares of native forest. That makes this the period of the most rapid deforestation across the past 40 years. This is according to Dialogue Earth’s analysis of data from MapBiomas, an initiative that monitors land use and land cover via satellite.
Colombia’s Total Peace Programme seeks to establish new peace agreements and offer economic alternatives to dissident groups. As part of this, president Gustavo Petro has championed sustainable tourism and the bioeconomy (working in harmony with nature to generate income, such as transitioning to agroforestry, a more environmentally friendly form of agriculture) as substitutes for illegal activities.
But his policies have failed to stem the expansion of the deforestation arc – the strip of advancing agricultural frontier that cuts across the north-west of the Colombian Amazon. This is where the highest rates of forest clearing are concentrated.
The area under the greatest pressure covers the departments of Guaviare, Caquetá, Meta and Putumayo. Eighty per cent of the deforested land here has been converted into illegal pastures, usually for cattle, followed by 15% for coca plantations and 2% for clandestine transport routes. This has been established through long-term monitoring conducted by the Foundation for Conservation and Sustainable Development (FCDS).
Now, amidst a general election taking place between March and June, Colombia is once again debating a long-standing issue: how can the forest and its people coexist? It’s a question that intertwines armed conflict, organised crime and the challenges of managing the preservation of very remote areas. The outcome of these elections will shape the political agenda for the forest, and the strategies for tackling violence and deforestation in the region.
From coca to pasture
Some 400 km from Bogotá, Guaviare is the most accessible Amazonian destination for farmers from the Andean region. It has therefore been one of the main centres of coca expansion for decades.
Leaving the Andean department of Cundinamarca in 1995, Olmes Rodriguez arrived in Guaviare as a teenager. He was brought by his brothers, lured by the promises of prosperity offered by the coca industry.
Now 47, Rodriguez has worked within various stages of cocaine production, starting with raspagem (the harvesting of the leaves) and eventually becoming a coca “chemist”. This entails transforming the leaves into a paste that forms the basis of the drug cocaine, he tells Dialogue Earth.
He says the early years were lucrative. But in 2002, then-president Álvaro Uribe Vélez intensified the crackdown on illicit crops, leading farmers like Rodriguez to switch to livestock.
In the following years, livestock farming – including in protected areas and Indigenous territories – grew rapidly. But the ensuing expansion of pastureland was primarily associated with land grabbing and land speculation rather than cattle farming, according to a study by the Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology and Environmental Studies (Ideam).
Against this backdrop, livestock farming in the Amazon is a grey area: the farming itself is legal, but it often takes place on illegally cleared land. “Livestock farming is irregular, but it is not criminalised,” says Camilo González Posso, president of the Institute for Development and Peace Studies (Indepaz).
Legacy of violence
These days, the apparent calm of the landscape, dominated by pastures and herds, is frequently disrupted by violence. In mid-January, 26 people were executed in an armed attack in El Retorno, 30 km from San José. Authorities believe the dead were members of an armed group called Estado Mayor Central. At least four minors were killed.
Control of Guaviare, which is currently home to around half a million cattle, is contested mainly between Estado Mayor Central and a rival faction called Bloque Jorge Suárez Briceño. Both are led by former FARC members.
Armed groups also profit from deforestation for farming. Gonzalez and other farmers, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals, said they have herds on large farms registered in the names of third parties. Furthermore, cattle farmers and land owners are extorted for protection money, known in Colombia as a “vaccine” or “revolutionary tax”.
Local producers told Dialogue Earth they have been targeted with these demands in recent years. One cattle farmer showed a handwritten receipt, with no recorded value, confirming payment of the “tax” to a FARC dissident group.
Extortion was also mentioned by Carlos, owner of the La Fortuna cattle weighbridge, a small roadside business near San José del Guaviare. His facility weighs animals before they are sold, setting the price of the cattle regardless of their origin. Well-versed in the local cattle market, he explains that the “vaccine” fee can vary: “In some places, one group calls the shots; in others, it’s another.”
Misplaced subsidies
Even so, the sector continues to receive state incentives, which include subsidised rural loans, generally without environmental protection requirements. Added to this is the Comprehensive Programme for the Replacement of Illicit Crops. This was created by the government to offer alternatives to coca, but in practice fuels irregular livestock farming and deforestation in the Amazon.
According to the FCDS, a third of the 42,000 beneficiary families in the region invested in cattle. Almost 80% of purchases under the scheme were allocated to this activity, and the herd grew by 86% between 2017 and 2024 – well above the national average.
In October 2025, the administrative court of Cundinamarca ruled the Colombian government should review policies and incentives that are harmful to the forest, and improve the traceability of products such as cattle, milk, gold and timber.
Some of these measures are being implemented by the national government, such as the updating of a traceability platform with real-time data. The tool is still being rolled out; results are yet to be published.
Dialogue Earth contacted the Ministry of the Environment for comment on other strategies adopted but had not received a response by the time of publication.
Progress on protected areas
After a long period of decline, coca cultivation has begun to recover in recent years. Reports from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime indicate the area of illegal plantations in the municipalities of the Colombian Amazon deforestation arc increased by almost 90% between 2019 and 2023, reaching 13,500 hectares. In total, the region had more than 64,000 hectares cultivating coca in 2023.
The recent expansion is driven, in part, by rising demand. This is coming from Europe in particular, according to the UN’s World Drug Report 2025. This market is also more lucrative than conservation initiatives: cocaine sales can generate over USD 150 million per production cycle, compared to USD 55 million annually from initiatives such as carbon credits and exports of native legal products, according to the FCDS.
In addition to FARC dissidents, paramilitaries and drug cartels operate in the region. Reports of the forced recruitment of minors and members of Indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities are on the rise.
Meanwhile, coca cultivation is encroaching on protected areas and Indigenous territories. Some of these plantations were spotted during our four-hour flight, in the Nukak nature reserve and the Nukak Maku Indigenous reserve.
“The Nukak Maku reserve is being put to the test, both politically and legally,” says Rodrigo Botero, president of the FCDS, which organised our flight.
According to Botero, the Indigenous territory has undergone profound changes, driven by livestock farming and coca cultivation. He says the growth of business interests in the region is sparking debate over the need to keep these areas under legal protection:
“Political pressure on Indigenous reserves in Colombia is likely to increase.”
A survey by the FCDS also shows that the encroachment of coca cultivation and livestock farming into protected areas threatens biological flows and connectivity between ecosystems in the region. Of the more than 196,000 hectares of ecological corridors mapped, almost 65% had already been deforested or degraded by 2025.
Botero emphasises that, due to the convergence of the savannah, Amazon, Andes and Guiana Shield ecosystems here, “there is no other place with such diversity per area in the region – and probably in the world.”
Some initiatives offer economic alternatives. After working in the coca industry, Olmes Rodriguez settled in the rural area of San José del Guaviare, where he became a community leader. In 2018, as president of the local associations’ council, he received funding from the Norwegian government to implement agroecological practices on farms.
To begin with, the initiative required the backing of the dissidents. “Here we need to be cautious. Before any project, I would meet with the men who call the shots in the area. Thanks to that, we had no problems or threats,” says Rodriguez.
With authorisation granted, the initiative began training producers from seven communities within the catchment area of the Serranía de Chiribiquete national natural park to implement agroforestry. These farming systems incorporate trees and shrubs to make them more resilient. “We carried out a study and decided to focus on the production of açaí and seje [an endemic palm],” explains Rodriguez.
Today, more than a hundred families in Guaviare are participating in the initiative. They have all signed forest conservation agreements with the Corporation for the Sustainable Development of the Northern and Eastern Amazon (CDA), the main environmental authority in Guaviare. Many of them, including Rodriguez’s own family, are still trying to reconcile sustainable production with livestock farming, their main source of livelihood.
Rodriguez believes many small and medium-sized farms are willing to invest in an economy based on forest conservation. Most of the families involved in the project live in areas that have already been deforested, and the farmer has been trying to show them that preserving the forest can secure the future of their livelihoods: “The forest provides the oxygen we breathe, the water we drink and the animals we eat. If we cut it all down, we’ll have nothing left to produce.”
Juan Ortiz travelled to Guaviare at the invitation of the FCDS to experience first hand the socio-environmental effects and dynamics of deforestation in the region.
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