The Amazon rainforest, near El Capricho, Guaviare department, Colombia, on July 29.

Insurgents are doing the jobs of park rangers in Colombia.

By Matthew Bristow
Photographs and video by Iván Valencia

August 22, 2023, 6:00 AM UTC

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Ivan Mordisco is a Colombian warlord with a cocaine empire and a bounty on his head. He is also doing more to protect the Amazon rainforest than almost anyone else on Earth.

Deforestation has plunged in the cattle ranching and coca growing region controlled by Mordisco’s guerrilla force after he took the unpopular decision of ordering local farmers to stop cutting down trees. This followed a request by the government of President Gustavo Petro, which has effectively persuaded a group that routinely guns down soldiers and police officers to take on the job of park rangers.

Destruction of the Colombian Amazon fell 76% in the first quarter from a year earlier, but environmentalists fear that outsourcing protection of the rainforest to violent outlaws is unlikely to produce lasting results. And as Mordisco prepares for peace talks with the Petro government, there is an implicit threat that he might reverse the early goodwill gesture and let the chainsaws roar again if he doesn’t get what he wants at the negotiating table.

“This isn’t sustainable, because it depends on the whims of an armed actor, not of the people, not of the government, not of anyone using any mechanisms other than force,” said Angelica Rojas, an environmentalist who works in the region for the Foundation for Conservation and Development, an NGO.

Mordisco’s exact motivation for saving the trees is unclear. It proves to the government that he is in control of much of Colombia’s most environmentally-sensitive territory, and can start and stop deforestation at will, which could provide leverage in talks. He may also want to preserve the jungle canopy that provides cover for his troop movements, and curb the development of big cattle ranches that could eventually threaten his grip.

Reaching Mordisco’s rural fiefdom is a 10-hour drive south from Bogota, ending in the dirt tracks of Guaviare province. Near the village of La Paz, on the edge of the Nukak forest reserve, signs warn travelers to keep car windows down and not to wear motorcycle helmets — all measures to prevent infiltration by rival armed factions.

Mordisco, whose real name is Nestor Vera, charges a tax on all the economic activity in the area, from farms, to gas stations and restaurants. He’s also the most powerful figure in the region’s vast cocaine industry, controlling everything from coca farms to processing laboratories to trafficking routes. Anyone who sells cocaine to a buyer not authorized by Mordisco’s group is declared a “military objective,” its euphemism for a death sentence.

At the entrance to the village, a sign warns the army not to go any further.

The Colombian state barely has any presence here apart from a school, whose students haven’t received the free meals they’re entitled to for more than a month, and a clinic which locals say barely has any medicine.

So it is Mordisco’s troops who set the rules and enforce them. Last year, menacing pamphlets and WhatsApp messages began circulating, warning farmers that they would face “revolutionary justice” if they cut down trees to expand their fields without permission. Mordisco is a former commander in the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and his henchmen still use the language of Marxist insurgency.

“They don’t want people to continue the deforestation,” said Edgar Ariza, a community leader in La Paz. “And they are the only ones who can stop it.”

About 10% of the Amazon is in Colombia, where it has suffered far less damage than Brazil’s forests this century. The Petro government has called ending deforestation a top priority, and the US, the UK, Norway and Germany are among the biggest foreign donors for conservation projects. The Amazon stores tens of billions of tons of carbon, crucial for limiting global warming, and provides a habitat for jaguars, thousands of bird species and even freshwater dolphins.

In Mordisco’s territory, anyone who cuts down trees without permission is fined 10 million to 20 million pesos ($2,400-$4,800) per hectare, according to one local leader in Calamar, another region of Guaviare province, who asked not to be named because he said the group has become increasingly violent lately.

By severely restricting deforestation, Mordisco has reintroduced an old FARC policy. The guerrillas needed the jungle canopy to conceal themselves from the army, and also used the forest for fishing and hunting wild animals to feed themselves when they were under siege.

“It wasn’t just about having territory to hide clandestine movements,” said a former member of the FARC’s ruling council known as Pastor Alape. “It was also about curbing the advance of big landowners’ estates.”

Alape and thousands of other FARC members laid down their arms after signing a peace deal with the government in 2016. Those like Alape who stayed in the peace process, and those like Mordisco who took up arms again, each regard themselves as the real FARC, and the others as traitors.

Mordisco’s faction, known as Estado Mayor Central, or EMC, now has about 2,200 fighters in arms, and a support network of about 1,400 people, according to estimates by army intelligence. That probably makes it Colombia’s third-largest illegal armed group, behind the National Liberation Army, or ELN, a guerrilla force, and the Gulf Clan, a cocaine cartel.

The FARC peace accord fell far short of its goals. In the chaos that followed, land grabbers and cattle ranchers took advantage of the power vacuum to rush into the Amazon and begin destroying the forest at a record pace.

Mordisco at first permitted the arrival of large-scale cattle farming in the Amazon, perhaps because it boosts his income from extortion. His men even issued death threats against environmental activists and employees of Colombia’s National Parks service.

Then, in 2022, he changed his policy 180 degrees. That was also the year Petro was elected as Colombia’s first leftist president, pledging to seek peace talks with the nation’s illegal armed groups, including Mordisco’s.

A rustic laboratory producing a type of unrefined cocaine known as coca paste, left, near La Paz, Guaviare.

Referring to the plunge in tree loss in a speech last month, Petro said, “To achieve this, we had to speak with armed groups, and one of the central themes was halting deforestation.”

In a written reply to questions, Colombia’s Environment Ministry 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. The government’s work with local communities and criminal investigations into the financing of large-scale deforestation also helped save trees, the ministry said.

At least one pamphlet purporting to be from Mordisco’s faction explicitly cited Petro’s election as a reason to halt the “ecological disaster.” It ordered local people not to chop down virgin forest or start fires “until, during these four years of Dr. Gustavo Petro’s government, there is an institutional solution for farmers who don’t have land to work.”

Petro made environmental protection central to his campaign, pledging to wean the economy off its dependence on fossil fuels, and redistribute land to poor farmers.

Maps from Colombia’s weather agency IDEAM show that, in the first three months of 2023, destruction of the Amazon continued in areas not then completely controlled by Mordisco’s faction, and plunged by 90% or more in some areas where he had a firm grip.

By implementing environmental restrictions, Mordisco is showing Petro that he is the one in control of the Amazon, the person who can halt deforestation if he chooses, according to Bram Ebus, a researcher at the International Crisis Group, an NGO which studies conflicts.

This puts him in a strong position to wring concessions from the Petro government, which longs to save the rainforest, but lacks the territorial control to achieve this on its own.

“This definitely strengthens their hand at the negotiating table,” Ebus said.

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