“May the forest survive, and so may we”: the gamble taken by farmers in Caquetá

For Genaro Martínez, the life of a landless peasant is like that of a migratory bird. This 68-year-old man from Caquetá has spent much of his life producing coffee, corn, cassava, and plantains on the farm left to him by his grandparents and parents in the rural area of Florencia, the capital of Caquetá. But, like most of the inhabitants of these lands, he has no papers to prove it. That is why, when in 2014 he heard rumors that a peasant association was being formed to fight for the needs of the Caquetá mountain range, he decided to join immediately.

At that time, this territory—which includes the municipalities of Florencia, Montañita, Paujil, and Doncello—was under threat from “the bogeymen.” That’s what community leader Elda Yaneth Martínez calls the extractive projects advancing in the area: two oil blocks and a hydroelectric plant that aimed to privatize the emblematic San Pedro River. Then, thousands of peasants, previously disjointed due to the war, came together again with a common goal: to stop the exploitation of their natural resources.

The first thing they did was strengthen the work of the 124 community action boards in the four municipalities. After many meetings, going from village to village, in 2015 the Peasant Association of the Mountain Range—Montañita, Florencia, Paujil, and Doncello Municipalities (Acomflopad)—was born. But the initial concern remained: how to protect the territory?

ZRC: The dream begins

From their neighbors in El Pato-Balsillas, in San Vicente del Caguán, they learned of a legal figure called the Peasant Reserve Zone, which had been established there in the 1990s. They were told that it did not guarantee the right to prior consultation or collective land titling (rights associated with Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities), but it did mean recognition “of our way of working, living, our historical knowledge, and proposing a form of territorial planning,” explains Elda, now president of Acomflopad.

There was the answer. Peasant Reserve Zones are territories where peasant communities decide how to use the land through a Sustainable Development Plan and an Environmental Management Plan, which outline their collective life project and are later agreed upon with public authorities. Acomflopad decided to embrace this figure to achieve several of its goals: boosting the peasant economy, conserving the forest, and halting mining and energy projects.

For Johana Romero, a board member of the organization, the idea sounded promising from the start. “I liked the concept of the Peasant Reserve Zone because it opens many possibilities for this neglected territory. We don’t have roads here, peasants don’t have productive projects; nothing reaches us, except maybe politicians bringing three hens during election season.”

Johana Romero, José Ignacio Artunduaga, Elda Yaneth Martínez, and Henoc Enciso Mahecha are part of the Acomflopad board of directors.

Their friends from El Pato were honest: it wouldn’t be an easy process—it had taken them years of procedures and insistence before agrarian authorities. Still, they took on the challenge, and in 2020, Acomflopad formally applied to create the Cabeceras Orteguaza–San Pedro Peasant Reserve Zone. The journey is just beginning, but if successful, it would become the second largest in the country: 233,000 hectares—an area larger than Luxembourg.

While that dream progresses, Acomflopad’s peasants have created strategies to defend their rights while caring for the mountains, forest, and rivers. “It’s everyone’s job on our farms. We’re already old, but we have children and grandchildren—we don’t want them to suffer in the future,” says José Elí Collazos, a peasant who arrived in the region 30 years ago.

The peasants of this area know they live on invaluable land for the environment, an ecological corridor home to species such as the jaguar. Their main tool for preserving it is the organization’s Code of Coexistence. This document, drafted by the 124 boards through multiple discussion sessions that lasted until dawn, states that each property must keep at least 30% of the forest intact, prohibits cutting trees around water sources, and forbids hunting and fishing for commercial purposes. Anyone violating these rules must pay a fine. This is how they’ve managed to control deforestation through what experts call closing the agricultural frontier—or, as Elda translates, “stop pushing into the forest.”

Related:

Agrarian Authority establishes 3 Peasant Reserve Zones

The pride of conservation

Thanks to this collective care of the forest, Genaro can proudly say that from his farm he can see the most beautiful species of flora and fauna. For example, “some giant, beautiful guans that wake you up at five in the morning with their calls”; or the woolly monkey, to whom “I whistle and he answers me”; or an orchid that “looks like an Arab bride.”

Genaro is a man with a furrowed brow and stern gaze who softens when speaking of the nature around him. He says that if they become a Peasant Reserve Zone, he’d like to create a tourist route to share with others the privilege he enjoys daily.

Genaro Martínez lives next to the Miraflores–Picachos Regional Park.

It is no coincidence that he and his family have access to this landscape—they are neighbors of the Miraflores–Picachos Regional Park, created in 2018 with Acomflopad’s support. An environmental milestone they earned through hard work. That year, Corpoamazonía began delimiting the new Regional Park, and, according to Elda, “they were going to create it over peasant settlements, which are historic.” She’s right, since the first Caquetá peasants arrived there in the 1950s fleeing partisan violence, mainly from Tolima and Huila, as documented by the Sinchi Institute in the book Caquetá: Construction of an Amazonian Territory in the 20th Century

Then, the peasant organization launched an innovative proposal for environmental conservation and peasant rights to coexist in the same mountains. “We went to Corpoamazonía and told them: we need to compare your polygon with ours because it seems there is overlap,” recalls Henoc Enciso Mahecha, Acomflopad’s board member.

Under the premise “let the forest survive and so do we,” local residents walked kilometers alongside officials, ensuring that the new Park’s boundaries did not cover peasant homes. As part of the agreement, they left an 8-kilometer untouched forest strip between the park’s limit and what will be the Peasant Reserve Zone. It is a buffer area which, as Genaro explains, “is not for any peasant to destroy, but as a symbol to be protected.”

Acomflopad meeting to discuss how to harmonize their PRZ with protected environmental areas.

The goal: conservation with peasants

Although under Gustavo Petro’s government the dream of turning the Caquetá foothills into a Peasant Reserve Zone seemed closer, a huge obstacle remains: 75% of those 233,000 hectares were designated as a forest reserve in 1959. This means peasants there cannot receive land titles. Elda, who always finds a way to translate legal jargon, sums it up as: “the forest must be kept just to look at.”

But for Acomflopad, the forest is to be put to good use. That’s why the organization’s plan is to ask the government to remove the area from the Forest Reserve Zone and allow the second-largest Peasant Reserve Zone in the country to become a reality. This way, they are convinced, they will own their lands, continue greeting the monkeys, and listening to the flow of their rivers. This way, they will no longer be migratory birds.

*Journalist at Dejusticia

(**) This article is part of the #TejidoVivo special, the product of a journalistic alliance between the Dejusticia research center and El Espectador.