The Logic of “War on Deforestation”: A Military Response to Climate Change in the Colombian Amazon

Evaluating Existing Explanations on “Green Wars”

There are three prevalent explanations for why countries respond to the protection of nature by waging wars. Scholars have found that these wars have taken various expressions, such as wars in defense of wildlife, biodiversity, conservation, and, more recently, against climate change (Cusato, 2022; Peoples and Vaughan-Williams, 2021). This phenomenon, also defined as green security, refers to the overt use of policing and militarization of protected areas’ vast territories (land or maritime) in the name of security (Kelly and Megan, 2016). Therefore, this strategy allows military actors to be employed to save particular forms of nature (e.g., elephants, jaguars, and forests) because they are discursively propelled as the standard, rational, and legitimate response ² (Marijnen and Verweijen, 2016). In the remainder of this section, we will briefly describe the patterns of the three most common green wars.

First, existing research maintains that it has been habitual to wage wars by conservation to save wildlife or biodiversity by the end of the Cold War. Since then, Northern and Western national security strategies began to emphasize not only issues of terrorism but also environmental security (Kelly and Megan, 2016, p. 173). Scholars have found that this is a common model for biodiversity protection in Africa (Duffy, 2014, p. 828), Latin America (Ybarra, 2012; 2018; Bocarejo and Ojeda, 2016), and Southeast Asia (Kelly and Megan, 2016), through the designation of parks and protected areas as war zones (Neumann, 2004, p. 834).

A related literature explains the war in defense of conservation. This is a proactive, interventionist militarized response that is spatially amorphous and extends well beyond protected areas and into the land and communities surrounding them (Duffy, 2016, p. 238). Proponents of militarized conservation often present forceful approaches as a noble or heroic quest to save species (Duffy et al., 2019, p. 67). These areas refer to spaces of importance to wildlife and biodiversity, especially of “exotic species,” ³ such as rhinos and elephants, ⁴ as well as forest reserves, which are often portrait as part of countries with high levels of poverty and internal conflicts between rebel groups and the state. According to this type of deterministic literature, the disposal of natural resources serves as income to maintain their wars.

Consequently, these (in)secure protected areas simultaneously afford opportunities and threats to mitigate deforestation, slow biodiversity loss, provide ecosystem services, and restrict terrorist access to valuable resources and nation-state borders (Alice and Megan, 2016, 171). Thus, conservationists have declared a “war” on poaching with extensive military resources deployed to combat it. This sometimes includes operations referred to as shoot-to-kill, particularly in the media (Dickman et al., 2020, p. 293). Security discourses referring to poaching as a war being fought by insurgents authorize militarized interventions as the threats from poaching and the wildlife trade highlight connections to terrorism, insurgency, and organized crime, which has an impact on the national security of the countries affected by these practices (Massé et al., 2018).

However, through discursive constructions in combination with the claim that parks are war zones, deadly violence against humans, not in self-defense of human life but in defense of “biodiversity,” is normalized (Neumann, 2004, p. 834). Protected areas frequently play essential roles in national-level projects of territorial securitization (Revelo-Rebolledo, 2019a). Border parks prompt discussions of unprecedented environmental threats to national body politics and mobilize political actors to support the exclusion of foreigners (armed or otherwise), the assertion of sovereignty over land and/or sea, and the quelling of insurgencies located in the nation’s periphery (Kelly and Megan, 2016, p. 171).

Finally, a prolific body of literature explains the links between security, war, and climate change (Marzec, 2015; Marijnen, 2017; Büscher and Fletcher, 2018). Climate change has been identified as a top military concern for the United States (Gilbert, 2012). It is commonly presented as a planetary crisis that human beings must fight against. Furthermore, climate change has produced conditions in which “the paradigm of security as the normal technique of government” is being applied at a scale and scope hitherto unimaginable (Wainwright and Mann, 2020, p. 5), enabling green militarization over the world. The climate change discourse has been presented, above all, as a catastrophic crisis with irreparable consequences, which deserves the urgent action of the only entities with the coercive capacity to counteract the crisis: states. Therefore, the adoption of a military approach is unsurprising in this new war that humanity faces. As militarization of ecological policies perpetuates an externalized concept of nature as something to be commanded and controlled, there is no real sense of ecological prioritization (Gilbert, 2012, p. 10).

In a similar vein, recent research has demonstrated how Western powers are increasingly adopting a military response to ecological problems where climate change is a casepar excellence (Keucheyan, 2017). These studies found that the global crisis can be mitigated in faraway places, including rural territories in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia (Kelly and Megan, 2016). By shifting the focus to other places, the crisis can be solved. However, this premise also facilitates the normalization of foreign interventions through international cooperation from Global North countries to Global South countries. ⁵ As we will demonstrate in this paper, these global shifts of emphases in security politics are nationally appropriated, transformed, and adapted in relation to pre-existing war discourses and policies that target marginalized populations for specific political reasons (expanding the territorial control of the state).

Together, all of these studies have expanded our understanding of how states wage green wars by demonstrating the different ways in which these conflicts take place. This paper provides a contribution by including a new example of green militarization by focusing on the so-called “war on deforestation.” The novelty of this war resides in the interplay between the victim that is sought to be protected (the Amazon tropical rainforest) by the state, and the enemy that is persecuted (organized criminal groups and guerrillas). More importantly, the uniqueness in the environment-security link lies in the co-creation of wars that serve internal (Colombia’s) and external (United States) interests, masked as “the need to protect the environment.”

Put differently, the politics of the protection of sinks of greenhouse gases constitutes a strategy of waging green wars as an excuse to continue militarizing a country that, supposedly, was transiting into a less violent, post-conflict scenario. In turn, the United States gains an access to intervene militarily with the Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) in Latin America and the Caribbean ⁶ under the pretext of combating “environmental insecurity” caused by transnational criminal organizations that engage in deforestation and other green crimes (U.S. Embassy and Consulate in Ecuador, 2022). Hence, the process of green interventionism is twofold: first, through local and global rhetorical maneuvers. ⁷ Second, through the fact that militarization is taking place in a country experiencing a war of six decades.

Operation Artemis: The Military Response to Climate Change

On April 28, 2019, former President Iván Duque inaugurated this military operation from the Serranía del Chiribiquete National Park in the municipality of La Macarena (Meta), northwest of the Colombian Amazon. According to the presidential speech, the military operation was conceived to confront the increase in the annual rate of deforestation that has recently affected the country’s forests, although repeatedly highlighting the specific ecosystem of the Amazon rainforest. Surrounded by the Ministers of Defense and the Environment, the Generals of the Armed Forces, the Attorney General of the Nation, and the Director of National Natural Parks, the former president pointed out the protection of the forests and its biodiversity as a new object of strategic interest for national security. Later, he highlighted the three purposes of the campaign: to stop the “deforestation hemorrhage” of recent years, recover the humid tropical forest, and prosecute those who are behind what he called deforestation culture; he further added the pedagogy and collective conscience for the appropriation of natural wealth to this list of objectives (Presidency, 2019).

Three political and legal antecedents underline the importance of the place chosen for the launch of the Operation Artemis campaign. First, during the peace talks (2012–2016), the pressure of the contrainsurgent logic of the internal enemy was reduced by recognizing the existence of the internal armed conflict. Simultaneously, deforestation continued to gain a public space in academic, political, and journalistic discussions related to the Amazon region. Since 2016, official reports of the Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology and Environmental Studies (IDEAM, 2020) as well as academic articles (Sierra et al., 2017; Prem et al., 2019; Van Dexter and Visseren-Hamakers 2020; Ganzenmüller et al., 2022) agreed to draw attention to the transformation of the Colombian Amazon into a critical “hotspot” of deforestation as an unintended consequence of the post-conflict scenario.

Moreover, in April 2018, the Supreme Court of Justice issued a decision recognizing the Amazon River ecosystem as a subject of rights and beneficiary of protection (IUCN, 2018). In addition, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace and the Truth Commission recognized the environment as a silent victim of the conflict. Finally, in July 2018, the Serranía del Chiribiquete National Park, the same place from which Operation Artemis was launched, was declared a Mixed Heritage (cultural and biological) of Humanity (UNESCO, 2018). Just 2 days later, former President Juan M. Santos announced the territorial expansion of this park, ⁸ increasing the protected area from 2.7 to 4.3 million hectares, making the Serranía del Chiribiquete the largest protected area in the Amazon Basin and the continent.

Operation Artemis’ second goal—recovering the humid tropical forest—is supported by recent defense and environmental policies that shifted conservation efforts in the Colombian Amazon toward military actions. Since the government of Juan M. Santos, the armed forces have carried out military operations in the Amazon directed toward crimes against natural resources and the environment. These operations were based on the new guidelines established by the Defense and National Security Policy, the Strategic Plan of the Defense and Security Sector 2016–2018, and the Environmental Policy Document of the Defense Sector in 2018 (Fundación Ideas para la Paz, 2021). An example of these military actions was Operation Oxygen, carried out in 2013 against alluvial gold mining informally carried out in the lower and middle basins of the Inírida River (Oficina de Prensa Brigada Dieciocho, 2013).

Duque’s government furthers this trend by including the creation of a Comprehensive Environmental Protection Force with the participation of the Ministry of National Defense, the environmental authorities, and the Office of the Attorney General of the Nation in the National Development Plan 2018–2022. Similarly, the Security and Defense Policy, published every January 2019, established the need to defend the environment, qualifying it as a strategic asset of main and prevailing national interest and innovatively turning its protection into a matter of national security (Fundación Ideas para la Paz, 2021). These security policies justified former President Iván Duque’s announcement of Operation Artemis as a new national security strategy (Presidency, 2019). As part of this guideline, all divisions of the National Army, the Marine Infantry units, the National Police, and the Air Force were expanded, and the use of remotely human-crewed aircraft was authorized for the surveillance of the lands recovered from deforesters.

According to official statistics, 23,500 members of the armed forces were deployed to carry out these operations; more than 350 military actions were carried out in the implementation of Artemis; more than 25,000 ha were “recovered”; and more than 94 persons were captured. Furthermore, more than 213 individuals have been accused of committing environmental crimes (Ministerio de Ambiente, 2022). However, independent journalistic sources challenge these results. Despite Artemis military actions and the invested budget spending—more than 700.000 US dollars—the Amazon deforestation augmented from 158.894 ha deforested in 2019 to 174.103 in 2021 (Tarazona and Parra, 2022).

As we mentioned at the beginning of this paper, virtually all these operations were implemented in the National Parks of the Amazon Basin (Fundación Ideas para la Paz, 2020). Previous policies based on incentives such as Vision Amazonia/REM were disincentivized (Ortiz and Sánchez 2021; Rodríguez-de-Francisco et al., 2021). Finally, in August 2021, Operation Artemis became a sustained, permanent military campaign rather than an isolated military action with diffuse operations to promote safeguarding the environment and protected areas. The following section will show a contextualization of the counterinsurgent doctrine that facilitates the creation of an internal enemy. Then, we will suggest a new realm of the green militarization approach at the Amazon Basin.

A Counterinsurgency Contextualization: The Internal Enemies from the Wars on Communism, Drugs, and Terror

In this paper, we argue that the logic of the war on deforestation can only be understood by considering the wars that preceded it. While they take place at the national level (Colombia), they also have explicit references to the wars formulated by the United States: the wars against communism, drugs, and terror. Scholars suggest that there is a close relationship between the wars waged by the government of the United States and its Colombian counterpart: from the anti-communism of the Cold War to the war on drugs and the global war on terrorism (Palacios, 2012, p. 35). While this author implies a unidirectional agenda-setting established by Washington, other scholars contend a more nuanced relationship, that is, a co-production of a security-centered binational foreign policy between Bogota and Washington (Acevedo-Ossa, 2023). Unpacking these wars is crucial to understand, on the one hand, the constant militarization of the country and, on the other, how the internal enemy is configured and evolves over time. Moreover, it is crucial to mention that these wars have occurred in the same zone where the war on deforestation is taking place. In a nutshell, the deforester was first communist, then drug trafficker, and later terrorist.

Since 1970, the shifting categories of danger to the security of the nation identified by Colombian state demonstrate how the armed conflict has been aligned with global definitions of what is “dangerous” for the world. The construction of the internal enemy could be summarized as a continuum from the communist enemy to the narco-cultivator enemy, passing through the narco-terrorist, and finally, the deforester. This transformation has not been exclusively rhetorical but has produced a periodic legal change as the threat has been redefined. Analyzing the changes in both the categories and the laws exposes the limitations of certain dominant theses on civil conflicts, in which Colombia repeatedly appears as a paradigmatic case (Kalyvas, 2006), by ignoring the geopolitical context of these so-called internal wars.

During the Cold War, the Julio C. Turbay administration (1978–1982) aligned the Colombian armed conflict with the United States’ efforts to contain the “Soviet threat” in Latin America. To this end, Turbay framed the Colombian internal insurgency in terms of “international communist subversion” (Borda, 2012, p. 29). In this sense, the Colombian government incorporated the US National Security Doctrine by implementing the Security Statute promulgated by a presidential decree in September 1978. This statute introduced the concept of the internal enemy, understood as any political adversary operating within the nation’s borders (Turbay, 1998, p. 5). Within the framework of this alliance focused on a counterinsurgency strategy, the Colombian government obtained substantial military and logistical resources while justifying repressive actions under the guise of maintaining social order (CNMH, 2013, p. 133). The logic of the internal enemy expanded its approach to all types of conflict, including the political and social, as a matter of war. As a result, political elites benefited from a robust military boost, ⁹ while thousands of social leaders and political contenders were singled out and persecuted for allegedly being communists and guerrilla members. ¹⁰

After the end of the Cold War, this framework ceased to have similarities and resonance with Washington’s interests and priorities. Instead of a passive and unidirectional process, the Colombian government began to modify the frame of reference of the internal conflict to understand it and co-develop it in terms of a new scenario of the war on drugs and, more recently, as the most critical place in Latin America in the war on terrorism (Chernick, 2012). In the eighties, with Reagan in power and the war on drugs as one of his administration’s priorities, regulating or stopping the traffic of illicit substances was already a fundamental part of the bilateral agenda (Borda, 2012). However, due to attempts at peace negotiations and political differences between Washington and Bogotá in subsequent governments, it was not until the late 1990s that the alliance between the governments of the United States and Colombia began to take on new strength by systematically connecting the problem of the insurgency with that of illegal drug trafficking. After resoundingly ending his attempt to negotiate with the FARC on December 19, 1998, President Pastrana presented the so-called “Plan Colombia” as an alliance with the countries of the world and the private sector to fight for peace, human and social rights, and as a set of strategic investment projects for peace (Pastrana, 2006, p. 118). Over the next 5 years, more than US$5 billion was spent under the umbrella of Plan Colombia (Tate, 2015, p.3).

Plan Colombia consisted of a renewed strategy of military support agreed upon with the Bill Clinton Administration. The Colombian armed forces were to be strengthened and modernized using military resources from the United States, and new military brigades specialized in the war against “narcoguerrillas” (Pastrana, 2006; CNHM, 2013) would be created. Put differently, Plan Colombia demonstrates the continuities of the major paradigms of U.S. foreign policy at the turn of the 21st century: the lingering Cold War preoccupation with defeating communist insurgents and the drug war against illicit narcotics trade, both of which set the stage for the war on terrorism’s focus on ANSAs employing particular tactics (Tate, 2015, p.3).

In the new Penal Code of Law 599 of 2000, the sanctions directed at small growers were toughened, punishing the production of marijuana, coca, and poppies with jail time and applying chemical herbicides over cultivated lands. Pastrana’s strategy of presenting these small producers as “terrorists” took on a new meaning after September 11, 2001, since it allowed the alliance between the two countries to be further strengthened and gave the Colombian war a priority role in US foreign policy. Thus, in May 2002, the Colombian Ambassador in Washington (and later Director of the Inter-American Development Bank between 2005 and 2020) clearly presented the Colombian insurgency as a prominent aspect of global terrorism and paved the way to disregard the internal conflict (Moreno, 2002).

Despite these precedents, the most complete and explicit form of the institutionalization of the participation of the United States in the war in Colombia was achieved during the Álvaro Uribe Administration between 2002 and 2010 (Borda, 2012). Uribe consolidated the discursive transformation of the enemy into a “terrorist” by arguing that they lacked a political agenda, threatened democratic institutions, and constantly attacked civilians in their war against a legitimate state. Consequently, a military response was seen as the only possible way to end what he conceived as a “terrorist threat.” In the same way, Uribe carried out criminal and administrative actions that linked the Colombian conflict with the new United States war against terror (Unidad de Paz 2002; Abello, 2019). According to Chernick (2012), Uribe’s strategy was central to the global rhetoric of Bush’s war on terror. Promptly, Colombia, a non-Islamic country, indicated that the fight against terrorism was not a matter of religion. At this juncture, the armed conflict was discursively aligned with the two major law-enforcement-related efforts launched by the United States in the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the twenty-first: One to eliminate drugs and the other terrorism (Lawson, 2019, p. 178).

Funding and military support for Plan Colombia continued during Uribe’s second term (2006–2010) but suffered a significant turn with the transition to the presidential administrations of Barack Obama (2009–2017) and Juan M. Santos (2010–2018), ¹¹ respectively. In 2011, with Uribe’s public rejection of the explicit recognition of the armed conflict (Revista Semana, 2011), Santos signed the Victims and Land Restitution Law (Ley 1448 de 2011) which granted restitution to the people who suffered damages as a consequence of infractions of International Humanitarian Law or serious and manifest violations of international human rights standards that occurred during the internal armed conflict (Article 3). Although, in principle, the recognition of the armed conflict delegitimized the discourse of the internal enemy, this new scenario allowed Santos to officially start the peace negotiation with the FARC. Simultaneously, he formulated the Damasco Doctrine in2016 ¹² to respond to the new national threats as well as to expand military interventions into other fields of public policy, including the environmental protection of the Amazon (Ministerio de Defensa Nacional, 2015).

We propose that Santos, the architect of the Environmental Peace Agenda in Colombia, inspired this new military doctrine linking security, peace, and environmental issues. ¹³ Santos strategically presented to the international community the environmental peace dividend. According to the National Planning Department, the country could save $2.2 billion dollars a year in environmental damages by achieving peace (Departamento Nacional de Planeación, 2016). Thus, government officials framed the end of conflict as an opportunity to repair the environmental damage and rethink the country’s development (Bustos & Jaramillo, 2016).

The signing of the Final Peace Agreement in 2016 led to the legal and international recognition of the armed conflict. Still, it did not stop the dispute in the public and electoral arenas. While the agreement did not allude specifically to terrorism, it contained a specific chapter for the solution to the production and commercialization of narcotics. The agreement achieved the support of several Western states concerned with the Environmental Peace Agenda, such as Norway, and refocused funding away from the United States. In 2016, the Obama administration renamed the bilateral alliance “Paz Colombia” (Peace Colombia) and requested a new package of US$450 million mainly directed towards the fight against drugs and social programs. However, on the national stage, former President Uribe decided to lead the opposition to the negotiation with the FARC and promoted the non-endorsement of the Agreement at the referendum polls. The “NO” victory gave the opportunity to the militarist right-wing party, Centro Democrático, to win the following presidential election.

Duque’s government (2018–2022) reintroduced a new period of rhetorical denial of the armed conflict and legal attempts to rebuild the “dangerous individual” rhetoric of narco-terrorism (Ministerio de Defensa Nacional, 2019). In his National Development Plan, he reinstated international terrorism as a threat to national security. Taking advantage of the environmentalist turn taken by his predecessor, Duque strategically connected drug trafficking, deforestation, and the illegal extraction of minerals as the primary means of financing terrorist acts (Law 1955 of 2019, 2019). Concurrently, the Trump administration sent more than US$400 million per year to Colombia, mainly destined to fight against drug trafficking, the fight against terrorism, military education, and demining (Gómez, 2020). Subsequently, the Biden Administration published in May 2022 its latest Holistic U.S.–Colombia Counternarcotic Strategy, focusing on “environmental protection” against crimes that sustain and fuel narcotrafficking groups and that have a profoundly negative impact on the natural environment in Colombia and the Amazon region (The White House, 2022). Despite the rise in the number of politically motivated murders and massacres, the government of Iván Duque denied the armed conflict in the country while continuing to ease the shift in security categories and laws toward the new war on deforestation.

Towards a Critical Interpretation of the “War on Deforestation”

There is a growing literature studying the impact of armed conflict on forest loss in Sierra Leone (Burgess et al., 2015), Nicaragua (Stevens et al., 2011), and the Democratic Republic of Congo (Nackoney et al., 2014). Similarly, a second body of literature has studied the links between guerrillas and paramilitaries causing deforestation in Colombia (Dávalos, 2001; Álvarez, 2003; Ferguson et al., 2014). A third body suggests that deforestation is an undesirable effect of the peace agreement between the Colombian state and the FARC on forest cover (Clerici et al., 2020; Prem et al., 2019; International Crisis Group, 2021; Ganzenmüller et al., 2022). From 1990 to 2013, 58% of the deforestation in the country took place in areas affected by the conflict, with 3 million hectares lost (Bustos and Jaramillo, 2016). Despite the evident relationship between the armed conflict and deforestation in the Amazon Basin, no previous research analyzes deforestation through the lens of war. Thus, this paper aims to present a first approach to the phenomenon by revealing the militaristic dynamics that drive this confrontation seeking to reduce deforestation. Furthermore, this war showcases a common pattern of militarization in Latin America: the involvement of armed forces beyond their traditional roles.

The Colombian state has defined this war as the armed confrontation undertaken by the state against actors who incite logging, generally ANSAs, and who usually carry out such activities in order to modify the use of the land to obtain income. In this section, we propose to deconstruct this definition by suggesting that the premise of green militarization offers a critical interpretation of this new green war. We challenge this definition by arguing that although the war’s central objective is the persecution of an enemy that destroys rainforests, in practice, the struggle has resulted in the continuing militarization of the national territory while criminalizing local communities (Benites, 2022; Acero and Thomson, 2022). Three premises must be presented in framing this of the war. First, Colombia has experienced an armed conflict since the 1960s between rebel groups, paramilitary organizations, and the state (Richani, 2002). Furthermore, the Colombian Congress enacted the Law 2111 of 2021 that established deforestation as a new environmental crime, and as a result, the state must prosecute the criminals engaging in the act. Finally, although Colombia is suffering from deforestation in many parts of the country, the only region where the state is adopting a green militarization approach is in the “Arc of Deforestation,” located in the contours of the Chiribiquete National Natural Park northwest of the Colombian Amazon. It is important to question this geographical focus of the war since previous conflicts (communism, drugs, and terrorism) have occurred predominantly in this area.

Our critical interpretation also departs from identifying that the state’s ambition to increase its control and capacity in areas of rich forests and biodiversity followed a mechanism throughout the expansion of natural parks that must be protected militarily (Revelo-Rebolledo, 2019b). From 2019 to 2022, Operation Artemis executed 21 military campaigns, 20 of them in natural national parks and forest reserve areas in the departments of Guaviare, Meta, Caquetá, Putumayo, and Amazonas (Tarazona & Parra, 2022). To borrow the words of Dickman and colleagues, these operations were part of a growing rhetoric that portrays anti-deforestation ¹⁴ as a “war” rather than merely a civilian law enforcement issue (2022, p. 294).

The need to achieving state territorial control of disputed areas of the Amazon is due to an ongoing state-building process, in which this war is presented as an opportunity to dominate a contested space by ANSAs, campesinos ¹⁵ and indigenous populations. State-building in the Colombian periphery has been historically characterized by a process in which the central state informally delegated the construction and maintenance of subnational sociopolitical orders to the Catholic church, local elites, and, more recently, corporations. The result has been the consolidation of informal authoritarian orders in some entities at the subnational level, in which democratic rules as established at the national level are subverted, often through the use of violence, and accompanied by ANSAs that also engage in illicit markets (Albarracín et al., 2022, p. 8).

It does not mean, however, that democratic order is only experienced in the center of the country, given that many of these authoritarian practices emerged from the central government. In a similar vein, scholars have challenged the myth of an absent state, a democratic order-related assumption that claims that the state apparatus has not yet reached peripheral territories (Camargo & Ojeda, 2017; Serje, 2012; Bolivar, 2010). It is crucial for us, therefore, to see that the war on deforestation responds to a centralistic, limited understanding of the state presence, which associates military presence with territorial presence. Moreover, this war was superimposed on other conflicts that are currently taking place in Colombia as this country experienced a 60-year civil war, and post-conflict violence continues despite the Peace Agreement between the state and the FARC guerrilla. ¹⁶

Consequently, we propose in this paper a framework to understand the confrontation undertaken by state against deforesters by considering three factors: the longstanding historical creation of internal enemies, the fabrication of “environmental crimes” related to climate change, and the intention of the state territorial control through Operation Artemis. Given the increase in the rates of deforestation in Colombia, related to the end of the conflict with the FARC, ¹⁷ the Colombian Congress enacted Law 2111 of 2021 to create new environmental crimes and their respective fines. ¹⁸ Consequently, deforestation became a crime that the state could prosecute and punish ¹⁹ through this military campaign. Previous studies found that despite of Latin American countries efforts to enact clearer and comprehensive environmental laws, these measures are also becoming increasingly incapable of halting deforestation (Ungar, 2018, p.3).

Amazon deforestation and anti-deforestation policies are new sources of conflict in crucial areas for peace. The same areas that are being affected by deforestation are those that are areas where there is an axis of conflict and peace (Revelo-Rebolledo and Santamaría, 2021). Therefore, the efforts of the state to deploy large operations in these areas, justified by the post-conflict scenario after the signing of the Peace Agreements in 2016, are not surprising. Consequently, scholars suggest that deforestation is a trace in the landscape that reflects the construction of the state (Revelo-Rebolledo, 2019b).

Northwestern South America in general, and Colombia in particular, is known for being a vital global biodiversity reserve, within which the Amazon stands out. If the Amazon was a nation, it would be the world’s ninth biggest (Ungar, 2018). It is the largest rainforest on Earth, covering 40% of South America’s landmass and includes eight countries: Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, and Suriname, as well as French Guiana, an overseas territory of France (Butler, 2020). The biome encompasses 6.7 million km, ² in other words, a territory that is two times the size of India (WWF, 2022). A cumulative total of 17% of the original forest has already been cleared, and 14% has been replaced by agricultural land use (Albert et al., 2023). Amazon deforestation is accelerating from a combination of anthropogenic drivers, including drier climatic conditions and policies that favor industrialized agriculture (Albert et al., 2023). Although these South American countries have created national environmental protection brigades focusing on the Amazon (Watson, 2019; Jones, 2021), only Colombia has officially declared war on deforestation. This new role for the military has gone even further in the Brazilian case, where generals have replaced technicians in deforestation monitoring institutes (Souza et al., 2022). With this in mind, this research focuses on the Colombian Amazon, the most salient case of the green militarization approach in South America.

The Amazon rainforest became a key nonhuman actor in the global fight against climate change in 2015. That year, within the framework of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the international treaty was adopted known as the Paris Agreement. The Paris Accords negotiated by 196 countries/parties at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 21). In this agreement was the first ever universal and legally blinding climate deal. In the agreement, the members promised to reduce their “household gas emissions as soon as possible” (Art. 4) and to do their best to keep global warming “to well below 2 degrees C” (Art. 2). However, the agreement is deeply intertwined with the Amazon, insofar as it recognizes “the importance of the conservation and enhancement, as appropriate, of sinks and reservoirs of the greenhouse gases” and establishes the goal of “to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century” (Art. 4). Consequently, Article 5 focuses on establishing that parties should take action to conserve and enhance, as appropriate, sinks and reservoirs of greenhouse gases as referred to in Article 4, paragraph 1 (d), of the Convention, including forests.

In this order of ideas, the Amazon rainforest has been highlighted by scientists, experts, and politicians as one of the most important carbon sinks in recent decades. Although there are controversies about the measurement of the relative importance of tropical forests to the global carbon balance, one of the most cited recent articles on this subject points to another element regarding greenhouse gases: due to deforestation and factors associated with it. Climate change, the Amazon would be ceasing to be a sink to become a source of carbon emissions (Gatti et al., 2021). In the midst of these global conversations, while in Colombia, former President Santos negotiated agreements with the FARC and redefined the doctrine of the national army, and in April 2016, Colombia signed the Paris agreement and in 2017 the national Congress ratified it.

The war on deforestation, announced in 2021 by the former president of Colombia, Iván Duque, is part of a modern state narrative that conceives nature and the environment as new objects in national security strategy. ²⁰ Although the Colombian Amazon represents 42% of the country’s territory, and some policies were enacted to shape this tropical rainforest, ²¹ the government explicitly assigned green functions to the armed forces through the Damasco Doctrine until the last 8 years. This shift was enhanced by the environment-security-peace nexus formulated in the 2016 Peace Agreement between the Colombian State and the FARC guerrilla.

Existing studies have found that under specific practices of state territorialization, conservation becomes both the means and justification for violence (Bocarejo and Ojeda, 2016, p. 167). Likewise, as journalistic sources and NGOs revealed, the Artemis military campaign criminalizes local communities that live in these places (Noriega, 2022; Bautista, 2022; Forero, 2020). The criminalization of local populations is linked to patterns of capital accumulation and state-building (Gutiérrez and Ciro, 2022). In the same vein, recent research reveals that indigenous peoples and other local populations are affected by numerous forms of green crimes ²² and victimization (Lynch et al., 2018, p. 319; Menton and Le Billon, 2021) as the targeted enemies are predominantly local deforesters who are equated as environment destroyers or terrorists (Ciro, 2021). Although the drivers of deforestation include ANSAs, transnational companies, ranchers, and businesspeople with close ties to subnational political powers, the military actions have primarily focused on campesinos and indigenous people, the weakest actors in this chain. We argue that green militarization policies do not in practice target the actors they are designed to. Rather than addressing those who make the biggest impact on the forest, they target those people who are the victims of the ANSAs and exploitative labor and do the least damage. The following section will describe the Colombian government’s core military campaign against deforestation.