L’“environmental alert” was 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 February 5.
The wind pushed smoke from fires attributed to armed groups, some 350 kilometers to the northwest, to the capital of Colombia.
“The city is on environmental alert”, tweeted Bogota Mayor Claudia Lopez, according to which more than half of the air quality monitoring stations have continuously recorded already high levels of pollution for forty-eight 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 hands” rebels who have decided to no longer respect the historic 2016 peace agreement that led to the disarmament of the Marxist guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Dissidents, as they are called, matter “grab land (…) to develop illegal cattle ranching activities”, denounced the Minister of Defense, Diego Molano, who published a list of 17 suspected arsonists.
“10,000 hectares” consumed
L’” Red alert “ was decreed in the department of Guaviare (Southeast), whose governor, Heydeer Palacio, spoke of « 10 000 hectares » consumed by the fires, i.e. an area equivalent to that of the capital of the French Republic (10,500 hectares). The Serrania de Chiribiquete National Natural Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is also affected.
According to testimonies collected by Agence France-Presse in October 2021 in this region, peasants and landowners take advantage of the dry season, from January to April, to burn the cut trees, plant coca plants instead or leave them there. graze cattle.
According to data from the Colombian government, deforestation has exploded in recent years in the Amazonian part of the country, a consequence in particular of the peace agreement with the FARC, which then abandoned large swaths of territory under its control. Other armed groups have since seized it, also taking advantage of the absence and inaction of the State in these isolated areas.
January 2022 was the hottest month for the Colombian Amazon in the past decade, with over 3,300 “hot spots” in the six departments that make it up, according to a report by the Ministry of the Environment.