Two Colombian companies have been removing cows from villages bordering or within the Nukak Makú Indigenous reserve in Guaviare, an Amazonian area that has been recently deforested.
Upon analyzing mobilization records, we discovered that two food trading and processing companies, Supermercados Zapatoca and Cialta SAS, had moved cows from properties adjacent to the Nukak Makú reserve, which is part of the national natural reserve of the same name.
The cattle from these companies were sent from farms in four villages of the reserve: Caño Blanco III, Caño Makú, Caño Mosco, and Manglares. These villages have had a high rate of deforestation.
The case of Zapatoca is particular because in the mobilization guides it appears as Municipality Zapatoca, but by its identification number it can be found that it is a surtifruver chain with 40 years of existence, 16 points of sale around Bogotá and Cundinamarca, which in 2021 had sales of $466.807 million, with an increase of 6.8%, compared to 2020, when they totaled $437.017 million, according to a report from the digital newspaper Halcones y Palomas.
In the case of Cialta, it sent 454 cattle, mostly bulls (396) between 1 and 3 years old, from farms in the villages of Brisas, Caño Blanco III, El Morro, and San Francisco, which are along the cattle trail, all destined for its processing plant in Villavicencio, from where it is dispatched to the entire country.
Cialta is a company headquartered in Bogotá, distributing carcass and packaged meat in several cities of the country, and its shareholders own a chain of restaurants.
The presence and mobility of cows in these villages coincide with land cover changes and recent deforestation in some of these villages that share territories with the Nukak reserve.
