Armed rebels threaten Colombia’s ‘peace’ drive at global nature summit

Armed rebels who control swaths of the Amazon have threatened the COP16 biodiversity summit to be held next week in Colombia, calling into question Bogota’s chosen theme of “peace with nature” as the country deployed thousands of police and soldiers.

Militants from a faction of the Estado Mayor Central leftist rebel group launched attacks in the western hamlet of El Plateado last weekend, injuring 17 people and shutting down highways days before the nearby city of Cali hosts 14 heads of state and dozens of ministers and diplomats.

The EMC warned delegates not to attend the summit starting on Monday, in a post since removed from social media.

“Do not take part in this mercantile event,” the group wrote on X, in block capitals. “COP16 is a fiasco!” The group had earlier pledged not to carry out attacks in Cali during the summit.

Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro — an outspoken environmentalist who is pursuing peace deals with the country’s myriad armed groups — dispatched 11,000 police and soldiers to Cali last weekend, and 1,400 more to secure control of El Plateado. “The security of the COP16 is guaranteed,” Petro posted on X at the time.

Armed groups in the country’s Amazon region are committing environmental crimes to pressure the government politically, analysts have said.

Members of the 3,800-strong EMC can increase deforestation “at will”, said a report published by the International Crisis Group on Friday. The EMC is by far the largest culprit, but others including some fronts of the National Liberation Army (ELN) rebel group are also involved in damaging forests.

The deforestation enables the land to be used by business interests, political elites and guerrilla commanders for cattle grazing, but is also timed to exert political pressure, said analysts.

María Victoria Llorente, executive director of the Bogotá-based think-tank Fundación Ideas para la Paz, said: “While they [the EMC] were negotiating with the government last year, there was a significant drop in deforestation, and now they are fighting, it has gone back up.”

Bram Ebus, co-author of the Crisis Group report, said: “While Colombia’s slogan for COP16 is ‘peace with nature’, it is painful that its major natural asset, the Amazon, is increasingly under the control of armed groups.

“Who controls the Amazon dominates the narrative, and right now, that is not the government.”

Petro is pursuing a policy dubbed “total peace”, which seeks demobilisation deals with some 11 armed groups. Some, such as the EMC, trace their origins to leftist guerrillas, while others are descendants of counterinsurgent paramilitaries.

All are deeply involved in illicit businesses including drug-trafficking, illegal mining, migrant smuggling and protection rackets.

The western region surrounding Cali has long been of strategic value to criminal organisations, with its access to the Pacific making it a natural hub for trafficking cocaine, marijuana and gold, all produced nearby. Historically deprived rural and urban communities have provided a steady supply of recruits for armed groups and gangs.

Petro’s ambitious policy has largely failed to yield results. Talks with the 6,000-strong leftist guerrilla group the National Liberation Army were suspended last month after its fighters attacked an army base, killing two soldiers.

The EMC split into two factions in April, with one side supporting negotiations and another 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 that group’s 2016 peace accord with the government.

Petro’s approach has not won popular support: a poll published on Tuesday found 82 per cent of respondents preferred stronger security measures over continued negotiations with illegal armed groups.

But foreign minister Luis Gilberto Murillo said the government would continue to seek peace.

“We prefer to insist on peace rather than war,” Murillo told the Financial Times, adding that the presence of armed groups in environmentally sensitive regions complicated the government’s ability to protect biodiversity. Colombia is the most biodiverse country in the world per square kilometre.

Almost 200 countries are due in Cali to discuss biodiversity, which is essential to life on earth. Healthy ecosystems help provide clean air, water and food, as well as playing a critical role in disease control and regulating the climate.

“Obviously there is correlation between inequality, poverty, violence and the presence of rebel groups, and those happen to be in areas when you have tremendous natural wealth and biodiversity,” Murillo said.

Colombia’s conflict, waged between leftist guerrillas, rightwing paramilitaries and the state, cost an estimated 450,000 lives between 1958 and 2016, according to Colombia’s Truth Commission.

The 2016 deal with the Farc aimed to allow the state to expand its presence in rural areas, but its implementation has been patchy, according to a study published in May by the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies.

Llorente said that while the peace process had enabled some of the country to open up, including to eco-tourism development, the demobilisation of the Farc — which outlawed felling trees so they could move beneath the jungle canopy — was also driving deforestation.

“We’ve started to see the pressure armed groups like the EMC can exert in the Amazon,” Llorente said.