UN biodiversity summit opens under guerrilla threat in Colombia

The largest conference on environmental preservation in the world began ceremoniously in Cali, Colombia, on Sunday. The city is on high alert due to threats from a guerilla organisation.

Attending the event is Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who stated on Friday that he was “nervous” about security. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres will address the attendees via video.

With the assistance of UN and US security forces, thousands of Colombian police and military will guard the high-stakes UN biodiversity gathering when it formally opens on Monday.

On Sunday, armed police were spotted policing the airport, conference centre, and city centre.

The 16th Conference of the Parties (COP16) to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is scheduled to take place from November 1 to November 1. Approximately 12,000 delegates from nearly 200 countries are expected to attend, including 140 government ministers and a dozen heads of state.

With the theme “Peace with Nature,” its pressing duty is to devise funding and monitoring systems that will enable the achievement of 23 UN targets set in 2022 to stop and reverse the extinction of species by 2030.

However, the conference is clouded by the Colombian rebel group EMC, which is a breakaway faction of the FARC guerrilla army that split in 2017 and has warned that the summit “will fail.”

The threat came after EMC fighters were targeted in a military raid in the southwest Cauca department, where the group is accused of engaging in drug trafficking and illegal mining.

The closest major city to the EMC-controlled area, where the group has been involved in difficult peace talks with the government, is Cali.
Petro stated on Friday: “We are all anxious and praying that nothing untoward occurs. Some others want the gathering to be a display of bloodshed and fatalities.”

But Alejandro Eder, the mayor of Cali, maintained, “We have been working since February to preserve the city of Cali… The whole perimeter of the city is guarded by detachments of the Colombian Armed Forces in addition to about 10,000 police personnel. We have air protection, protection against drones.”