Colombian Amazon Department Watch
The Colombian Amazon is not one place — it is ten departments, each with its own pressures, institutions, and communities. This page tracks public reporting department by department, so a reader can follow what is actually happening in Guaviare, or Vaupes, or Vichada, instead of a single flattened "Amazon" headline.
Every item below is linked to its original source. Sourcing standards, scoring, and publishing rules are the same ones that govern the rest of Amazon News Watch.
Core Amazon Departments
The six departments that make up Colombia's officially defined Amazon region, per SINCHI (the government's Amazon research institute).
Tikuna, Cocama and Yagua women monitor the Yahuarcaca lake system around Leticia and run a sustainable fishing and fish-flour initiative that builds economic autonomy while easing overfishing pressure in the Colombia-Peru-Brazil border zone.
MongabayAn investigation details how the Calarca FARC-dissident faction rules rural Caqueta through per-hectare and per-head cattle extortion, movement curfews and forced labor. The same control drives deforestation that made Caqueta 26.63 percent of Colombia's late-2025 forest-loss alerts.
InfobaeA Mongabay investigation documents at least 31 mining barges controlled by FARC-dissident and ELN structures along Guainia's Inirida and Atabapo rivers. Blood and fish mercury levels far above WHO limits are harming Indigenous communities on the Colombia-Venezuela border.
MongabayColombia's Navy seized 2,426 cubic meters of illegal timber in Guaviare and the wider Amazon between January and May 2026, a 64 percent jump over the same 2025 period, as FARC dissidents and other armed groups control the rivers and trails used to traffic wood.
El TiempoA more than 900 percent increase in the cost of moving Colombian crude through Ecuador's SOTE pipeline threatens operations by Ecopetrol, GeoPark, Gran Tierra and Emerald Energy in Putumayo, which pumps about 19,200 barrels a day. Producers warn the jump could force them to store output or halt production.
El TiempoIn one of the Petro government's final acts, Resolution 0961 of August 6, 2026 declared 483,283 square kilometers of the Amazon biome a permanent reserve, ending new mining concessions and hydrocarbon contracts. Vaupes is covered in its entirety, alongside Amazonas, Caqueta, Guainia, Guaviare and Putumayo.
El EspectadorAmazon Transition Departments
Cauca, Meta, Narino, and Vichada are not part of Colombia's core Amazon region, but each has territory in the Amazon biome or its immediate piedmont, and each shows up in national deforestation and land-use data. Coverage here will be thinner than the six core departments — that's a reflection of where reporting actually exists, not an editorial choice.
Drone strikes injured 18 people, 12 soldiers and 6 civilians, during clashes between the army and Ivan Mordisco's FARC dissidents. Commanders warned the group is now deploying explosive-laden drone swarms that challenge military detection systems.
SemanaGreenpeace satellite monitoring found 8,896 hectares deforested in 2025 across Sierra de La Macarena, Chiribiquete and Tinigua, with La Macarena losing 4,973 hectares. Armed dissident groups in southern Meta and Guaviare have blocked park ranger operations.
La Silla VaciaColombia's Special Jurisdiction for Peace found members of the Grupo Cabal and Batallon 93 responsible for stigmatization, false-positive executions and military control over ethnic territories on Narino's Pacific coast. The ruling also documents environmental harm from glyphosate spraying and unresolved gender-based violence.
El Espectador / Mongabay LatamThe Agencia Nacional de Tierras seized the Buenavista estate in La Primavera, 6,182 hectares of national baldios irregularly held by a former congressman and a businessman, overturning a 2017 court ruling. The land, found stocked with cattle and country houses, will be redistributed to local campesino communities.
Agencia Nacional de Tierras (ANT)How this page works
One item per department, refreshed on the same weekly cycle as the rest of Amazon News Watch. Every headline links directly to its original source — wire services, national and regional outlets, government agencies, and research/conservation organizations. Sourcing rules, severity/confidence scoring, and the language standards that govern the rest of this section apply here too: no unsupported accusations, no sensitive locations, no publishing below a confidence threshold.
Some departments will have thinner coverage than others in a given week — Vaupes, Guainia, and the four transition departments generally produce far less English- or Spanish-language reporting than Caqueta, Putumayo, or Meta. When a department has nothing new and credible to report, its card will say so rather than being padded with an unrelated story.
Part of: The Colombian Amazon
