Colombia’s Hosting of COP16 Will Be a Heavily Militarized Affair
Next month, Cali, Colombia, will host the annual environmental conference COP16. The city’s right-wing mayor has called upon thousands of army and police officers in preparation, both of whom have a long history of suppressing environmental activists.
Colombian police members attend a ceremony with local authorities at the Farallones de Cali National Natural Park in the outskirts of Cali, Colombia, on July 6, 2024, during security operations ahead of the upcoming COP16 Summit. (Joaquin Sarmiento / AFP via Getty Images)
COP16, that is, the United Nations Biodiversity Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, will be held at the end of October in the hot, tropical city of Cali, Colombia. The event, in which world leaders from 150 different countries get together to promote sustainable development, will have a greater impact on the city of Cali than on the rest of the planet. Around 12,000 distinguished guests from all over the world will descend on the city for a week, shuttling back and forth between conferences, restaurants, hotels, and tourist sites. The net economic effect of this deluge, according to some estimates, will be to inject around $25 million into the local economy. COP16 will also be a great way for the city to promote tourism by highlighting its biodiversity and green economy to help shake its reputation for violence and cocaine trafficking.
Cali’s local government, industry, and cultural sphere will all try their hardest to make a positive impression upon the visitors and the international media. To make sure all goes smoothly during the ten days of activities, Alejandro Eder, Cali’s mayor, who was recently elected on a platform of law and order, has promised a “three-ring defense” plan that will coordinate police, military, and UN blue helmets stationed in and around strategic parts of the city. The ground forces will be supported by three military helicopters brought into the city for the event. A recent overhaul of the city’s 1,500 surveillance cameras will also help beef up security from above.
This hyper-militarization of the city due to threats of terrorist attacks could ruin the party. Adding extra soldiers and cops to protect the world leaders attending COP16 is something any city hosting such an important international event would do. But in Cali, these moves have come at a particularly sensitive time. In 2021, during the National Strike protests, the then right-wing government of President Iván Duque militarized the city and unleashed lethal force against people peacefully protesting an unpopular tax hike, widespread police violence, and human rights abuses. As a result, more violence and human rights violations ensued, which then turned the tide of social unrest and led to the election of left-wing president Gustavo Petro in 2022.
Violence in Cali
Cali’s current mayor, a member of Colombia’s most right-wing party, has, like ex-president Duque before him, repeatedly called for the militarization of the city to repress all social protest and to “end the violence.” Violence in and around Cali, however, continues unabated.
The guerrilla group Estado Mayor Central (EMC), which represents a cartel of FARC guerrilla splinter groups consolidated into a single criminal organization, announced in a recent message they posted on X/Twitter directed at President Petro: “COP16 will fail even if they militarize the city with gringos.” EMC’s belligerent behavior comes after the government peace process with EMC was suspended in March 2024 (due to EMC’s constant violations of the treaty). Since then, terrorist attacks in towns around Cali, including car or motorcycle bombs directed against police stations, have increased in frequency. In anticipation of violence, the government has planned to send four personnel carriers, armed to the teeth with chain guns, machine guns, and grenade launchers, to the area near Cali where recent terrorist attacks have occurred.
EMC’s main source of income is cocaine trafficking (in association with Mexican and Brazilian cartels), extortion, and illegal gold mines. The eradication of illegal gold mines, which poisons rivers with heavy metals (such as mercury) and leads to illegal deforestation in protected nature reserves, is currently a priority for the government in Colombia, and this has been cutting into the criminal group’s profits.
Even if EMC doesn’t successfully engage in any terrorist attacks during COP16, the violent clash over energy sources and environmental protection between the sharply divided left- and right-wing political powers in Colombia will provide a tense backdrop to COP16. While the federal government under President Petro is pushing a green agenda to transform the energy industry and to protect the environment, the right-wing political establishment continues to promote the extraction of coal, oil, and natural gas responsible for much of the destruction of the environment throughout the country.
An Attempt at Cultural Self-Promotion
To highlight the conflicts within Colombia’s political landscape, this year’s UN Biodiversity Conference will be held in the country with the highest number of murders of environmental activists. In addition, Cali combines areas of incredible biodiversity with huge swathes of extreme environmental degradation. While the protected natural areas in the Andes mountains on the edges of the city are some of the most biodiverse areas in the whole world, the vast cultivated lands in the valley around Cali are among the least.
The city of Cali is at the very center of an immense sugar industry, surrounded by cane fields that extend for miles and miles in almost every direction and that represent Colombia’s largest agricultural monoculture. Cali’s sugar industry is the largest single employer of workers in the region and has been, since the Cuban Revolution, the largest supplier of sugar to the United States. The sugar industry is made up of a conglomeration of ingenios (sugar cane mills) in and around the city, and is often referred to as a cartel (much like the famous Cali Cocaine Cartel). In 2015, fourteen sugar companies in Cali were slapped with a historical fine of $80 million for conspiring to block sugar imports from other countries in Latin America into Colombia.
Many of the “sugar barons” are descended from the original European families that colonized the region. These families continue to wield enormous economic and political clout in and around Cali. Alejandro Eder, Cali’s mayor, is a direct descendant of the original and most powerful of the city’s sugar barons. Along with several other local right-wing politicians in the region, he is attempting to get the sugar industry in and around Cali cataloged as a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) cultural landscape world heritage site.
This attempt at cultural self-promotion is strongly opposed by the minister of the environment, Susana Muhamad, who stated to the press: “Instead of naming a sugar monoculture as a ‘cultural landscape,’ it should be reconverted into bio-diverse agriculture with a social and environmental pact.” The proposal was also strongly opposed by environmentalists from the region, who pointed out the damage to local ecosystems caused by the sugar industry’s heavy use of pesticides (including glyphosate, the same toxic substance the army sprays to eradicate coca fields) and its impact on the water system of nearby rivers.
Jonhy Acosta, a state congressman from Petro’s left-wing political party, also weighed in and described such efforts as “crazy” because it would give cover to a sector whose operators are involved in land grabs, assassinations of union leaders and environmental activists, and the exploitation of its workers, a large percent of whom are descended from Africans brought to the New World as slaves to work the sugar and coffee fields in the region. “It would,” according to Acosta, “be declaring violence, exploitation, and suffering as our heritage.”
A Political Flash Point
Alejandro Eder, Cali’s mayor, is the great-grandson of the original founder of Manuelita, the oldest and one of the largest sugar companies in Cali, which has long been a generator of social unrest. Eder’s grandfather, one of the biggest sugar barons of his time, was the first person to be kidnapped and killed by guerrillas in all of Colombia. M-19, an urban guerrilla group active in Cali and elsewhere in the country in the 1970s and ’80s, claimed responsibility for the kidnapping and murder of Eder’s grandfather, and also for the kidnapping of Alejandro’s aunt and an unsuccessful attempt to kidnap his mother.
One of M-19’s most ambitious acts as an urban guerrilla group was an attempt in 1984 to take military control of Yumbo, the industrial neighborhood on the outskirts of Cali, a stronghold of the sugar barons (and the site where COP16 will be held). During the attack on Yumbo, the police station was seized (and all the prisoners released), the local church assaulted (and the hundreds of people inside taken hostage), and the mayor’s office burned to the ground. M-19’s policy of kidnapping family members of Colombia’s wealthiest and most powerful led to the creation of MAS, the first of many large, well-organized death squads funded by industrialists, narcos, the US government and multinationals, responsible for the assassination not just of leftist guerrillas but also “sympathizers,” including thousands of peaceful protesters, union members, and environmental activists.
President Petro, a member of M-19 at time, was never involved in any of its armed actions, but the political elite and the sugar barons still consider him an enemy, and his efforts to promote environmental and social issues within the region are met with great resistance.
Whatever might happen during the ten days of COP16 in Cali, Colombia, the conflict and contradictions between biodiversity and industrial monoculture, between sugar barons and environmentalists, between right-wing politicians militarizing the security of the event and guerrillas threatening it, and between local and federal politicians, will lead to heated debates.