A recently discovered 12,500-year-old rock frieze in Guaviare depicts ice-age beasts and offers significant cultural tourism potential. Guaviare remained inaccessible to many Colombians for decades due to coca cultivation and guerrilla warfare until a 2016 peace agreement. A USAID-funded Destination Nature program received a $39 million, five-year grant in 2022 to promote ecotourism and convince former coca farmers and ex-combatants to conserve wildlife and pursue sustainable livelihoods. The program was operating at full speed when the Trump Administration abruptly terminated its funding in February. Similar sudden U.S. grant terminations affected projects from the Colombian Amazon to Malawi's Liwonde National Park, leaving local development initiatives without promised support.
Four miles by foot into the Colombian Amazon, in war-torn Guaviare, a stunning prehistoric rock painting known as the "Sistine Chapel of the Ancients" stretches across a full eight miles of cliff face. The frieze, estimated to be about 12,500 years old, depicts massive ice age beasts thought to have once roamed South America, including mastodons and ground sloths the size of a car.
"My parents wouldn't have let me go," said Beatriz Mogollón, a Bogotá native who ran a United States-funded ecotourism project in Guaviare until March. Before the signing of the peace agreement between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) in 2016, after half a century of civil war, "you just wouldn't go into those areas. And there wasn't much of a tourism offering there then, either."
Mogollón's Destination Nature project, which was funded by a $39 million, 5-year grant from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in 2022, has been working to change that, in large part by convincing local farmers and ranchers-including former coca farmers and armed guerillas-that conserving wildlife and working in ecotourism could be a viable alternative to more destructive activities. And the project was "at full speed and implementation" when the Trump Administration suddenly terminated its funding on February
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