- Defending the Amazon Rainforest is something that Indigenous communities have been doing for centuries, and the practice has gained renewed interest with the “Indigenous guard” program that launched two decades ago in Colombia.
- According to the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia (ONIC), there are around 1,200 guards across the three Indigenous councils in the Amazon Trapeze region, Colombia’s tri-border area with Peru and Brazil.
- However, the lack of income for the guardians in particular, and of economic opportunities for communities here in general, have driven many Indigenous people, including some guards, to get involved in illicit activities such as coca cultivation in Peru or drug trafficking.
- To continue protecting the environment, Indigenous guards are calling for greater government support and say they hope to receive fair compensation for the work they do.
Olegario Sánchez Pinto, 74, wakes up at 7 a.m. every day to complete all the tasks he must perform as a member of the Indigenous guard in the Colombian community of San Martín de Amacayacu. He begins work early, using only his traditional walking stick to patrol the hamlet along the Amacayacu River, a two-hour boat ride from the city of Leticia on the Amazon River.
First, he travels along the shore, which serves as a port where people arrive at and depart from San Martín. Next, he walks among the houses to find out if anyone is sick. In the event of an argument or fight, he immediately seeks out the curaca, or chief, the community’s highest authority. The curaca is responsible for resolving these problems, including imposing any penalties if necessary. Then, along with other guards, Sánchez travels along the ravines to determine whether anyone is cutting trees or fishing. In late March, according to Sánchez, he’s also very watchful for hunting.
“That’s the breeding season, so animals can’t be hunted. During those days, tapirs can’t be killed because they’re pregnant. If you kill an animal with [a large] belly, that to us is a crime,” he says.
Sánchez has more years of experience as a guard than almost anyone else in San Martín, an Indigenous Tikuna community. Over the years, he’s watched as dozens of his colleagues have left the Indigenous guard due to a lack of income. He recalls a former fellow guardian telling him, “I don’t want to work for free.”
It’s a persistent problem, according to Jairo Vargas Mora, coordinator of the Indigenous guard of the Tikuna, Cocama and Yagua (Ticoya) Indigenous Reserve. The guardians patrol the area around San Martín de Amacayacu and another 171,000 hectares (about 422,600 acres) of the central and western Amazon Trapeze, an area that forms the extreme southern part of Colombia, on the tri-border area with Peru and Brazil.
In the 22 communities that make up Ticoya — one of the region’s three associations of Indigenous councils — Vargas estimates there are about 7,000 to 8,000 residents, with 364 serving in the Indigenous guard. “Although there could be a bit more than 500,” he adds, if counting those training to join the ancestral organization.
Vargas, a Tikuna, is also a member of the guard, having served for 25 years. He says he tries to motivate his colleagues to stay, but many leave because of the lack of money. It’s a pervasive problem across the Amazon Trapeze: several members of Indigenous communities, speaking on condition of anonymity for safety reasons, say they cross the Amazon River into Peru in search of paid work, and that many others in their communities do the same.
On the other side of the largest river in the world lies Mariscal Ramón Castilla province, in Peru’s Loreto department. A 2024 report by the Crisis Group, a think tank, identifies the province as the center of cocaine production in Peru — and in the entire Amazon — where the total area of coca cultivation increased from 2,939 hectares to 8,613 hectares (7,262 to 21,283 acres) between 2018 and 2022. Against the size of the illicit economy here, there’s little in the way of income opportunities for Indigenous people on the Colombian side of the border.
A lack of income — and the resulting attraction of the illicit economy for some guardians — is just one of the problems facing the Indigenous guard in southern Colombia.
In late March 2025, more than 120 guards from 41 communities along the Amazon, Loretayacu, Atacuari and Amacayacu rivers gather in the community of Villa Andrea, 7 kilometers (4 miles) west of the town of Puerto Nariño. For three days, this village, which sits on a branch of the Loretayacu, hosts guardians from the three associations in the Amazon Trapeze (Aticoya, Azcaita and Acitam). Reporters from Colombian daily El Espectador and Mongabay Latam also attend the gathering.
Over time, it became clear that to continue defending the territory that they’ve protected and conserved for thousands of years, the 1,200 guardians in this region, as estimated by the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia (ONIC), must overcome enormous challenges.
These range from the lack of canoes and other equipment, to the advance of illegal activities and armed actors, increasingly closing in on their territories.
For various members of the Indigenous guards, a large part of the solution to these problems lies in strengthening their organization internally. Other members see a need for support from the Colombian government, especially to contain armed groups and illicit industries. What the members all agree on, however, is that they should be compensated financially for their work.
The birth of the Indigenous guard
Just after 8 a.m. on the second day of the gathering, the large group of guardians, ranging in age from 3 years to more than 70, has already formed lines on a sports field in Villa Andrea. Luis Alfredo Acosta, the national coordinator of the Indigenous guard within ONIC, hurries to organize exercises as part of their physical training, but constant rain impedes these plans.
While most of his colleagues learn how to evacuate a person without a stretcher, Olegario Sánchez watches from the small soccer field that has been converted, for now, into a training camp. Due to his age, he prefers not to participate in the physical exercises. In the meantime, he recalls conversations that he had with his grandparents when he was young. These conversations sparked his interest in becoming an Indigenous guardian, although the term was not yet in use back then.
“My grandfather, Juan Ahué, never told me that there was a guard, but he did talk to me about some people who helped authorities to control the territory,” says Rosendo Ahué Coello, 57, an Indigenous Tikuna. Ahué Coello was born in the Tarapoto Lakes area, a complex of more than 30 lagoons in Ticoya, just a few minutes’ boat ride from Villa Andrea. “They were Indigenous families that had an agreement, mandated by their law of origin, to make sure that the territory would not be damaged by people from outside,” says Ahué Coello, who also works as the town councilman in Puerto Nariño.
Acosta from ONIC can pinpoint the moment the term “Indigenous guard” began to be used to describe the practice of territorial and environmental protection, which has been carried out in this region for thousands of years. It was Acosta who brought the Indigenous guard to the Amazon Trapeze 20 years ago, shortly after an Indigenous guard was formed in El Tierrero in Caloto municipality, in his home department of Cauca. When Acosta, an Indigenous Nasa, first visited these communities in the Amazon, he found there was no clear organizational structure among the people protecting their territory.
However, the situation has changed in the two decades since then. “Unlike [the Indigenous guard in] Cauca, the guard in Amazonas has not needed to attend to any armed conflict, so it has been focused entirely on the environment. That has allowed them to consolidate their communities internally,” Acosta says.
The Indigenous communities conserving and restoring the rainforest
In the last decade, the scientific community’s warnings about the Amazon’s “tipping point” have become almost constant. This concept refers to the moment at which the world’s largest humid tropical rainforest would collapse, either partially or completely, transitioning inexorably from lush rainforest to savanna. This would have serious implications for a biome that hosts 10% of the planet’s biodiversity, stores carbon equivalent to 15-20 years of global CO₂ emissions, and is a key region for stabilizing the global climate.
That tipping point is predicted to occur as soon as the middle of this century, according to a scientific study published in the journal Nature in February 2024. To avoid reaching that point, several researchers on the Science Panel for the Amazon, the first high-level regional scientific initiative focused on this biome, have proposed nine strategies to be applied. In addition to drastically reducing greenhouse gas emissions and ending deforestation, the two main stressors on the Amazon, the scientists propose “creating and maintaining protected areas and Indigenous territories.” This, they reason, “is an effective and low-cost action that contributes significantly to reducing deforestation and forest fires.”
The situation in the Colombian Amazon (covering the departments of Putumayo, Caquetá, Amazonas, Vaupés, Guaviare, Guainía, and parts of Nariño, Cauca, Meta and Vichada) is evidence of this. Of the more than 50 million hectares (123 million acres) this region occupies in the country, the 64 Indigenous communities living here possess half, about 25 million hectares (61 million acres). Their territories hold 58% of the forests in the region and, according to a 2019 study by Colombia’s Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology and Environmental Studies (IDEAM), Indigenous peoples maintain 98% of the forest cover in their territories.
Despite those promising general results, environmental problems persist within the Indigenous reserves of the Amazon Trapeze. During a 2020 visit, Sergio Martínez, project coordinator of the Roads to Identity Foundation (FUCAI), an organization that advocates for the dignity and protection of Indigenous peoples, conducted an inventory of timber trees. He did this in many of the 41 communities along the Amazon, Loretayacu, Atacuari and Amacayacu rivers, where FUCAI has been working for more than three decades.
Along with the Indigenous guard and children and teenagers from the communities, Martínez noted that several reserves were buying acapú, olive, chestnut or bulletwood trees, with which they were building houses and canoes. Years ago, however, they harvested trees from their own land. “We did calculations and found that, more or less, they had inventories for about five to seven years,” Martínez says. He added that 20 years ago, a house measuring 70 square meters (about 750 square feet) would require three trees to be felled. Now, for smaller houses, measuring about 40 m2 (about 430 ft2), up to seven trees are used. “This led us to think that communities were cutting trees ahead of time to have timber because there are not enough [mature] trees.”
Since then, FUCAI and the Indigenous guards began reforestation efforts to increase forest cover in degraded areas. Their efforts have already yielded significant results. Rather than using nurseries, they use seed banks (seeds collected under mother trees). Their work focuses on the four timber species that the communities use the most. They also plant açai, moriche and bacaba palms, and medicinal plants such as cedar trees (whose bark is used to treat malaria) and chachajo (sometimes used to treat headaches, fevers or vomiting). In those five years, they’ve already begun reforestation on more than 500 hectares (1,250 acres) of land.
This process is in addition to another one, launched by the foundation in 2009, which set out to reforest degraded areas using Indigenous ancestral agriculture. On cultivated land, FUCAI increased species diversity from three to six to 60 to 120. Through interventions in communities in Colombia, Brazil and Peru, the foundation estimates it has helped reforest more than 5,800 hectares (21,000 acres). Meanwhile, the families are self-sufficient on 85% of this cultivated land.
FUCAI estimates that over those 14 years, more than 430,000 seedlings of timber trees and about 650,000 seedlings of fruit-bearing trees (of approximately 110 different species) have been planted. In the past five years, the Indigenous guardians have monitored the overall state of each plant. Once the seedlings are a year old, FUCAI switches to using satellite imagery for monitoring. Thanks to this combination of methods, Martínez says, about 75% of the reforestation efforts have been effective.
The limitations of the Indigenous guard
It’s raining in Villa Andrea when the Indigenous guardians arrive in the village. Their day in the communal house, which goes past 5 p.m., is interrupted for only a few hours for lunch and, at times, becomes a class taught by ONIC’s Acosta. At other times, their conversation is invigorated when several members of this “resistance body,” as Acosta calls it, discuss problems they face in their territories.
In Tarapoto Lakes, Ahué Coello’s community, the main concerns in recent years have been the increase in tourism and difficulty in enforcing fishing agreements.
“We are not requiring fishers to comply with the regulations or requirements,” Ahué Coello says. “For example, how many fish are they catching for [their own] food and how many to sell? We also don’t review the sizes or the items with which they are fishing.” Meanwhile, the arrival of up to 24,000 tourists per year, according to data from Puerto Nariño’s culture and tourism department, has given rise to disputes among communities, as this number exceeds the guards’ capacity to regulate.
The Indigenous guard at Tarapoto Lakes is facing problems similar to those experienced by other communities in the Amazon Trapeze. To begin with, says Mora, the Indigenous guard coordinator for the Ticoya reserve, the group lacks resources: uniforms, boots, flashlights, machetes and radios to communicate. Another point of weakness evident in far southern Colombia, according to Acosta, concerns the guards’ transportation.
“Sometimes they have nothing in which to travel,” he says.
This is the case with the Indigenous guard in the community of San Pedro de Tipisca, in the western Amazon Trapeze, just 4 km (2.5 mi) from the border with Peru. This year, just like last year, says Sirley Valentin Laurí, the chief of the community, a large number of fish died in the stream connecting the territory to Tierra Amarilla, on the other side of the border.
“I talked to the chief there, because the [rumor] was that [our] Peruvian brothers were dropping poison. We wanted to go see, but we didn’t have fuel,” Laurí says.
In addition to these practical and material difficulties, there are also threats as a result of the dynamics of armed violence in the department and near the border. In response to questions sent by El Espectador and Mongabay Latam, Colombia’s Ombudsman’s Office said Amazonas department’s location on the border with Peru and Brazil, coupled with its wealth of natural resources, have made the region a point of interest for armed groups and organized crime. They want “control over illegal gold mining routes, routes for drug trafficking and the illegal harvesting of timber-bearing resources, among other practices that seek social [and] territorial [control] and the control of natural resources through armed means,” the Ombudsman’s Office said.
Several sources we speak to say lack of income has driven some community members, including several guards, to get involved in these illegal activities.
Despite the complexity of this situation, all of the Indigenous leaders we speak to agree that a large part of the solution — but not the only one — is for Colombia’s national government, as well as departmental and municipal governments, to invest more resources in strengthening the Indigenous guards in the Amazon Trapeze. They say they’d hoped this would have happened when President Gustavo Petro signed an order in October 2024 establishing the regulations for environmental management of Indigenous territories. Many Indigenous peoples in the Colombian Amazon had been waiting for such an order for more than 30 years, the leaders say.
The order was celebrated by the Indigenous movement and several NGOs, but criticized by regional environmental authorities. It “ratifies the exercise of environmental control that the Indigenous communities have completed, using [Indigenous] guards, for a long time,” says Acosta as he raises awareness about the new regulations in the community of Villa Andrea.
However, since the order was issued a year ago, a flaw has been identified: it lacks a specific budget to strengthen Indigenous environmental authorities. That’s prompted concern among Indigenous people like Ahué Coello that the order could become just another piece of paper. Acosta says he’s working to draft a bill to present to the Ministry of the Environment so that the Indigenous guards can receive funding.
While that draft is being prepared, Ahué Coello makes a call from the village. Although he emphasizes the need for the Colombian government to support the process, he says his colleagues also need to work to build more internal strength within the Indigenous guard in each of the 41 communities to avoid losing autonomy or the power to self-govern that each Indigenous reserve enjoys.
“We do not believe that Indigenous communities, which we now call the ‘guardians of the rainforest,’ should have to work for free,” says Martínez from the FUCAI foundation. “Instead, they need to be paid for taking care of this biome. The service that [the guards] are providing is not just nothing.”
Banner image: Illustration by Sara Arredondo/Baudó Agencia Pública.
This story was first published here in Spanish on May 6, 2025, as a collaboration between El Espectador and Mongabay Latam. It is part of the project “The Rights of the Amazon in Sight: The Protection of Communities and Forests,” a series of investigative reports about deforestation and environmental crimes in Colombia, funded by Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative (NICFI). Mongabay maintains complete editorial independence from outside influence.
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