With the aim of promoting the protection of the Amazon from the legislative work of the House of Representatives, during the month of January the IRI Colombia team held a series of bilateral meetings with the candidates for the department of Caquetá to this corporation, Leonardo Ramón Ramírez and Angie Carolina Quimbayo (Radical Change Coalition-Mira); Juan Pablo Duque and Yenny Adalid Chilatra Rivera, (Caquetá Coalition); Edilberto Molina Hernández (Democratic Center); and Marlody Quiñonez (Special Victims’ District).
“We seek to share strategic information and open a channel of early dialogue on one of the most decisive issues for the future of the country: the Amazon,” said Blanca Lucía Echeverry.
During the meetings, the director of IRI Colombia referred to the essential role that parliamentarians can play in protecting the Amazon and controlling deforestation, presented the candidates with a brief overview of the socio-environmental situation in the region and highlighted the main impacts of deforestation on water security. climate, food, territorial and social of the country.
With these early dialogues, IRI Colombia seeks to provide candidates with rigorous, strategic, and evidence-based information that will be useful for their eventual legislative work and to offer the Initiative’s experience in advocacy processes, interreligious dialogue, and technical accompaniment to decision-makers, with the aim of strengthening the capacity of House representatives to make informed decisions on the challenges of climate action. inviting them to integrate an ethical and plural vision for the protection and restoration of the Amazon biome.
Likewise, Echeverry invited the candidates to form the “Parliamentary Alliance for the Amazon 2026-2030 and presented the possibility of creating a Permanent Table of National Articulation for the Amazon, which connects Congress, science, indigenous peoples, territorial communities and strategic actors, with the purpose of improving the quality of legislative deliberation, to reduce the gap between the rules and the territory, and to strengthen political control with solid and contextualized information.
