40 Scientific American, November 2019 Map by Mapping Specialists
which biodiversity is both cherished and sustainably capital-
ized. Despite Humboldt’s relative influence, observers say that
the environment remains low on the government’s priority list
and that deforestation continues to ravage much of the country.
Didier describes this trajectory as “putting in a bulldozer and
chopping down everything in front of it. Everything is at stake.”
WAR AND (GREEN) PEACE
that so much wildlife and habitat remain in Colombia today is,
in part, a serendipitous side effect of conflict. Civil war officially
broke out in 1964, when members of the peasant class, a group
largely composed of small farmers, miners and land workers,
rose up to fight gross inequality and formed FARC. The half-
century of fighting froze not just ecological exploration but, in
some places, ecological destruction.
Millions of rural residents fled the
countryside to take refuge in cities,
giving nature time to reclaim their
properties. Rebels commanded those
who stayed behind to keep out of cer-
tain tracts of forest and forbade them
from hunting and cutting down trees.
What began as an ideological struggle
for a Marxist-Leninist government
morphed into a conflict largely fueled
by profit, especially from narcotics.
Coca fields and cocaine labs sprang
up alongside forest camps. “The guer-
rillas benefited from having forest
they could hide in, and other people
didn’t dare go there,” Didier says. “As a
result, biodiversity remained high in
hot spots for conflict.”
As narcotics trafficking spread, vio-
lence followed. Any scientist who dared
venture into rebel-controlled areas did
so at the risk of his or her life. Nearly
every field researcher in the country
today seems to have a story of being
kidnapped, interrogated at gunpoint or
otherwise scared away from study sites.
“Ten years ago the most dangerous
thing you could come across in the field
was a person,” says Lizcano, who was
held hostage for two days by rebels
who kidnapped him while he was out
looking for tapirs. Lizcano continued
his work at a different location, but
other studies were abandoned or never
attempted in the first place, and many
researchers chose to either leave
Colombia or change careers. Ecological
knowledge stagnated.
Hope for a reversal of this trend
came from one of the nearly 600 stipu-
lations of the 2016 peace agreement:
the country must develop sustainably
to improve the lives of all Colombians—
not just urbanites, who compose at
least three quarters of the population. This point was largely
meant to address the rural discontent that ignited the conflict to
begin with, and it promises marginalized countryside residents—
many of whom are members of Colombia’s 112 ethnic minority
groups—access to education and clean water, subsidies for devel-
opment programs in former rebel-held territories, and new roads
to connect their communities to the rest of the country. It also
encourages illegal coca growers to switch to legal crops in ex -
change for cash payments and government assistance.
“Because many of our problems come from lack of better
livelihoods, education and health care in rural areas, that was
the main part of the agreement for me,” says Julia Miranda Lon-
doño, director general of the Colombian National Park System.
“If our development was more equitable, people would not need
A
N
D
E
S
Pacific
Ocean
Caribbean Sea
COLOMBIA
PANAMA VENEZUELA
BRAZIL
PERU
ECUADOR
Cubará
Bogotá
Medellín
Cartagena
Panama City
Iquitos
Caracas
Guayaquil
Maracay
Quito
Maracaibo
Colón
Barranquilla
Mitú
Cali
COLOMBIA
AMAZON
Colombia’s Hotspots
With 311 different ecological zones, Colombia is a bio
diversity powerhouse: 10 percent of all species on Earth
are found here. After a halfcentury of civil war, scientists
are racing to document and preserve Colombia’s natural
heritage. But peacetime means deforestation has ramped
up, as formerly rebeloccupied territories open up to mining,
logging and resettlement. Of the country’s nine hotspots for
deforestation, five are located in the Amazon basin.
© 2019 Scientific American