President-elect de la Espriella wants to abolish the self-governance entities of communities in the Amazon and Chocó. Alarm over killings and kidnappings.
The first possible, likely impact on the environment and rights in Colombia following the election of the new president-elect, the ultra-liberal Abelardo de la Espriella, is that the South American country risks entering a new era of colonisation of the Amazonian forests in the south-east, and of the Chocó, the Pacific coastal strip. Abelardo de la Espriella has indeed announced his intention to abolish the Entidades territoriales indígenas (Eti), the self-governance entities that recognise indigenous communities' control over their ancestral territories. A decision that, according to environmental and human rights organisations, concerns not only the country's institutional architecture, but the very survival of some of the planet's most important tropical forests and the indigenous communities that protect them.
The Eti are enshrined in Colombia's 1991 Constitution, which recognises the State as multi-ethnic and multicultural and grants indigenous peoples the right to administer legally constituted or ancestrally occupied territories. For over thirty years, however, this constitutional mandate remained a dead letter: the 2011 organic law on territorial organisation never regulated the framework, leaving a regulatory vacuum.
Between 2024 and 2025, the government of Gustavo Petro attempted to fill that gap, launching the formalisation of the Eti starting from the Amazon. Eight large indigenous territories in the regions of Guainía, Vaupés and Amazonas were transformed into Eti by decree, with other processes still under way: in total, the entities already formalised or in the process of formalisation cover approximately 17 million hectares, 15 per cent of the national territory. This was not a top-down operation, but the result of years of work with indigenous councils, border demarcation, censuses and intercultural agreements with the State.
The newly elected president takes the opposite view: for him, the Eti are "federal territories" removed from central State authority, where national law would not apply and public funds would end up in the hands of allies of the outgoing government. In the name of the principle of "one law for all", De la Espriella has pledged to repeal the decrees that established them, bringing them back under full state jurisdiction, without, however, explaining how he intends to guarantee the indigenous self-governance provided for by the Constitution.
The starkest warning has come from the organisation Guardiani della Foresta, which denounces how the new government's rhetoric — having branded the Eti an "ancestral mafia" — risks legitimising violence already taking place on the ground. The organisation reports allegations of killings, mass kidnappings of representatives of traditional authorities, and armed checkpoints that are restricting freedom of movement along roads and rivers, along with images of indigenous people killed and mutilated. Guardiani della Foresta is calling for these allegations to be urgently verified by the relevant national and international bodies, and is appealing to the United Nations and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to monitor the situation.
If the decrees underpinning the Eti are revoked, indigenous communities would lose the formal tools to manage their own budgets — currently funded by public money for healthcare, education and water — and to participate in decisions on land use, infrastructure and extractive concessions. In environmental terms, this translates into greater exposure to mining, energy and agro-industrial projects decided at central level, often without community consent: a direct driver of deforestation and biodiversity loss.
On the human rights front, dismantling the Eti would call into question the self-determination of indigenous peoples and the recognition of their traditional authorities, leaving them more vulnerable in the face of armed groups and illegal interests already competing for control of these lands. The battle, legal experts and indigenous organisations warn, will now move to the courts: the Colombian Constitutional Court has already ruled in favour of indigenous peoples' right to prior consultation on decisions affecting their territories, and will also have to rule on the attempt to undo what has been built so far. As Guardiani della Foresta reminds us, "defending the forests means defending the peoples who have protected them for millennia."
