‘Cocaine, gold and meat’: how Colombia’s Amazon became big business for crime networks

Armed groups have moved in to the space left by the Farc after the civil war, cutting down rainforest to control land and build thousands of kilometres of smuggling routes

High above the Colombian Amazon, Rodrigo Botero peers out of a small aircraft as the rainforest canopy unfolds below – an endless sea of green interrupted by stark, widening patches of brown. As director of the Foundation for Conservation and Sustainable Development (FCDS), he has spent years mapping the transformation of this fragile landscape from the air.

His team has logged more than 150 overflights, covering 30,000 miles (50,000km) to track deforestation advancing along the roads, illicit crops and the shifting frontiers of human settlement. “We now have the highest road density in the entire Amazon,” says Botero.