Abstract
Drawing on qualitative analysis and anthropological histories, we argue that deforestation rates in the Inter-Andean Valleys and in the Amazon Belt of Colombia reflect the specific role of the military in different articulations of the political forest along with new connections between conservation and the war on drugs. This paper examines the increase in deforestation in Colombia in 2020 that partially coincided with the “lockdown” imposed to curb the spread of COVID-19. Early media analysis linked this with the redeployment of military forces away from forest protection to impose lockdown restrictions. However, closer investigation reveals significant regional variation in both the reorganisation of military groups, and in the rate at which deforestation has materialised; military presence has increased in some regions, while in others deforestation has increased. To explain this, we unpack the “biopolitical” dimensions of international conservation to show how the specific deployment of military groups in Colombia reflects an interplay between notions of the protection of (species) life, longer colonial histories, and more recent classification of geographies in terms of riskiness and value.
Highlights
This paper is motivated by a sharp uptick in deforestation in Colombia during early 2020, partially coinciding with the “lockdown” imposed by national governments to suppress the reproduction rate of a novel coronavirus first identified in China in late 2019, whose rapid spread was declared a Public Health Emergency by the World Health Organisation on the 30th January 2020 (WHO, 2020)
We argue that the differential patterns of militarisation observable through lockdown do not reduce to the formula “removing armies increased deforestation”: instead, they reveal important dimensions of power and spatial control in play through the governance of Colombia’s forests, which we characterise through the vocabulary of biopolitics
In this article we have observed how the general sharp uptick in rates of deforestation identified in Colombia in 2020 reveals important dynamics of green militarisation and its potential future directions
Summary
This paper is motivated by a sharp uptick in deforestation in Colombia during early 2020, partially coinciding with the “lockdown” imposed by national governments to suppress the reproduction rate of a novel coronavirus first identified in China in late 2019, whose rapid spread was declared a Public Health Emergency by the World Health Organisation on the 30th January 2020 (WHO, 2020). Measures ranged from mandatory geographic quarantines to non-mandatory recommendations to stay at home, the closure of certain types of businesses and bans on events and gatherings. By midApril of 2020, it was estimated that a third of the world’s countries were in some kind of lockdown (Buchholz, 2020), with impacts already evident on the global economy, transportation systems and business (Bates et al, 2020; Spenceley, 2020, forthcoming). In Colombia, lockdown measures were introduced on March 17, 2020 and began to be relaxed in August 2020. Some are still in place at the time of writing. The measures adopted in Colombia included restrictions on mobility; closures of public places, and mobility restrictions on inter-municipal roads overnight
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