Isabel Peñaranda Currie

Caitlin Morrissey 

Isabel, what is an Amazon city, and what makes a city an Amazon city?

Isabel Peñaranda Currie 

Yeah, I was thinking about how important it is that you're even asking this question. And probably kind of counterintuitive for a lot of listeners because the imaginary that your average person who hasn't been to the Amazon, or even the ones who have, has of the Amazon, is like of this vast virgin jungle. And when we think of people in the Amazon, it's kind of like coexisting with nature and living in small, remote communities, mostly Indigenous. And of course, that is like a very important reality of the Amazon, but it's actually not the reality of the majority of the people who actually live in the Amazon, and their reality is actually quite urban. And so I think this question about cities in the Amazon is long overdue and very important to have.

So as you've probably already discussed with the other guests, the population of the Amazon region, which comprises nine or ten different countries, including Brazil and Peru and Bolivia and Colombia and Venezuela and so on, the populations of around 48 million people. And I briefly looked up what country is kind of that scale, and it's the size of population-wise of Spain, which is a huge reality that I just don't think we talk about very much. And it's a historicised reality. So historically, a very small amount of the population lived in cities, or when it was just the Indigenous groups who lived there, it was a very-- it was arguably none. But the IDB has been tracking this, and they found that around 30% of the population was urban in the ‘60s, then around 60% in 2009, and it's over 70% in various countries today. And so going back to your question of what a city, an Amazon city is, my first hopefully not sounding too flippant, my first answer would be just like a city in the region of the Amazon. And I know that might sound silly, but for me, it draws attention to the fact that even though cities in the Amazon are very unique in some ways, and I'm guessing we'll talk about that a lot, I also think it's important to de-exceptionalise cities in the Amazon. And I think Government policy either doesn't acknowledge that the Amazon is a very urban region or treats it as something so separate that like normal development policies, you know, don't apply, or that these can't be included in urban policies. And so I think it's important to both understand the exceptional qualities and unique qualities of the Amazon as well as, like, just how interconnected they are to global supply chains and to, like, many other relationships that we have. They're not something that's like outside of urban systems.

The other thing that I think is interesting in discussing Amazon cities is that we're talking about a region that crosses so many national boundaries, and it is striking that they have a lot of things in common. But also when you study their particular national trajectories, you realise how important these are. And so while they may share histories of Indigenous settlement or a violent like extinction of the Indigenous population or recent 20th Century colonisation or extractive industries, it's also a really interesting case to study, like how pertinent national trajectories are in defining the unique qualities of Amazon cities in different places, different countries.

Caitlin Morrissey 

Thank you so much, Isabel. I guess an immediate follow-up to that is to maybe ask you to say a little bit more about those national trajectories and how they have shaped what it means to be an Amazon city, or the different ways that the cities have evolved because it sounds like you're, yeah, sort of pre-empting our next question, which is about the distinguishing features, but also, how did the national borders and nation-states shape that?

Greg Clark 

Maybe I'll add one, Isabel, which is just to say, I love your framing to kind of normalise urbanisation in the Amazon. Could you just say a little bit from your perspective about what you think are the drivers of urbanisation in the Amazon, and whether they're the same drivers that we see in India, in Africa, in other parts of the world, or is there something distinctive that's been driving that urbanisation process?

Isabel Peñaranda Currie 

Which one should I answer first?

Greg Clark 

Whichever you like.

Isabel Peñaranda Currie 

Maybe I'll try to tackle them both at once. So I should probably caveat by saying that I have a pretty unique-- I don't know if it's a unique approach to the Amazon, but as I was mentioning, what draws me to study the Amazon are the things that interest me most about studying the Amazon are linked to this impulse of understanding them in bigger global processes or national processes, or understanding the economic patterns and political economy of these regions. And so I have a bias, and the bias is probably against identifying the very particularly Indigenous history and particularly natural relationship that Amazon cities have. And I think other guests have probably talked about that, so it's probably a good compliment. I'm drawn to-- I studied in a region, or the regions of the Amazon that I’ve most studied have been in Colombia and particularly the areas of Caquetá and Putumayo, which have been much more settled. They're kind of internal frontier within Colombia that have a very unique history of state-driven colonisation that meant like there's a very strong mestizo-- mestizo being a kind of racial mix that is not Indigenous-- settlement pattern among other things, or have been deeply integrated into global commodity circuits through oil extraction in the case of Putumayo, coca-- which is the plant used to make cocaine-- in the case of Caquetá and Putumayo, and a lot of cattle ranching. And so these are not the deep Amazon cities. And I think it's very important to talk about them because they're less easy to romanticize but are very important to consider because these are often the frontiers of deforestation. So yeah, that's my kind of bias when I discuss Amazon cities, I talk about the other ones, I know them much less well. And in terms of what drove the settlement patterns there, yeah, I think we'll probably talk about it later because I studied this region as a historian when I was doing my Masters in History and as a planner. And so I have these twin perspectives. Caquetá and Putumayo were very much the product of 20th Century colonisation, even though there were prior attempts by the Spanish during the colonial period to settle the region, mostly failed. But in the 20th Century, the state started to promote, actively promote, colonisation mostly as a way of avoiding the land crisis, the access of land that many peasants had in the kind of Andean region. And so to avoid a substantive agrarian reform, different colonisation waves were either promoted gently or like with very direct state intervention, particularly in the ‘60s. Colombia also has a very long history of the armed conflict, so the Andean region has pushed people out, and many of them have come to the Amazon region, and also more recently, the coca booms and the oil booms have promoted their own colonisation patterns, and so all these have fuelled very particular and changing kinds of settlement and urbanisation in these two states.

Caitlin Morrissey 

Thank you so much. Isabel. I'm just taking some notes as you're talking because everything you're saying is incredibly fascinating. I'm going on to this question now, which is about are cities in the Amazon, Amazon cities in the same ways, or in different ways, for example, in relation to their proximities, to nature? I think you just mentioned the term ‘deep Amazon’. So perhaps some alternatives to that, the relationship to the river, the rainforest, and, like you said, the Indigenous cultures and traditions, but anything else that we haven't sort of elicited from that question in terms of how we might understand what makes Amazon cities similar or different?

Isabel Peñaranda Currie 

Yeah, so, like I said, those are the cities I can speak least about. I studied them in a very macro way when I was studying planning. I'll talk a little bit about some things that I found that they did have in common, and some of those things when I was studying it from a planning, economic planning perspective is that these cities, and this is unique to Amazon cities in relationship to more central Andean cities in Colombia, these Amazon cities have very important connections between the cities and their surrounding countryside or hinterland, which sounds kind of bad, but I think is a useful term because it connotes a relationship to a city. And so cities in the Amazon, whether they're in the deep Amazon, like the cities of Mitu and Inírida and Leticia, which is right on the border with Brazil, or these more internal frontiers, like Mocoa or Florencia, in the case of Putumayo and Caquetá, they all have important-- they also have really important roles for this rural areas that surround them. And this doesn't come across in a lot of the economic policies, but a study done by the National Planning Department and an agency called Venice found that in terms of health and education, cities in the Amazon provided way more services than their other counterparts, than the national average. And so Florencia provides 18 times the health services than the national average. And I think this is just like grossly overlooked in national policy and in how we think about these cities. And often, because these distances don't make sense when you're in the Andes, which is much more densely populated. But often, people will have to travel six hours by boat, two days by boat to get to their closest hospital. But it makes the role of those nodes where hospitals are that much more important.

And likewise, and when you look at it from the perspective of economics, it's much vaster, the economic relationships. Like I used to live in downstream six hours from the closest town, which itself was three hours from the closest city. People would bring their cows from downstream six or eight hours to the closest town and then sell them in Florencia, the city. And without those linkages, those farmers in the countryside would have no markets. And so it's a very vital relationship between the countryside and the Amazon cities. Those are the things they have in common. And I need to pause because my computer is going to run out of battery, but I have the charger here.

Greg Clark 

What a fascinating point Isabel's just made about the vitality of those connections and this kind of very strong mutual interdependence, that singular interdependence, in a way, what a fascinating point, and those chains of value and exchange.

Isabel Peñaranda Currie 

Yeah. Because I think, like, yes, the relationship with the surrounding ecosystems is very important. But we also need to consider that, like many of the, especially the Colonos, which is a word we use in Colombia to designate like kind of recent settlers of the Amazon, usually mestizo, like those Colonos, are deeply inserted in commodity, like a capitalist economy, and they need access to liquidity to buy basic things like medicine for their families or for their cattle. And so cities play a really important economic role in making their subsistence viable. And I think sometimes when we like are in like romantic jungle mode, we forget the importance of these like, very vital relationships.

Okay, so on the topic of differences, I really love the work, and I think I've touched upon this a little already, but I love the work of Javier Revelo, who's a professor here in Bogotá. In his exploration of why deforestation is so much higher in Caquetá than Putumayo, and he basically reconstructs the histories of integration of these territories into the broader nation-state, and finds that cattle ranching was strongly promoted between the ‘50s and ‘60s in Caquetá, which integrated that territory much more deeply in the markets of like Colombia as a nation and actively resulted in much stronger deforestation in this region versus Putumayo was settled a little later and was mostly an oil extractive region, and so it didn't-- it simply doesn't require the same kind of deforestation. At the same time, he finds that because agriculture and cattle ranchers rely much more on water and have deep cultural and organisational kind of social fabric, they've been able to oppose oil extraction much more successfully than the territory of Putumayo, which, even though has a much larger Indigenous population and they tend to oppose oil extraction, Putumayo as a whole wasn't able to politically mobilise against further extractive industries. And so that for me, Javier's work illustrates really well, kind of what a difference history can make, and kind of refutes readings of geographic determinism.

I've been really interested in and my work has concentrated a lot on coca, which, as I mentioned, is the leaf used to make cocaine. And I worked a lot with coca growers in the Amazon region and elsewhere. And coca basically entered Colombia in the ‘70s, and then kind of took off and strongly overlapped with histories of-- and settled-- like the geographies of the armed conflict in Colombia. But I remember being really struck by the fact that once I was in Putumayo, I crossed the San Miguel River, which separates Colombia from Ecuador, and as soon as I crossed into Ecuador, the streets were paved. There was running water. There was a health centre right there, which was-- all of which were lacking in Colombia and like, helped explain why, for a long time, you would find a lot of coke on the Colombian side and none on the Ecuadorian side. But also this is a kind of dynamic relation because we know now that, like, criminal groups have also taken a lot of hold in Ecuador. And so I think all these things point to, like, how far a difference can stretch in terms of like, national and regional trajectories, and also how regional phenomena often overflow international boundaries.

Caitlin Morrissey 

Thank you so much, Isabel.

Greg Clark 

Just to reflect how interesting, Isabel, the point about the differences in the productive fabric for, you know, a farming-based activity like cattle ranching, from an extractive activity like oil mining, and how they have different impacts on deforestation processes and how important it is to be able to relate those factors. Just to say that's a very important and interesting point.

Caitlin Morrissey 

Yeah, and I think a point made very well, especially in terms of what the communities were able to politically mobilise against, given that sort of trajectory that you just described. And I know you mentioned that a lot of your work has been taking place in Colombia, Colombian cities in and outside of the Amazon. So from your understanding, so we've asked this question quite broadly about cities in Latin America, South America, but perhaps you might want to talk more about Colombia. But how, as you see it, have cities in the Amazon historically had different development trajectories to other cities outside of the Amazon region or the Amazon basin, and what sort of forces have shaped that as you see it?

Isabel Peñaranda Currie 

Yeah, I love this question, obviously, because I studied history, and I think it's underestimated in terms of a driving force in the Amazon. So some things that I think are important to consider, there's a lot, and I could talk for way too long about this topic. But I identified some, like three different things that I think are really important to consider. The first is that I think the Amazon and I've talked about this with Adrián Lerner. I think it was originally his point, but I thought it was brilliant, which is that settler colonialism is not the best paradigm for understanding much of Latin America, but it's actually very appropriate for understanding the Amazon's history. And the term settler is actually very interesting, especially in the terms of conversation about Amazon cities, which is that not only in vast regions of the Amazon was the Indigenous population like mercilessly persecuted and exterminated, but also what was erased was a whole form of relating to the Amazon itself, which was not a permanent settlement, but this very itinerant, cyclical but interactive relationship between nature and people. And that was very explicitly repressed by early Spanish attempts to colonise the Amazon, and has been very explicitly pursued by different state initiatives to establish permanent settlements. And so you really get the settler element of settler colonialism. The second is one I've thought about a lot, which is, I think Amazon cities are, in many ways, haunted by a kind of legacy of failure. And I say failure in a kind of playful way because I think academics don't think enough about failure and think of failure as a kind of absence or lack, but actually, failure has a lot of effects. And so the failure of Spanish colonisation to establish permanent settlements or the failure of developmentalist state projects to drive state-directed colonisation efforts all left their marks. And so I think Amazon cities, and studying the history of Amazon cities, is a really interesting place to think about what are the effects of failure? And I think actually cities are, and I've explored this in some of my research, cities are very much an effect of the failure to colonise like to promote an agriculturally based colonisation scheme. And so when you take mestizo farmers from the Andes and just send them down into the jungle where we know the soil is very poor, and they fail to make a living there, they often, at least in the case of Caquetá, ended up settling in cities and coming up with alternative means of making a living. And so cities are literally a byproduct of state failure. And I think that's a really interesting kind of history to explore.

Greg Clark 

Would it be fair to call them accidental cities, Isabel, in a way?

Isabel Peñaranda Currie 

For sure, but yeah, so accidents-- I like that word accident because it has much more presence than sometimes failure. But failure is the word you find again and again in the literature, at least in Colombia. Maybe we're particularly obsessed with state failures in Colombia. And then related, I think it's really important to mention when we discuss cities in the Amazon in the Amazon in Colombia, is that there's a very strong history of-- or the legacy of the internal armed conflict. And so the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia, or the FARC, which were the oldest group, were founded in 1964, were the oldest group in the Western Hemisphere. Demobilised in 2016, although many went back to war because of the failures of the peace process. Though the FARC were born in Caquetá and the FARC controlled vast amounts of the territory of Caquetá, as well as Putumayo. And my research has studied what kind of territory emerged when you have armed actors as being one of the de facto state presences of a region. My colleagues Silvia Otero and Simón Uribe and I studied the road networks that the FARC built, financed by the coca economy, often using local government bulldozers and the work of the Colonos settlers and coca growers. And so the history of the Amazon cities, at least in Caquetá and Putumayo, allow us to understand the armed conflict, not just like as a mass act of destruction, but also of like the strange ecologies that emerged in these territories that were so defined by the armed conflict and even the productive and yeah, really fascinating cultures and ecosystems that included both people and nature that emerged in these territories.

Caitlin Morrissey 

Thank you. That's such an incredible framework because you have really, I think so, clearly painted a very strong picture of why Amazon cities have developed differently, or like, what the forces have been, in a way that we are also looking at in this series, perhaps for context, at São Paulo and Mexico City, which is obviously in Central America, but it's very vivid when you start to think about all of these different places in the same sort of sphere in my mind, just how different these forces have shaped urbanisation in the region. So thank you for that. On to some of our, well, our third final question, which is to ask you, what is needed for Amazon cities to become more sustainable and more prosperous while also retaining their Amazonian identity, or identities?

Isabel Peñaranda Currie 

Yeah, I think again, it's a really important question simply because there's been such a vacuum in public policy in dealing with these cities. And this is something that I've been trying to address in my work, and that is the reason I wanted to tackle it from a planning, an economic planning angle, rather than one that wasn't immediately legible to the logics of policymaking in the state.

So yeah, I think, at the risk of repeating myself a little bit, the most important point of departure is for government and civil society more broadly to recognise the specificities and kind of general patterns of these regions. And so that means designing policies that don't just impose the paradigms that apply to central cities onto Amazon cities. And so I studied something called the National Policy of the Systems of Cities, which was supposed to promote agglomeration economies in the entire national territory, but they didn't account for these cities that occupy the Amazon, which is literally 40% of the country. And so they-- just to give you an example. They defined agglomeration by commuter flows and so they defined it by having an integrated labour market. But as we know, as I mentioned earlier, Amazon cities aren't defined by like daily commutes but they're defined by really vast relationships of service provision that may, you know, require that somebody ride for two days in a boat just to access healthcare. But that's very much a functional relation to use the language of the state, and so within the context of the post conflict, so we signed peace agreements with the FARC in 2016 and out of that, the government said it was going to take up lots of different programs that would integrate a territorial approach, which meant that they would take into account the specificities of the territories where the armed conflict was most prevalent. But they haven't really taken up this territorial approach because doing so would require coming up with definitions of, for example, functional relations or agglomerations that were specific to the Amazon region.

And I think one of the most important ways that this is expressed is that currently in Colombia, we have a very market mediated healthcare and education system, more so in the case of healthcare, and the Amazon simply doesn't have the population density to make a market option viable. It's just there's not enough demand, so to speak. And what that ended up when, for example, during COVID, is that three of the states of the Amazon region didn't have an intensive care unit and so people literally had to fly to Bogotá just to be treated for COVID, which is a very violent thing to ask citizens to do because clearly not everyone was getting the same right to health if some people just had a 50 minute commute or a 30 minute commute, and some people had to travel for days. And the impact is so much more powerful when you have vast territories without a single ICU because not only were the death rates much higher, but also-- and obviously, all lives are valuable, but there's a kind of extra violence, for example, when the elders of an Indigenous group die because their territory doesn't have healthcare, which happened a lot, and was profoundly devastating to the Indigenous communities that live, for example, around Leticia, which is one of these deep Amazon cities. Yeah, so the something similar happens with education, where all of Putumayo, which is a quite densely populated area, doesn't have a single university, and so people have to leave if they want to pursue higher education, but then you have this horrible brain drain that like undermines Putumayo’s own ability to like generate a development vision of itself or for itself.

So yeah, I think taking account these specificities of the territory and also recognising that the state needs to operate differently in these territories than it does in the Andean region, I think would go a long way to making these territories kind of more self-sustainable and able to, like generate their own visions of development and prosperity.

Greg Clark 

Right, I’ve got a couple of questions in here, then, if I may. So I want to ask about identity Isabel. And given what you've been saying, there's a strong theme in what you're saying about the urbanisation of services to serve a hugely dispersed population group that interact with each other through value chains that are very important but are not necessarily urbanised value chains in that way. So when you have people who are served by a city that's three hours away from them or nine hours away from them, how do they describe their relationship with that city? Because I'm guessing people who live six hours from Iquitos, but depend upon services in Iquitos, don't say I come from Iquitos. So how does identity work in relation to these cities of service for large geographical space?

Isabel Peñaranda Currie 

Yeah, that's a really interesting question and I sidestep the whole identity question, even though I'm an anthropologist by training and should be thinking about this all the time, but it's just so fraught. It's such a tricky question. And I think there's something to be said about-- it's very historical that we're obsessed with identity right now, and in Colombia, this is very marked because the 1991 Constitution, which is our newest constitution, places a big emphasis on particular ethnic identities and gives a lot of autonomy to Indigenous groups who have territorial autonomy in something called resguardos and Afro Colombian groups which have their own territorios colectivos or collective territories, but the Colona population doesn't have a very legible identity, and they've worked very hard to try to come up with one because that is the regime of recognition within which we exist in Colombia right now. And so most a lot of the Colono identity is very rural because the resguardos and the Afro Colombian collective territories are also very rural, which in turn makes it, as a side note, very difficult for urban Indigenous people to get recognised as like having differential rights, or Afro Colombian people. And so in Caquetá, you get-- I don't remember if in Putumayo as well-- but there are something called Peasant Reserve Zones, or Zonas de Reserva Campesina that really like capitalise or that try to craft a very legible peasant identity that like produces food, that opposes a lot of like the commodity circuits, and I think that's a very important project and that they claim a kind of territorial autonomy for themselves. Many of the Zonas de Reserva Campesina are in internal frontier regions. But as an academic and someone who thinks more about class and political economy, I think this also kind of erases, for example, the coca growers who were like, very clearly not growing food, they were very clearly producing for a commodified global market. And I think they deserve rights too. And there was a really interesting movement in the ‘90s that researched in the 2013, I think, COCAM. It's a kind of union of coca growers that try to also defend their identity as worthy of recognition. But again, all of these are rural cities in this paradigm, like are very much lost. And being in Florencia was this kind of ongoing identity crisis that I was witnessing because so much of the funding was either for conservation or for rural post-conflict programs or these kinds of Indigenous groups and the urban dwellers of places like Florencia or San José del Guaviare, just like, weren't legible to any of the programs of the state. And so, like, we're scrambling for a definition of an identity, but we're also, like, constantly being overlooked because they didn't have a clear, digestible identity that would make them recipients of government or NGO help.

Greg Clark 

Yeah. I mean, it's a common place to say that cities are the orphans of public policy because it's true in many, many contexts, but you're giving us a particular version of how that's true in this context, which I think is really interesting. And that leads to my other question, Isabel, which is, can you talk at all about municipal structures and leadership? Do you have any sense that there's a topic or a narrative here to get into about, you know, these slightly precarious cities that are providing these services to these hugely dispersed populations that have all sorts of different reasons for being there or not being there or coming or going, is there a narrative about how such a city should be organised, led, planned?

Isabel Peñaranda Currie 

That's a really excellent question, and I don't think I have much of an answer for it. Yeah. I think in the current system in Colombia, we have a fairly decentralised governmental structure, which makes it very hard for poor municipalities to self-manage, and there's been a lot of flip-flopping with, for example, access to royalties. And royalties are always a really tricky thing because they generate this kind of rentier logic, sometimes fuel political corruption, have strange labour dynamics, but it made Mocoa and Putumayo like have access to a kind of liquidity that, for example, areas in Caquetá didn't have. At the same time, because Caquetá had so much cattle ranching, there was a kind of more democratic relationship to like paying taxes and demanding accountability. I don't know how that translates. Oh, I mean, I guess another thing I should mention, and I recommend the work of the two sisters, Estefanía and Alejandra Ciro, is the role of regional elites, and it's like a fascinating history. They both chart the role of the Turbay family, which was very well connected in Bogotá and able to channel congressional funds directly into Florencia, and in that way, perpetuated their political rule for decades. And one of the things I studied is the construction of a particular informal invasion called Las Malvinas because it was founded on the year of the Maldives War, the Falklands. So it's called Las Malvinas. And Las Malvinas was largely constructed through very, what we would call corrupt client list networks or relationships, but which literally is the normal way, or was in that era, of constructing a city, which is—so the Turbays would channel funds directly to the residents of the city because they were a big voting block for buying, for example, bricks or zinc roofing, or they would install electricity, and often this involved a very close relationship with the military, which is also the legacy of the armed conflict that a lot of civilian life gets very militarised. So I don't know if I answered any of your questions, but those are my big thoughts.

Greg Clark 

Yeah very interesting about these creation of these regional regimes. And I'm going to go back to Caitlin because I know she's got more questions, and we've got about 10 minutes, so we better get going.

Caitlin Morrissey 

Yes. Thank you so much for this, Isabel, it's been absolutely fascinating. So one of our final questions is to ask you how you think the world understands or doesn't understand Amazon cities? And I think you may have mentioned, well, perhaps touching this a little bit previously, but are there any common misconceptions that you feel you encounter when discussing Amazon cities, or perhaps also in the way that they're represented in the academic literature that you're coming across in your studies?

Isabel Peñaranda Currie 

Yeah, I think I've mentioned just my overall frustration with thinking of the Amazon as like a not urbanised place. And so I thought I’d only mentioned two more things. The first is the idea, and I touched upon this, that the Amazon is like, or Amazon cities are something completely separate from us. And I thought I'd illustrate this by talking about the water rationing in Bogotá right now. And so every 10 days right now in Bogotá, we get our water cut off for the entire day because we just don't have the water reserves for everyone to have constant water supply. And I was reading about this, and one of the reasons this is happening is because the deforestation in the Amazon is so terrible that the atmospheric rivers that rise out of above the Amazon and like carry over to the Andes and fall as snow and then come downstream, that whole process has been disrupted. And so literally, one of the reasons I don't have water to shower with sometimes is because of deforestation in the Amazon. So I think climate change makes us very much aware of just how interconnected these geographies are, and the closer we get to the tipping point that many experts are warning about, that after a certain threshold of deforestation, the jungle can't self-restore and may fall into this pattern of like turning into a savanna that's going to affect everybody. And so, the Amazon cities aren't just like kind of curious exotic cities by rivers surrounded by jungle out there. It's something that has a direct bearing on wherever we are, in Bogotá or São Paulo or London. So that's the first misconception.

And then the second one, I think is somewhat related, which is that I do think that the conservation imaginary, if not in its actual day to day, but the conservationist imaginary continues to be of a kind of virgin territory or of a very romanticised relationship with nature. And I think that this idea as certain critical geographers like Neil Smith have warned, is very depoliticising and ahistorical. And I think, like throughout this conversation, we've talked about just how important understanding those histories and those politics are. And so, for example, I was living in a municipality, as I mentioned, five hours downstream from the nearest town in Cartagena del Chairá, which was a territory that was very central for the FARC. And when peace agreements were signed, I don't think we understood just what an important role the FARC had played in stopping deforestation or containing it, or regulating it. And so when peace was signed in 2016 and the FARC retreated from these territories, deforestation just skyrocketed. And I went to some of the like frontiers of the deforestation, and it was, like, completely heartbreaking. But also, what was equally frustrating is that the NGOs, who were like fuelling huge, multimillion projects to stop deforestation didn't seem very interested in the political and economic relationships that were driving them. And so often there'd be like, this idea that the people who were cutting the trees down were just like, bad individual Colonos, but actually, they were like, it's very expensive to cut down a hectare of the Amazon jungle, and there were clear money flows that it seemed like the multi lot, like national NGO community was just like utterly uninterested in and I think that's a really dangerous tendency.

Just on-- last point, I think there's a very interesting process of like, conservatism among areas where cattle ranching is very strong or agricultural business, like soybean farming. And my colleague, Giselle Mendoza, studies new soybean cities in the Brazilian agrarian frontier, and both in the case of Colombia, these cattle ranching regions, but especially the cities of these cattle ranching regions were the ones, for example, who voted most for right-wing candidates, or who were decisive in voting against the 2016 Peace Plebiscite, which really weakened the later implementation of the peace agreements. Or in the case of Brazil, these frontier cities have been very strong, like deep strongholds of Bolsonarismo. And so when we treat the Amazon as an apolitical region, it really comes back to bite us because these are often the forces that are most actively undermining conservation efforts, never mind like efforts to build a more progressive and like fair political system,

Caitlin Morrissey 

What is it that the world should know about Amazon cities, but it doesn't currently? And what are the benefits of telling that, and what the risks of not telling that? Obviously, you've discussed some of that so far, but what else would you add?

Isabel Peñaranda Currie 

If we think of the Amazon as a region that is separate, we are actively undermining the grounds for our solidarity, and our ability to actually free some of these processes that are most destructive to everybody on the planet, wherever we are. And then the other is that, like, it's very important to understand the history and politics of the region and not to treat it as something that's kind of like outside of these dynamics.