PUERTO ASIS, Colombia (AP) — Jani Silva sits inside the wooden house she built on the banks of Colombia’s Putumayo River — a home she hasn't slept in for more than eight years.
The longtime environmental activist has been threatened for work that includes protecting part of the Amazon from oil and mining exploitation. She describes a tense escape one night through a back window after community members tipped her that armed men were outside.
“Since leaving
because of the threats, I’m afraid ... it’s not safe to live here,” she told The Associated Press. She only comes now for brief daytime visits when accompanied by others. “The two times I’ve tried to come back and stay, I’ve had to run away.”
Activists like Silva face steep risks in Colombia, the deadliest country in the world for people protecting land and forests. Global Witness, an international watchdog monitoring attacks on activists, recorded 48 killings in Colombia in 2024, nearly a third of all cases worldwide.
Colombia says it protects activists through its National Protection Unit, which provides bodyguards and other security measures. Officials also point to recent court rulings recognizing the rights of nature and stronger environmental oversight as signs of progress.
Silva, 63, now lives under guard in Puerto Asis, a river town near the Ecuador border. She has had four full-time bodyguards for 12 years provided by the National Protection Unit. Yet the threats have not pushed her from her role at ADISPA, the farming association that manages the Amazon Pearl reserve she previously lived on and has worked to protect.
“I have a calling to serve,” Silva said. “I feel like I am needed … there is still so much to do.”
Colombia's ministries of Interior, National Defense and Environment did not respond to requests for comment.
About 15,000 people nationwide receive protection from the NPU, the Interior Ministry said in a 2024 report. They include environmental and human rights defenders, journalists, local officials, union leaders and others facing threats, though watchdog groups say protections often fall short in rural conflict zones.
The Amazon Pearl is home to roughly 800 families who have spent decades trying to keep out oil drilling, deforestation, illicit crops and the armed groups that enforce them. Silva describes the community-run reserve, about 30 minutes by boat down the Putumayo from Puerto Asis, as “a beautiful land … almost blessed, for its biodiversity, forests and rivers.”
The preserve's 227 square kilometers (87 square miles) host reforestation projects, programs to protect wetlands and forest threatened by oil exploration and efforts to promote agroecology. The farming association has community beekeeping projects to support pollination and generate income, organizes community patrols, supports small sustainable farming and has carried out major restoration, including cultivating more than 120,000 native seedlings to rebuild degraded riverbanks and forest corridors.
Silva has been a main voice challenging oil operations inside the reserve. As president of ADISPA, she documented spills, deforestation and road-building tied to Bogota-based oil company GeoPark's Platanillo block and pushed environmental regulators to investigate.
Advocates say those complaints, along with ADISPA’s efforts to keep new drilling and mining out, have angered armed groups that profit from mining and oil activity in the region.
GeoPark said it complies with Colombian environmental and human-rights regulations and has not received environmental sanctions since operations began in 2009.
The company maintains formal dialogue with local communities, including Silva, and “categorically rejects” threats or links to armed groups and its activities require environmental licenses and undergo regular inspections, GeoPark said in a written statement to the AP.
Rubén Pastrana, 32, runs one of the Pearl’s beekeeping projects in the riverbank community of San Salvador, where ADISPA works with children using native stingless bees to teach biodiversity and forest conservation.
“They’re very gentle,” he said of the bees, and their calm nature lets children learn without fear.
More than 600 families now take part in conservation and agroecology projects, many launched through community initiative.
“The first project was started on our own initiative,” Silva said. “We started setting up nurseries at our homes … and reforesting the riverbank.”
Women exchanged native seeds and organized replanting drives, and the community agreed to temporary hunting bans after seeing pregnant armadillos killed — a move Silva said allowed wildlife to recover. Families now map their plots to balance production with conservation.
Armed groups known locally as Comandos de la Frontera, or Border Commandos, operate throughout this stretch of Putumayo, controlling territory, river traffic and parts of the local economy.
The Commandos emerged after Colombia’s 2016 peace accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the Marxist guerrilla army whose demobilization ended a half-century conflict but left power vacuums across the Amazon and Pacific regions. In places like Putumayo, those gaps were quickly filled by FARC dissidents, former paramilitaries and other criminal networks.
The Commandos enforce control through extortion, illegal taxation and by regulating, or profiting from, coca cultivation, clandestine mining and key river routes. Residents say the group forces some communities to perform unpaid labor or face fines, further eroding livelihoods in an area where most families rely on tending their farms.
The AP saw illegal coca growing near the beekeeping project via drone imagery.
Human Rights Watch on Friday said armed groups in Putumayo have tightened their control over daily life and committed serious abuses against civilians including forced displacement, restricting movement and targeting local leaders.
Andrew Miller, head of advocacy at the U.S.-based advocacy group Amazon Watch, said Colombian authorities must go beyond providing bodyguards and prosecute those behind threats and attacks on defenders.
Pastrana, from the beekeeping project, said Silva’s long-term vision has nurtured new leaders and guided young people, helping them develop the grounding to resist recruitment by armed groups.
Silva's daughter, Anggie Miramar Silva, is part of ADISPA’s technical team. The 27-year-old grew up inside the reserve’s community process and watched her mother move constantly between meetings, workshops and patrols, pushing others to defend the land.
She admires that resolve, even as she lives with the same fear that trails her mother. While people often suggest she might one day take her mother’s place, she is not convinced.
“My mother’s work is extremely hard," Miramar said. “I don’t know if I would be willing to sacrifice everything she has.”
Jani Silva knows the risks. But stopping doesn't feel like an option.
“We have to continue defending the future," she said, "and we need more and more people to join this cause.”
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