Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries.
In a corner of the rainforest where Colombia meets Peru and Brazil, the hum of chainsaws and gunfire never quite dies. Yet, in the shadows of this long emergency, a subtler resistance endures. Its frontline is marked not by barricades or armed patrols, but by walking sticks carved from peach palm, and a deep, unshakable intimacy with the land, reports Mongabay Latam’s Daniela Quintero Díaz.
Luis Alfredo Acosta has walked this path for 35 years. A member of the Nasa people and national coordinator of the Indigenous guard under the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia (ONIC), Acosta speaks with clarity shaped by decades of witnessing promises deferred and communities displaced. “Although these appear to be isolated things … it really is an integral resistance,” he says. “Because at its core, all of this only works if there is land.”
In Colombia’s Amazon region, “resistance” is neither metaphor nor battle cry.
It is physical — guarding against armed groups, illegal loggers, and narcotraffickers.
It is intellectual — preserving ancestral knowledge and mapping sacred sites.
It is spiritual — sustained through rituals and the use of yagé.
And it is cultural — enacted in daily life through small farms, seed banks and forest patrols.
That these efforts persist amid violence is remarkable. Of the 1,411 human rights defenders killed in Colombia over the past decade, at least 70 were Indigenous guards. In many areas, the state has withdrawn: 11 protected zones in the Amazon are now inaccessible to park rangers due to armed conflict. Yet forests within Indigenous territories remain largely intact, with 98% cover — a fact both defiant and tragic.
The guards, often unpaid, rely on collective will more than resources. In Putumayo, the Siona community has removed mines and monitored vast forest tracts. In Guainía, fishers have transformed kitchens into labs, contributing to national fishery policies. In Amazonas, communities reforest thousands of hectares using knowledge handed down through generations.
The state’s support has been halting. President Gustavo Petro’s National Development Plan pledged to strengthen Indigenous guardianship, but funding has been piecemeal. For guards like Olegario Sánchez of the Tikuna, even basics like radios or canoes are scarce. “If we leave the territory,” a Siona guard warned, “we get closer to dying. If a root dies, its essence dies. And the principle of a community dies.”
In the Amazon, the forest still stands. But its fate — and that of its guardians — hangs in the balance.
Read the full story by Daniela Quintero Díaz here.
Banner image: A community member catching fish in the Fluvial Star of Inírida, where the Guaviare, Atabapo and Inírida rivers meet. Image courtesy of Camilo Díaz for WWF Colombia.
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