“The Guaviare roads resemble a fish skeleton”

A city dweller, who over a weekend travels the roads of the country to a hotel or a farm to rest, has little idea of the relationship between roads and deforestation. Perhaps he may think that one has nothing to do with the other. However, in Colombia, road construction has gone hand in hand with deforestation and a long process of landscape transformation, driven by colonization.

Decades or centuries ago, the vast fields of crops or cattle and the miles and miles of fences that a traveler now sees when going down a road were occupied by forests and animals and were populated by indigenous cultures. Arguably, the relationship between deforestation and the opening of roads is historic.

A part of Colombians does not measure this relationship, maybe because they were born in places and in times where roads and fields have been part of the landscape for many decades, but it continues and can be observed in different territories of the country. Among them are the Amazonian foothills. There, the colonization that has accelerated for 70 years has made it clear that the arrival of peasants and settlers, the founding of municipalities and hamlets, the expansion of the agricultural frontier and, of course, deforestation, all relate to the opening of roads.