(Bloomberg Opinion) — Iván Mordisco is a Colombian guerrilla at the helm of a cocaine empire and on whom a bounty hangs for his capture. He also does more for the protection of the Amazon rainforest than almost anyone on Earth.
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Deforestation has plummeted in the coca-growing and cattle-growing region controlled by Mordisco’s guerrillas after he made the unpopular decision to order local farmers to stop cutting down trees. This happened after a request from the government of President Gustavo Petro, which managed to convince a group that routinely shoots soldiers and policemen to take on the job of park rangers.
Destruction in the Colombian Amazon fell 76% in the first quarter from a year earlier, but environmentalists fear that putting rainforest protection in the hands of violent outlaws will not produce lasting results. And as Mordisco prepares for peace talks with the Petro government, there is an implicit threat that he could reverse the initial goodwill gesture and go back to roaring the chainsaws if he doesn’t get what he wants at the negotiating table.
“It is not sustainable because it is depending on the voluntariness, in favor or against, of an armed actor, not of the people, not of the Government, not of those who exercise other mechanisms than force in that territory,” said Angélica Rojas. , an ecologist who works in the region for the NGO Foundation for Conservation and Sustainable Development.
Mordisco’s exact motivation for saving the trees is unclear. He shows the government that he controls much of Colombia’s most environmentally sensitive territory and can start or stop deforestation at will, which could give him an advantage in negotiations. It is also possible that he wants to preserve the treetops that cover his troop movements and curb the development of large cattle farms that could threaten his control.
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Getting to the rural stronghold of Mordisco is a 10-hour drive south of Bogotá, ending on the dirt road in the department of Guaviare. Near the town of La Paz, on the edge of the Nukak forest reserve, there are signs advising travelers to keep car windows rolled down and not to wear motorcycle helmets, measures to prevent infiltration by rival armed factions.
Mordisco, whose real name is Néstor Vera, taxes all economic activity in the area, from farms to gas stations to restaurants. He is also the most powerful figure in the region’s vast cocaine industry, as he controls everything from coca crops to processing labs to trafficking routes. Anyone who sells cocaine to a buyer not authorized by Mordisco’s group is declared a “military target,” his euphemism for a death sentence.
At the entrance to the town, a sign warns the army not to advance any further.
The Colombian state hardly has a presence here, apart from a school, whose students have gone more than a month without receiving the free meals to which they are entitled, and a clinic that, according to the locals, has little or no medicine.
So it’s the Bite troops who make the rules and enforce them. Pamphlets and WhatsApp messages began circulating last year warning farmers that they would face “revolutionary justice” if they felled trees to expand their fields without permission. Mordisco is a former commander of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and his henchmen still use the language of the Marxist insurgency.
“They don’t want people to continue deforesting,” said Édgar Ariza, a community leader in La Paz. “And they are the only ones who are capable of stopping deforestation.”
About 10% of the Amazon is in Colombia, where it has suffered far less damage than Brazil’s forests so far this century. The Petro government has declared ending deforestation a top priority, and the US, UK, Norway and Germany are among the top foreign donors for conservation projects. The Amazon stores tens of billions of tons of carbon, crucial to limit global warming, and serves as a habitat for jaguars, thousands of species of birds and even freshwater dolphins.
In Mordisco’s territory, anyone who fells trees without permission is fined between 10 and 20 million pesos (between US$2,400 and US$4,800) per hectare, according to a local leader from Calamar, another region of the Guaviare department, who asked not to be identified because he said the group has become more violent lately.
By severely restricting deforestation, Mordisco has reintroduced an old FARC policy. The guerrillas needed the treetops to hide from the army, and they also used the jungle to fish and hunt wild animals to eat when under siege.
“It wasn’t just the logic of defending in the war, of being able to have a territory for their movements in hiding,” says a former member of the FARC command council known by his alias Pastor Alape. “It was a political conception in the sense of being able to contain the advance of the latifundio.”
Alape and thousands of other members of the FARC laid down their arms after signing a peace agreement with the Government in 2016. Those who, like Alape, stayed in the peace process, and those who, like Mordisco, took up arms again They consider themselves to be the true FARC, and the others to be traitors.
Mordisco’s faction, known as the Estado Mayor Central, or EMC, currently has about 2,200 armed fighters and a support network of about 1,400 people, according to army intelligence estimates. This probably makes it the third largest illegal armed group in Colombia, behind the National Liberation Army (ELN), a guerrilla force, and the Clan del Golfo, a cocaine trafficking cartel.
The peace agreement with the FARC did not achieve its objectives. In the ensuing chaos, land grabbers and ranchers took advantage of the power vacuum to plunge into the Amazon and begin destroying the rainforest at record rates.
At first, Mordisco allowed large-scale cattle ranching to arrive in the Amazon, perhaps because it increased his extortion revenue. His men even threatened to kill environmental activists and employees of the Colombian National Parks Service.
Then, in 2022, it changed its policy 180 degrees. That was also the year that Petro was elected Colombia’s first left-wing president, pledging to enter into peace talks with the country’s illegal armed groups, including Mordisco’s.
Referring to the decrease in tree loss in a speech last month, Petro said: “To achieve it, you had to talk to armed groups. And one of the central conversations was not to deforest.”
In written response to questions, the Colombian Ministry of the Environment said that the government’s search for peace through “dialogue with illegal groups” has created conditions that allow for the conservation and restoration of ecosystems. Government work with local communities and criminal investigations into the financing behind large-scale deforestation have also helped save trees, the ministry said.
At least one pamphlet purportedly belonging to the Biting faction explicitly cited Petro’s election as a reason to stop the “ecological disaster.” He ordered the local population not to cut down virgin forest or set fires “until an institutional solution for the peasants who lack land to work materializes in these four years of the government of Dr. Gustavo Petro.”
Petro made environmental protection a central element of his campaign, promising to break the economy’s reliance on fossil fuels and redistribute land to poor peasants.
Maps from the Colombian meteorological agency IDEAM show that, in the first three months of 2023, the destruction of the Amazon continued in areas not then fully controlled by the Mordisco faction, plummeting by 90% or more in some areas. areas where it had a strong presence.
By enforcing environmental restrictions, Mordisco shows Petro that he is the one in control of the Amazon and the one who can stop deforestation if he wishes, according to Bram Ebus, research coordinator for the NGO Amazon Underworld.
This puts him in a position of power to wrest concessions from the Petro government, which wants to save the rainforest, but lacks the territorial control to do so alone.
“This strengthens their position at the negotiating table,” Ebus said.
Translated by Cynthia Barrera.
Original Note: Cocaine Warlord Is Saving the Amazon With His Campaign of Terror
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