In August 2023, Mongabay Latam published a joint investigation with the Colombian independent media outlet, Rutas del Conflicto, on illegal land acquisitions and deforestation in Colombia’s Llanos Orientales. The reporting revealed how Mennonite communities that arrived in the Meta department in 2014 had expanded rapidly, acquiring close to 38,000 hectares (almost 94,000 acres) of land in Puerto Gaitán for their colonies called Australia, Liviney, and Las Piedras.
Much of this land overlaps with the ancestral Sikuani Indigenous communities of Barrulia, Iwitsulibu, and Tsabilonia – which later became a dangerous territory, hotly contested by drug traffickers and paramilitaries – from the 1980s to the early 2000s, when Mennonite people began arriving. By late 2022, the reporting team began looking into why the Attorney General’s Office was investigating at least 10 men from these religious communities for environmental crimes and other proceedings before Cormacarena, the region’s environmental authority.
Impact
Less than a month after publication, the reporting team’s investigation had already made its way into Colombia’s political sphere, when a debate in the Congress addressed the illegal occupation of Indigenous Sikuani territory by Mennonite colonies. Senator Wilson Arias presented evidence to representatives from the Ministry of Agriculture, the National Land Agency (ANT), and the Superintendence of Notaries and Registry, largely drawn from the reporters’ findings.
