(Bogota) The “environmental alert” has been decreed for Bogotá, 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.
Posted at 6:42 p.m.
The wind pushed smoke from fires attributed to armed groups, some 350 kilometers to the northwest, to the Colombian capital.
“The city is on environmental alert,” tweeted 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 “the criminal hands” of rebels who decided to no longer respect the historic 2016 peace agreement which led to the disarmament of the Marxist guerrillas of the FARC.
The dissidents, as they are called, intend to “grab land […] to develop illegal extensive livestock farming activities,” denounced Defense Minister Diego Molano, who published a list of 17 suspected arsonists.
The “red alert” was decreed in the department of Guaviare (south-east), 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).
Serrania del Chiribiquete National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is also affected.
According to testimonies collected by AFP in October in this region, peasants and landowners take advantage of the dry season, from January to April, to burn the cut trees, plant coca plants in their place or let the cattle graze there.
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 last decade, with more than 3,300 “hot spots” in the six departments that make it up, according to a report by the Ministry of the Environment.