What the U.S. Left Behind in Colombia’s Conflict Zones

Guaviare is a remote department in the Colombian Amazon that historically has been dominated by armed conflict and coca cultivation. In that setting, a USAID initiative had success in turning that tide by offering former combatants and farmers incentives to trade illegal crops and logging for sustainable ecotourism.

This shift required local communities to take a significant risk by trusting an American agency in a highly volatile territory. For the U.S. government, the program was part of a broader strategy testing whether transitioning conflict-affected communities toward legal, environmentally sustainable livelihoods could help stabilize territory and displace illicit economic activity.

But success was not permanent. In early 2025, a sudden U.S. funding freeze halted the project mid-implementation, leaving tourism infrastructure unfinished and local agreements disrupted. As a former USAID project lead in Colombia noted: “We were making very sensitive agreements with them to take their coca out… and we just left.”

Deprived of USAID transitional support and facing pressure from armed actors, some farmers are already reverting to coca production and logging. As one community member told the interviewee: “We actually thought cooperation was coming in… Now we know it’s not going to happen with anyone.”

What happened in Guaviare illustrates a broader pattern: USAID’s environmental portfolio was never just a niche development function. In many places it also served as a security infrastructure which provided ground-level presence, intelligence, and a deterrent where other diplomatic personnel could not safely operate.

A new report, Beyond the Funding Gap: A Global Assessment of the Loss of USAID’s Climate and Environment Programming, provides the first systematic, empirical accounting of the direct consequences of terminating USAID’s environmental and climate portfolio in Guaviare and elsewhere. It is grounded in 72 semi-structured interviews with 150 key informants across five focus countries (Bangladesh, Colombia, Kenya, Peru, and Vietnam), as well as a 175-respondent global survey and a systematic scan of real-time media reporting.  The report’s direct access to practitioners, host-government officials, and former U.S. agency staff (many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity due to political sensitivities) offers a collective account of a core reality in Colombia and beyond: in fragile and conflict-affected settings, the environment, governance, and local and regional security are functionally inseparable.

The High Price of Leaving

The story that the new report tells about Colombia illustrates a key point: the sudden termination of U.S. funding created a physical security vacuum that directly facilitated the expansion of illicit economies.

Environmental and sustainable development programs run by USAID often were an effective way for the U.S. government to maintain a presence in volatile territories beyond the reach of other actors. As a former agency specialist in Colombia put it, these programs “reach[ed] the very heart of Colombia,” operating in conflict zones where neither the national military nor the police could safely go.

USAID ran a dozen concurrent programs in Bajo Cauca — a gold-mining and coca hub contested by the National Liberation Army (ELN). Local communities valued the legal economic alternatives enough to pressure armed groups into tolerating the agency’s presence. Indeed, the visible U.S. “flag” in the town itself functioned as a “layer of restraint,” curbing the level of violence armed actors were willing to use against local populations.

When the programs ended, that restraint vanished. Armed groups began operating “more blatantly.” Local leaders who had signed crop-substitution agreements now face retaliation specifically because of their past association with a US agency. Legitimate capital also followed USAID’s desertion. Private and foreign mining companies that had co-invested alongside the agency began pulling back, unwilling to bear the region’s security risk without “USAID in the middle” to de-risk it.

The landscape itself spoke to the negative effects. Colombia’s national deforestation surged 43% in 2024—a trend already underway before the funding freeze, driven by coca expansion, land-grabbing, and illegal road construction. But interviewees describe USAID’s abrupt exit as removing a critical countervailing force working against it. The loss of USAID programs compounded and accelerated a crisis already in motion.

These effects are visible elsewhere as well. In Peru’s Ucayali region, a technical partner reported that illegal landing strips for gold and drug trafficking more than doubled, from 62 to 141, after the withdrawal. (The report flags this correlation as meriting further investigation). While USAID was never a law enforcement agency,  its local presence, data systems, and community-level programs had been actively suppressing the crimes now expanding into the space it left.

The same security function that operated locally in places like Bajo Cauca also operated at scale, enabling a regional architecture that let governments track and prosecute organized environmental crime across the Amazon. These networks rarely operate in isolation: wildlife and resource trafficking routes frequently overlap with those used for drugs, arms, and human trafficking.

A six-nation project funded by USAID with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) allowed prosecutors and financial intelligence units across South America to collaboratively track the financial networks driving illegal gold, coca, and wildlife trafficking. According to a former USAID staff member, this regional intelligence exchange collapsed quickly after its resources were withdrawn, stalling joint cases on illegal mining and the shark fin trade.

A Vacuum for Others to Fill

Colombia shows how the loss of a single U.S. program set off an economic chain reaction. As Western capital retreated from the country’s most contested territory, Chinese state-aligned firms are moving in to claim it.

USAID had used “first-loss” capital to absorb the risk that kept Western investors out of volatile zones like Caquetá and Catatumbo. One mechanism, Obras por Impuestos (Taxes for Works), let private companies redirect tax payments into conservation in Catatumbo. It worked because USAID served as the neutral broker private firms trusted enough to participate, given these companies’ limited confidence in the government. When that broker disappeared, corporate agricultural buyers who could source high-quality coffee safely from more stable regions had little reason to stay in higher-risk territory.

As Western investments withdrew, the credible risk of Chinese state-backed mining conglomerates moving into the vacancy grew. To extract resources in contested rural corridors, mining companies require local community acceptance — a “social license to operate”—to protect their physical infrastructure and maintain operations. With USAID’s sustainable agriculture and conservation programs gone, local communities were left resource-strapped and without support.

One former USAID local expert reported that executives from major Chinese mining firms in Colombia are already planning to expand operations and fund community projects to secure their own social license in these corridors. By capturing these ready-made community relationships, Chinese firms can anchor a long-term geopolitical foothold in strategic resource corridors.

The pattern isn’t unique to Colombia. In northwestern Vietnam, the loss of USAID-backed community forest governance has left a region holding one of the world’s largest reserves of rare earth elements — critical to U.S. efforts to reduce dependence on Chinese-controlled supply chains — vulnerable to unchecked, Chinese-influenced illegal mining. More broadly, the report found that, in similar cases, the remaining Western donors lack the unified weight to counter the trend on their own. One bilateral donor official stated that other donors are simply “not able to talk with one voice” to press host governments on environmental compliance.

Beyond the Funding Gap reveals that USAID’s environmental programming rarely served a single purpose. In Colombia, the same initiatives that protected forests also deterred armed groups, sustained the cross-border networks that tracked organized crime, and kept strategic territory out of the hands of authoritarian competitors. These connections are not always immediately visible but are foundational to American interests.

Helping partner countries secure their natural resources and governance structures against bad-faith actors makes the United States more secure. Yet the disruption of transnational crime, and the protection of resources such as the Amazon are essential for the rest of the world as well.

This piece draws on Beyond the Funding Gap, a report co-authored by Monica Bansal and Hadas Kushnir. Explore the complete five-country findings and the strategic path forward for U.S. foreign assistance in the full report.