COLOMBIA 2025
Imagine Colombia’s inner-city youth, born of parents displaced from war-torn regions, returning to their homelands on the Pacific Coast and seeing the rainforest for the first time. This is Elena’s plan -- to reunite Cali’s displaced children, growing up in one of Colombia’s crime-ridden cities, with the homelands their parents were forced to leave only a few decades earlier. There, she hopes, they will grow a passion for the rainforest and a desire to preserve what is left of it.
Colombia is a megadiverse country, possessing one of the highest levels of biodiversity on Earth.
Nevertheless, since the signing of the peace agreement between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the government in 2016, deforestation rates in the country have quickly escalated. In 2017, deforestation rates reached 219,552 hectares -- 2.6% of the world's deforestation. This was due to the FARC leaving the woodlands they had controlled. In 2021, deforestation rates increased again as groups that rejected the peace agreement became involved in illegal activities.
Today, mining, logging, coca farming, and cattle ranching pollute rivers and destroy natural habitats and have led to violence against indigenous communities.
Elena Hinestroza grew up in Timbiqui, on the edge of Colombia’s Choco rainforest. To escape an area devastated by war and violence, she migrated to the metropolitan area of Cali. In 2008, Elena and her children were part of the more than 400,000 displaced people in Colombia that year.
In Cali, Elena found the lack of traditional values left children vulnerable to gangs and drug cartels. With this in mind, she began a foundation, going door-to-door, talking to mothers, typically displaced from war torn areas, so that she could teach the children the culture of the pacific coast, such as the music, nature, and traditional plants and medicine.
Presently, Elena is training a new generation of environmental stewards, hoping these young people who have never known life outside the inner-city and have never visited their homelands in the country's Afro-Colombian Pacific region -- only a few hours away -- will desire to reconnect to their roots and fight to save what is left of their natural heritage.
Her goal is to bring the kids on a journey to the Pacific Coast to see the rainforest for the first time. If she can grow a passion for nature in these young people, she hopes that they might return to their homelands one day and act as conservators of the natural area, helping to protect their native land and natural resources from the ever-encroaching mining and coca industries.
As Elena teaches children about the ecosystem of the Choco Rainforest, viewers will also be brought on this journey, observing natural habitats that have been hidden from the public for much of the modern era.
Elena Hinestroza
