Some years before my uncle Francisco Correa passed away (he was the first manager of the Araracuara Corporation as it was known back then, today transformed into the Amazon Institute for Scientific Investigation - Sinchi), he handed me all his records for safekeeping. The period that preceded his death was a rather difficult one and he feared for the work he had put so many years into.

There were ten boxes which I had to accommodate in some corner of the apartment in which I live in, in Bogota. It was only after his death that I mustered the nerve to mess with his stuff. I could have reconstructed the biography of this old sociologist from his papers but what really drew my attention was a file containing documents of his more than 20 years of research and management of the Colombian Amazon during the seventies and eighties.

This article then, is based on those documents, especially on a certain brown cover file called “The Amazon Expedition” selected among yellowed newspaper clippings where I found articles such as the one that described the archeological finding of cave paintings close to the township of San José Del Guaviare and reports such as the one on the symposium on tropical forests, held in 1990 in Paris.

The Amazon expedition report was an account of a trip made aboard a 25-ton boat named Santa Catarina by a group of 35 researchers, members of the Amazonian Pact, on May 22nd, 1984. During the 20 day trip, those scientists travelled through the tributaries of River Caquetá, that wash the country’s southern coast, such as the Yari, the Apaporis, Miriti, Cahuinari and the unexplored San Bernardo.

The Amazon described by my uncle in 1984, a quarter century ago, isn’t very different from the Amazon of today. The area that encompasses more than 47 million hectares takes up 41.8% of the country’s territory. Just as in those days, reports indicate that there still is a high degree of protection of the biosphere, 95% actually according to some researchers. The region contains 59 ecosystems and registers 674 species of birds, 212 of mammals, 195 of reptiles and 158 of amphibians, of which 75% correspond to species of that region (according to data from Sinchi in 2007). As for the plant life and only speaking of the vascular variety, 6,249 species were identified, which are represented in 219 families (Cárdenas, 2006).

A similar discourse

While reading my uncle’s documents, I get the impression that time, in many ways, has not passed for the Amazon. One would just have to change a few dates of some of his writings and they would be as current as any other. The problems and expectations of those days are similar to those we have today for that region: “we are in agreement about the preservation of the Amazon and to halt the devastation, but what of the settlers who are already there?”; or even “developed countries have done away with their forests and now they don’t want us to use ours”. And yet another: “the colonization, occupation and administration of our Amazonian territories are conducted according to a model taken from the country’s interior. What we propose is to adapt technologies, laws and practices developed within the Amazon territory in order to address another context and reality.”

That is not different from the findings of investigator Ernesto Guhl Nannetti in a recent article published by the Colombiana Amazônica magazine: “the Colombian Andes have seen the Amazonian region as something distant, exotic and dangerous to the point of designating the Catholic Church to manage certain basic services that should be afforded by the State, such as education and health”. 70% of the population of Colombia are located on the three major mountain ranges, away from the Amazon which is inhabited by only 960,239 people (or 2.3% of the country’s inhabitants), in their majority grouped into 62 indigenous tribes.

This centering contempt has done little to block the progress of the region’s problems. Luz Marina Mantilla, current director of the Sinchi Institute knows them by heart: unplanned settling, road building, farm land frontier expansion, illegal crops and intensive extraction of natural resources. Mantilla reports that 19.88% of the Colombian Amazon is affected by different processes of human intervention. “Today, the Amazon is one of the country’s most cherished regions”, pointed out the employee referring not only to the jungle that has become one of the favorite hideouts for armed groups, but also to its use for illegal crops. In 2006, these illegal plantations covered a surface area of 78,000 hectares. A single year later made those numbers jump to 99,000 hectares.

Low deforesting

Even so, the problem of deforesting in the Colombian Amazon isn’t as serious as in other countries. While the average rate of deforesting among the first twenty countries in the world that have a forest cover – a group of which Colombia is part – is of 0.48% while Colombia’s is just 0.1%, in contrast with other Amazonian countries that are members of this group such as Venezuela (0.6%), Brazil (0.55%), Bolivia (0.45%) and Peru (0.1%). For this reason, during the last COP 15 in Copenhagen, Colombia protested against the reason why REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) works on a subnational and not on a national level as most countries complain.

Carlos Rodríguez, director of the Tropenbos-Colômbia Organization and one of the people who is most knowledgeable about the Colombian Amazon, added yet another threat: mining. Hydrocarbons, gold and materials such as coltan (columbite-tantalite) have attracted the greed of miners. “There are more than 2,000 requests for prospecting rights”, mentions Rodríguez explaining that it was this very mining threat that prompted the government to transform a native reservation into the Yaigojé Apaporis Natural National Park by demand of the traditional authorities for indigenous people before the Associação de Capitães Indígenas Yaigojé Apaporis. Declaring a reservation as a park is a way to protect its underground riches from exploitation. The new park is located in the low basin of the Apaporis River where the Macuna, Tanimuca, Letuama, Cabiyari, Barazano, Yujup Macu and Yauna tribes live.

It is a race against time to keep Amazonian territories safe from harm. “Colombia has a lot to offer when the subject is the Amazon”, said Martín Von Hildebrand, director of the Gaia Foundation that in 1999 was awarded the Alternative Nobel Prize for its efforts in creating local governments in the Amazon, “50% of the Colombian Amazon are reservations of indigenous people, an area greater than that of Great Britain and another 10% are National Parks. One can therefore say that almost 60% of the Amazon lies under special handling”.

For Martin, this can result in a source of income in payment for environmental services: “If we speak of payment for environmental services, say 5 dollars per hectare, while we have here some 30 million hectares, between parks and aboriginal territories, we’re looking at a figure of 150 million dollars a year”.

His Foundation together with others such as the Natural Heritage Foundation, the embassies of Holland and the US and the European delegation, work on a gigantic project with which the Colombian Government expects to safeguard its territories in the Amazon. The goal of this proposal is to enlarge the Serrania de Chiribiquete Natural National Park with its 1,280,000 hectares to 4 million hectares. This would be a solution to hold back the advancement of one of the settler fronts in the Amazon. In addition, the legalization of buildings to stop settlers established in Caquetá and Guaviare. The final goal is to collect international resources and leave tropical forests standing.

A few months ago, the “Regional action plan for the Biodiversity of the Southern Colombian Amazon 2007-2027” became known. After browsing through the subject, I went back to think of my uncle’s writings with the title of “When will we take the Amazon seriously?” which began with a quote by Jean Hebette, from the Center for Amazonian Studies: “When politics are guided by unrealistic goals of grandeur regarding accomplishments, one refers to them as Pharaonic”. We hope that another 25 years do not pass without appropriately addressing the threats that hang over the Amazon today, lest they become irreversible.

Links:
Instituto de Investigaciones Amazónicas (Sinchi)
Tropenbos – Colombia
Corporación para el desarrollo sostenible del sur de la Amazonía
Plan de Acción Regional en Biodiveridad del Sur de la Amazonía Colombiana
Revista Colombia-Amazónica
Fundación Gaia-Amazonas
Instituto de Investigación de Recursos Biológicos Alexander von Humbolt
Unidad de Parques Nacionales Naturales

Pablo Correa studied journalism and spanish literature in Bogota, Colombia. He has been working for the last five years in El Espectador newspaper.