L'”environmental alertwas decreed for Bogota, threatened by the smoke of active forest fires for a few days in the Colombian Amazon and the size of a city like Paris, local authorities announced on Saturday.
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The wind pushed smoke from fires attributed to armed groups, some 350 kilometers to the northwest, to the Colombian capital. “The city goes on environmental alerttweeted Mayor Claudia Lopez, according to whom more than half of the air quality monitoring stations have been continuously reporting high levels of pollution for 48 hours.
The city councilor asked the 8 million inhabitants of the capital to refrain from all physical activity in the open air in the coming days. The government believes that these fires were started by “criminal handsof rebels who have decided to no longer respect the historic 2016 peace agreement that led to the disarmament of the Marxist Farc guerrillas.
Dissidents, as they are called, mattergrabbing land (…) to develop illegal cattle ranching activities“, denounced the Minister of Defense Diego Molano, who published a list of 17 suspected arsonists.
L'”Red alertwas decreed in the department of Guaviare (southeast), whose governor, Heydeer Palacio, spoke of “10,000 hectares»consumed by the fires, an area equivalent to that of the French capital (10,500 hectares).
The Serrania del Chiribiquete National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is also affected. January 2022 was the hottest month for the Colombian Amazon in the last decade, with more than 3,300 “hot spotsin the six departments that make it up, according to a report by the Ministry of the Environment.