The Private Carbon Project in the Colombian Pacific That Overlaps With Afro-Colombian Lands

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Tángara Forest S.A.S. is the developer of a carbon project in the mangroves and tropical forests of Colombia’s Pacific that has already sold one million credits. The company says it is private land, but official maps show that it includes land belonging to an Afro-Colombian community council and may also overlap with the lands of two others. The conflict between the company and local communities who say they have not benefited from the project has already reached the hands of a land restitution judge.

From the tropical rainforests of the Amazon and Pacific to the mangroves of the Caribbean, the savannas of the Orinoquia and the páramos (alpine tundras) of the Andes, the vast majority of these so-called Redd+ projects revolve around indigenous and Afro-descendant communities. These ethnic peoples are attractive as partners for such projects because they have both collective ownership and effective governance of large forested territories that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. For this reason, they can sell these environmental results in the market to companies seeking to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, seeking to become more ‘carbon neutral’ or to reduce the amount of carbon tax they must pay to the Colombian State for their consumption of gasoline and other fossil fuels.

One of the places where these initiatives are most concentrated is the biogeographic Chocó, a region of Colombia mostly on the shores of the Pacific Ocean and covered by lush tropical rainforests and mangroves that extend from the Gulf of Urabá to the border with Ecuador. It is one of the world’s greatest biodiversity hotspots and home to thousands of endemic species. 

There are at least 32 projects of this type in different phases of approval, according to an analysis made by the Opaque Carbon journalistic alliance after examining the platforms of the four certification standards operating in the country. Of the 19 initiatives that have been certified and can now sell credits in the market, 18 are operated by a total of 55 Afro-Colombian community councils and eight Embera indigenous reservations.

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Only one of them does not involve ethnic communities: the Tángara project, which, unlike the others, is being carried out in two private forest and mangrove estates located 40 minutes by boat south of the port of Buenaventura, in the department of Valle del Cauca. As of December 2024, it had sold one million credits in the voluntary carbon market.

But the background to these lands is more complex. The properties that host the successful project and that its proponent companies defend as private coincide in part with the lands that two Afro-Colombian community councils received from the State almost three decades ago. The inhabitants of that area discovered the existence of the Tángara project five years ago, during a meeting with another carbon company with which they were considering designing a similar project to sell credits.

The official maps of the Colombian State seem to agree with the locals. Although they’re confusing, given that different polygons for the same community councils rest in two different national government agencies in charge of land management, both show an overlap between the Afro-Colombian lands and those that Tángara defends as its own. In the National Land Agency polygons, the project overlaps with the community councils of Río Mayorquín y Papayal on the one hand and Río Raposo on the other, while in those managed by the Agustín Codazzi Geographic Institute (IGAC) there is only an overlap with the former. A land deed study commissioned by these two communities concluded that there is an overlap with these two community councils, as well as with a third one called Bracitos y Amazonas. In fact, the leaders of Mayorquín and Raposo say they only learned of the existence of the Tángara project when it was already approved and maintain that they are not included in any way within the initiative nor that they have received its economic benefits, despite the overlapping of the properties and what, at the very least, appears to be a land conflict.

Meanwhile, the developer Tángara Forest S.A.S. Zomac insists that legal documents prove its ownership of these lands and that the chain of private possession dates back to the 19th century. It argues that multiple public entities have indicated so, including the Ministry of the Interior, which certified, according to the company’s interpretation, that there was no presence of ethnic communities on those lands, despite the fact that the official polygons of the community councils held by the state entities responsible for land and cadastre issues clearly show the existence of an overlap. “We are totally sure and certain that we have developed the project on private land and, as such, that it is a private project,” says project manager Carlos Eduardo Domínguez.

Both the company and the communities acknowledge, however, the existence of a land conflict that has already reached the courts, given that no previous space for dialogue has allowed it to be resolved. That solution will probably be handed down by judges specialized in land restitution who will have to rule on two cases already referred to them by the government’s Land Restitution Unit on behalf of the two community councils, due to dispossession and displacement at the hands of guerrillas in the armed conflict. The reason is that, although the current carbon conflict is not part of that earlier wave of violence, land titling is a central part of the legal process.

A central point of the conflict is that the Tángara project documents prepared by Tángara Forest S.A.S. Zomac and the company Biofix Consultoría S.A.S. BIC, which the former hired to structure the project, state that the Ministry of the Interior certified that there are no Afro-Colombian communities in the area where the environmental initiative is being carried out. However, the document they cite as support does not actually state this: it only indicates that in the Ministry’s view, it does not require free, prior and informed consultation because it is an environmental initiative, but it does not determine whether there are ethnic communities there.

The two companies that audited the project, Icontec and Aenor, detected the presence of Afro-Colombian communities there, but gave credibility to the developers’ explanation that they are private lands. Neither they nor the certifier BioCarbon Registry responded whether they checked the area of the initiative against official maps of ethnic collective territories.

These are some of the findings of Rutas del Conflicto and the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (CLIP) as part of the Opaque Carbon journalistic alliance. This project, which is coordinated by CLIP and brings together 14 media from eight countries, seeks to understand how the carbon market is working in Latin America, with support from the Heinrich Böll Foundation and the Pulitzer Center.

The Tángara project and its proponents

Sailing south from Buenaventura, Colombia’s largest city on the Pacific Ocean, the landscape changes suddenly. After the boat leaves the open bay where the port is located, flanked by rocky cliffs crowned by green forest, it enters a labyrinth of brackish canals and freshwater rivers that extends for hundreds of kilometers. Its banks are lined by mangrove trees up to thirty meters high, whose leafy branches are home to pelicans and cormorants and whose roots form pronounced arches over the estuary.

Dozens of community councils follow one another, their Afro-Colombian inhabitants living in villages of wooden stilt houses, whose names take those of the streams that flow into the mangroves and then into the sea. Their life, as well as that of the flora and fauna in the area, is marked by the two bodies of water that surround them: the sea and the meandering rivers through which their boats navigate, in a region with no land routes.

This is where the Tángara REDD+ Conservation Project is located, which promises to “mitigate climate change by reducing CO2 emissions by avoiding forest deforestation” and “contribute to biodiversity conservation by protecting the habitat of endangered species,” according to its project design document (PDD, in industry jargon) available on the platform of the Colombian certifier BioCarbon Registry, which approved it. The project seeks to achieve this through the sale of carbon credits generated by “the conservation of 14,200 hectares” of mangroves and tropical rainforest inland over 30 years, in two contiguous properties that another of its documents describes as “private.”

Its main proponent is Tángara Forest S.A.S. Zomac, although the project documents list a handful of other companies and entities as also involved in the initiative. The company Biofix Consultoría S.A.S. BIC appears in the documents as the project’s structurer and trader of its credits, and four others — the Cali Zoo, the Cali Botanical Garden, the hotel trade association Cotelco and the regional environmental public authority CVC — are listed as “institutional allies.” An organizational chart in the PDD corroborates this. 

Tángara Forest S.A.S. Zomac is, according to the project documents, the “proponent,” “owner of the land” and “responsible for the implementation of activities to avoid deforestation.”

Its name and logo allude, like the title of its carbon initiative, to a family of small, highly colorful birds found only in the Americas and present in most of Colombia. It was so named because, according to the PDD prepared by Biofix for Tángara Forest, such tanagers “are observed in the project area” and “are on the IUCN Red List [of globally threatened animals] and listed as an endangered species.” The documents do not explain, however, which tanager present in the project area faces that level of risk. In fact, the two that it cites as threatened or endangered do not appear as reported in Colombia, with one living between Mexico and Guatemala, and the other between Peru and Bolivia.

Tángara Forest, the company, was incorporated in September 2018 in Buenaventura, with the purpose of carrying out “activities related to the issuance, validation, verification, registration, and marketing of carbon credits and the structuring of Redd and Redd+ projects.” Its corporate documents repeat the names of three persons who have appeared as its legal representatives and shareholders at different times over the last six years: Óscar Javier Peláez González, Óscar Ricardo Peláez Herrera and Andrés Jordán Herrera.

As of June 2023, its shareholders were Negocios Tramontana S.A.S. (with 51% of the shares), Óscar Ricardo Peláez Herrera (with 24.5%) and Andrés Jordán Herrera (with 24.5%), according to a chamber of commerce document. In turn, Negocios Tramontana —which was called Peláez Herrera S. en C. until September 2022 — had Peláez González as general manager and Peláez Herrera and Jordán Herrera as alternate managers as of January 2025. As of the date of publication, in Tángara Forest the legal representative was Peláez González — who had already been listed as holder of 51% of its shares between 2018 and 2019 —with Peláez Herrera and Jordán Herrera as his alternates.

All three appear in several of the Tángara project documents. Óscar Javier Peláez, a lawyer and criminologist who ran in 2016 for the position of Inspector General of the Nation and who in recent years has dedicated himself to art, appears as “project proponent” and “holder of the land” in a monitoring report made by the developers of the 2021 initiative, as well as manager of Tángara Forest and contact person in an audit report made by Icontec in 2018. Andrés Jordán, a business administrator who worked for a decade in the pharmaceutical industry, is listed as Tángara Forest’s general manager and contact person in that same 2021 monitoring report. The two, plus industrial engineer Óscar Ricardo Peláez, who works as vice president of Valle del Cauca automotive company Fanalca, are listed as representatives of Tángara Forest in another report by the Spanish auditing firm Aenor from 2019.

Óscar Javier Peláez has had ties with at least two of the entities presented as institutional allies of the project in Buenaventura. He was president of the board of directors of the Cali Zoo Foundation, which — according to the PDD — has carried out activities of “release of native fauna seized in the project area,” including agoutis, armadillos, coatis, snakes and several species of birds. In fact, the PDD states that the project began on January 3, 2010, the date on which the zoo “establishes actions to strengthen the governance of the landowner’s property.” Peláez has also been a member of the board of directors of the Cali Botanical Garden, which — according to a 2018 audit report — “gives its support and endorsement to the REDD project.”

In addition to Tángara Forest, the company Biofix Consultoría S.A.S. BIC was listed as of January 2025 as the project’s holder on the certifier’s platform and has been, according to its documents, the “project structurer responsible for making the PDD and trading carbon credits”. Founded in 2018, Biofix is today one of the most visible players in the carbon market in Colombia with ten projects underway, including five in the Pacific, four in the Amazon and one in the Orinoquia. For the past two years it has also been leading two Redd+ projects in the Brazilian Amazon. One of its Colombian initiatives, Kaliawiri, was questioned by a report from Carbon Market Watch, a European NGO that monitors the carbon market, for possibly having inflated its environmental results, something that Biofix denied and described as “false”.

Its manager since February 2024 is Carolina Jarro, a biologist who over a decade was deputy director of Colombia National Natural Parks, the state agency that guards the 65 areas of the country’s national park system. Its most visible figure, however, has been its founder, deputy legal representative and until recently general manager, Ana Milena Plata Fajardo, an economist with a PhD in forest economics from the Federal University of Paraná in Brazil who worked in the green business office of the Ministry of Environment between 2016 and 2018, and most recently chaired the board of Asocarbono, the trade association that brings together carbon market players in Colombia. Plata and lawyer and current legal manager Marco González Carantón are the ultimate beneficial owners of Biofix, as sole shareholders of the company Biofix Group S.A.S., which controls it.

The Tángara project does not appear today on Biofix BIC’s web page, but it did so until at least May 2023 and was presented as “the only project being developed on private land south of the Buenaventura Bay,” as shown in screenshots taken using the Internet Wayback Machine tool. In fact, Biofix’s website celebrated that “this initiative is one of the few at a national level that incorporates in its methodology removals by blue carbon in addition to those generated by the very humid tropical forest areas.”

Biofix explained to this journalistic alliance that it had a commercial agreement with Tángara Forest from May 2018 to May 2022. “To date, there is no commercial or legal link in force between the company Biofix BIC and Tángara Forest S.A.S Zomac.” Despite this, as of January 2025, Biofix was still listed as “holder” and “participant” of the project on the platform of certifier BioCarbon.

The Tángara project reaches the market

After the Tángara project was structured by Tángara Forest with Biofix, it received the go-ahead from Colombian auditor Icontec in December 2018 and also from Spain’s Aenor in November 2019. It was then registered by Colombian certifier BioCarbon Registry (formerly known as ProClima) that same month. One day after being approved, on November 20, 2019, its first harvest of 348,000 credits was redeemed, BioCarbon’s platform confirms. Two years later, in July 2021, it had a third audit by Icontec.

As of December 2024, the Tángara project had sold 1,002,849 credits, according to BioCarbon’s transaction register.

It is not possible to know the identity of any of the purchasing companies because, since mid-2024, BioCarbon Registry removed the name of the end users of the credits from its transaction platform. Until that moment, a citizen could check who used the credits of any project certified by BioCarbon Registry in its platform, under a column termed ‘in name of,’ as seen in the transaction file of another project consulted in that platform and cited in a previous investigation by this journalistic alliance. This column appears empty today.

This journalistic alliance wrote to BioCarbon on December 1, 2024, and January 7, 2025, requesting the names of the companies that have redeemed credits from the Tángara project, but the certifier did not respond. Nor did it answer why it decided to remove from its platform the identity of the end users of the credits sold for the projects it has certified.

Consulted by this journalistic alliance, the company Tángara Forest identified three buyers: the gasoline distributors Terpel and Biomax and the hydrocarbon transportation company Cenit. 

One project, two properties and three community councils

Although no Afro-Colombian community is listed as a proponent in the Tángara project, the two properties where the Tángara Forest company is carrying out the project (one called Loma de Auca of 10,500 hectares and the other called Playa de Cuchas of 3,700 hectares) coincide in part with lands that the Colombian State granted to two Afro-Colombian communities for their collective use since the 1990s as part of one of its most important public policies of agrarian reform and protection of ethnic minorities.

The two sides tell different stories about the origin of the land.

According to the PDD of the project Tángara prepared by Biofix, the carbon rights in these lands are held by the owner, Tángara Forest, “since the property is legally protected under a fair title and held by a single person, clearing any doubts about who is the owner of the property and of the carbon credits.”

The two properties appear to have been in the hands of Óscar Javier Peláez or companies connected to him for more than three decades, according to the real estate registration records of the properties available at the Superintendence of Notaries and Registry, and in the Chamber of Commerce records of the owner companies that this journalistic alliance consulted. 

According to title and ownership certificates, current owner Tángara Forest S.A.S. Zomac acquired the Playa de Cuchas property on December 12, 2018, and the Loma de Auca property on March 8, 2019, through what it describes as a “tax receipt sale.” It bought them from its current legal representative, Óscar Javier Peláez, who, according to the same certificate, updated the boundaries and size of the properties in 2013 and changed their names to Loma de Auca and Playa de Cuchas. He had become the owner of Loma de Auca (in some documents also called Lomas de Auca) in 2009 and of Playa de Cuchas (sometimes called Playa de Chuchas) in 2010 after the commercial liquidation of another company called Sinergia.

The name of the company that transferred the properties to Pelaez by “adjudication in the liquidation of a business partnership” varies in the different documents, appearing as Sinergia Ltda in the certificate of tradition of one of the properties and Cinergia Limitada in that of the other property. Although none of these project or property documents identifies the company’s tax number, the information contained in them suggests that it is the company Sinergia Limitada, incorporated in Cali in 1995 and liquidated later. Among the shareholders of that company in October 1995 was precisely Óscar Javier Peláez, with 29% of the shares, according to Chamber of Commerce minutes.

According to the deeds, those who transferred the properties to Sinergia Ltda were four people: Diego López Zapata, Isabel Isaacs de Juri, Alicia Isaacs de Rojas and María Isaacs Revelo, who inherited them from a Rafael Isaacs who had bought them at the beginning of the 20th century and who, according to Tángara Forest’s Carlos Eduardo Domínguez, was a relative of Jorge Isaacs, who wrote María, the most renowned novel of Colombia’s first century of life. The four heirs were listed in October 1995 as shareholders of Sinergia Limitada, the company to which they transferred the property and in which Óscar Javier Peláez was also a partner. The four sellers accounted for half of the shares of the acquiring company: López Zapata held 37.5%, while María, Isabel and Alicia Isaacs each held between 4.16% and 4.18%. 

Tángara Forest acknowledged to this journalistic alliance the existence of the overlap and the land conflict in an online meeting on December 20, 2024, but stated that “we’re fully confident, according to the regulations in force in Colombia to prove ownership, that (we're) in compliance of them.”

According to project manager Carlos Eduardo Domínguez, the private origin of the two properties can be clearly traced back to at least 1881 in the case of Loma de Auca and 1884 in the case of Playa de Cuchas, the oldest document that mentions them being a succession decree of an owner named Manuela Micolta, widow of Martínez, even two decades earlier. 

In his view, the existence of multiple documents from different public institutions supports the fact that they are the rightful owners. Among them, he shows a response from the Superintendence of Notaries and Registry in December 2023 to a petition request sent by Tángara Forest to clarify the property and a request to the District Committee for the attention to the population displaced by the violence in Buenaventura to lift the protection measures on the lands. In addition, he says they have been paying property taxes for years. “You can see that we have consolidated a series of legal actions, from entities over which we have no control, that certify and fully guarantee the ownership of the land,” he says.

Regarding how part of these lands were handed over by the Colombian State to the Afro-Colombian communities, Domínguez says that “we consider that there was an irregular process in the adjudication to the councils” and that the lands at no time should have been considered as public lands. According to Tángara Forest, its legal analysis found that the Incora (Colombian Institute of Agrarian Reform, liquidated in 2003) did not consult the cadastral base or the Buenaventura registry office, something that — in the words of the project manager — “would have allowed them to establish the existence of private property in the area.” In his opinion, the fact that an announcement was not made in a medium of wide national circulation prevented the owners from filing an opposition petition. “If they had done their due diligence, they would have found that our titles are not invented. Lands such as the ones we are dealing with in this controversy would have been excluded from the adjudication,” he says.

Tángara highlights the pioneering role it played in the national carbon market. “We were one of the first credit projects in Colombia and possibly the first private one,” says Carlos Eduardo Domínguez. He explains that this type of land has very restricted uses due to its geographic location and ecological value, which is why in 2015 they thought of building a hotel on the extensive beach of the Playa de Cuchas property, which, according to the manager of the Tángara project, was even included in the development plan of the governor of the department of Valle del Cauca, Dilian Francisca Toro. But the high costs and the lack of investors, they explained, made them give up on that idea. When the 2016 tax reform of Juan Manuel Santos’s administration created the carbon tax and an incentive to pay with carbon credits, they saw the opportunity and bet on that fledgling market. “Everyone found an opportunity on land that nobody looked at before,” he says, adding that they do not rule out using the money from carbon credits to revive the ecotourism project.

Tángara Forest insists that neither during the genesis of the hotel project nor when structuring the carbon project did anyone mention an overlap. “We knew that there were community councils and some communities included [in them], but not the overlaps because the documents and maps were very clear,” says Domínguez. 

In turn, project structurer Biofix BIC responded to this journalistic alliance that it was unaware of the land dispute. In a written response on December 27, 2024, its director, Carolina Jarro, stated that “the Tángara REDD+ Project was formulated, validated, verified, certified and registered based on documents issued by public bodies that prove that the lands that comprise the project accredit private property rights, so that these lands enjoyed full private domain and other attributes of the property according to Colombian civil legislation.” (See Biofix’s complete response here).

According to Jarro, the ownership documents provided by Tángara Forest showed “the character of full dominion over the properties identified with said folios, which allowed the developer, protected by the principle of good faith and legitimate trust, to formulate the project and submit it for auditing.”

The history of the properties according to the Afro-Colombian communities

On the other hand, the leaders of the Afro-Colombian community councils of Mayorquín and Papayal and Raposo insist that the lands contained in the project were granted to them by the Colombian State in the 1990s.

In the case of Mayorquín and Papayal, it was the result of a struggle that gained strength in 1994, months after the enactment of Law 70 of 1993, which vindicated the ethnic and territorial rights of the black communities and established the process for the Colombian State to grant them collective lands, as it had been doing with the indigenous peoples since the government of Virgilio Barco in the 1980s. The communities of the Pacific coast organized themselves and in a concerted manner divided the territory by basins, as explained in a document seen by this journalistic alliance and prepared by the Land Restitution Unit, created by the Victims Law during the government of Juan Manuel Santos with the mission of returning lands taken from them to their former owners as a form of redress.

In 1994, local leaders Antonio Aragón and Eustaquio Grueso led the creation of the Mina Vieja Organization in order to defend the rights of the Afro communities and expel the firewood cutters who had settled there. Its members were descendants of slaves of African descent who arrived at the mining enclave called Mina Vieja in 1830 in search of gold and settled along the river. This organizational process led to the creation, by the state agency for agrarian reform Incora, of the Community Council of the Mayorquín-Papayal River Basin in 1998. 

At the same time that Aragón and José Nieves, another local leader interviewed by this alliance, led the constitution of the Mayorquín community council, other leaders did the same in other corners of that mangrove region: on December 27, 1999, the community council of the Raposo River was born with 20,563 hectares, on July 16, 2002, that of Bracitos and Amazonas with 4,029 hectares and, finally, on December 3, 2002, the community council of the Anchicayá River with 16,773 hectares. Incora, through the collective titling of 60,000 hectares, thus sought to assist more than 1,000 Afro-descendant families that were already suffering the effects of the expansion of the FARC guerrilla and several of whose leaders had been threatened.

On December 24, 1999, Incora handed over to the community of Mayorquín and Papayal a piece of land that until then had belonged to the Nation and was therefore suitable for an agrarian reform initiative — and which the beneficiary families had already been inhabiting for years. “Incora was asked to collectively title ‘a black community land’ on a parcel of vacant land. (….). The request for titling meets each and every one of the requirements, since the areas subject to the process are vacant, rural and riverside lands, which have been occupied and used in the historical and ancestral way by the applicant black communities with traditional production practices in accordance with their culture, their uses and customs,” reads the title deed of the Mayorquín and Papayal Community Council.

As part of the collective titling process, Incora placed an ad on Radio Buenaventura announcing the community’s request for adjudication, so that anyone who felt affected by the decision could voice their opposition. No one reported owning private property in the community council area, nor were there any reports of non-community members living in what was to become the Mayorquín and Papayal community council. In the more than two decades since the collective titling resolutions were issued there and in Raposo they have never been legally challenged.

Hence the surprise of several of their leaders when, during a meeting in the port of Buenaventura with the US-based company Terra Global Capital, which had already participated in the formulation of eight Redd+ projects in the Colombian Pacific as part of the BioRedd+ program financed by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), they received the news that a carbon credit project was already in operation in part of their territory. The communities of Mayorquín and Raposo were exploring the possibility of participating in a similar carbon project, which would include five community councils: their own two, plus those of Anchicayá, Dagua and Yurumanguí. “We can’t work with you because the map shows an overlap,” three Mayorquín leaders recount that they were told by a Terra Global employee during that meeting, the date of which they are not sure but which they believe occurred in 2018 or 2019. According to their account, she told them that the project could not go forward since another company had registered part of those lands in another initiative that had already been approved. That discovery meant that they would not be able to proceed with their project, given that it is not possible to sell the same environmental result twice in the carbon market — the risk was that they could be flagged for double counting.

The project that overlapped with their land was Tángara.

This journalistic alliance requested the polygons of the community councils to both the National Land Agency and the Agustín Codazzi Geographic Institute (Igac), the two state entities in charge of ethnic land management and mapping in the country, and compared them with the polygon of the Tángara project available on the platform of the certifier BioCarbon Registry. The resulting map confirms that there is an overlap.

Although the two polygons provided by the State differ from each other, both show that part of the lands that Tángara Forest claims as its own also belong to Afro-Colombian communities that enjoy maximum constitutional protection.

The community’s land titling study

Concerned about the possible overlap and the resulting land conflict, the community councils of Mayorquín y Papayal and Raposo hired lawyer Silvio Garcés to conduct a legal study of Tángara Forest's land titles, according to leaders of these two territories. Garcés was an ideal candidate for that task: recognized as "one of the people who best knows Law 70 of 1993," in the words of a 2017 La Silla Vacía story on the super-powerful allies of indigenous and Afro peoples in Colombia, he led the processes of community council creation and collective titling over two decades at Incora and at the Colombian Institute for Rural Development (Incoder), the agency that replaced it. Garcés was an advisor  to Vice President Francia Márquez on these issues recently.

Garcés' analysis concluded that the 14,200 hectares of Tángara "are non-existent and illegal, since they are based on an update of boundaries (...) without there being any registry record for it." In his view, the two properties of Playa de Cuchas and Loma de Auca "came to legal life as a result of two sales of improvements in vacant land belonging to the Nation with false tradition" (when an attempt is made to transfer the domain or ownership of a property, but this does not materialize because the person transferring this right does not have full domain) and, therefore, the person claiming them as his or her own "does not prove private property" in accordance with the laws in force.

According to the historical reconstruction made by this title study, the lands were owned by the Colombian state at least until Law 70 of 1993 was issued. With the creation of the community councils and the adjudication of these lands by the Colombian State, they became the black communities’ collective property and, according to the protection granted by the Constitution to these ethnic territories, they became inalienable, imprescriptible and unseizable.

The study explains that when during the collective land titling process "any right of possession, occupation or tenure that any natural or legal person had over these territories" arises, the state agency in charge — which at that time was the Incora —must examine the case. If it finds that there is indeed a private property, evidenced by an original title issued by the State that is duly registered and which has not lost its legal effectiveness, or a title granted before 1936 indicating traditions of dominion that have not been prescribed, that property would be excluded from the adjudicated territory. In case of not being able to prove it, that right would be extinguished.

According to the analysis made by Garcés, there is a quadruple overlap of the Tángara project properties. In the first place, the Loma de Auca property would overlap with the Raposo community council and to a lesser extent with Mayorquín and Papayal, while Playas de Cuchas would overlap with Raposo and with Bracitos y Amazonas in similar extensions.

"However, during the collective titling process carried out by Incora between 1999 and 2002, no natural or legal person claimed to have private property titles within the collective territories," says the study commissioned by the communities. "Neither were any oppositions presented, nor were any third party occupants reported in the territory and to date, after more than 20 years, the decisions (...) have not been challenged." This means that, in their opinion, "they are enforceable and firm and the registrations in the registration folios are in force."

The study then argues that the property titles of Tángara Forest are "nonexistent and illegal because they are based on a false tradition that was never sanitized, as stated in the respective annotations of the registration folios." In its view, Pelaez Gonzalez made in 2013 a "maneuver to update the boundaries and size of the properties (...) completely illegal and contrary to law" because "it was literally mounted on the collective territories already awarded by Incora to the community councils," which then the Agustin Codazzi Geographic Institute and the Public Registry Office of Buenaventura registered "without performing any technical or legal verification to determine its validity."

Its conclusion is that the two titles are "nonexistent and illegal" because "there is no document, resolution or administrative act that proves that the Colombian State awarded these lands in favor of the previous or current alleged owners" and that "the legal origin of these properties is a false tradition that was never sanitized, which (...) makes it insufficient to prove private property." The result, he says, was an "evident irregular appropriation of a piece of land that belonged to the Nation."

From this it follows, it argues, that "the company Tángara Forest S.A.S. Zomac does not prove private ownership of the 14,500 hectares of which it claims to be the owner, nor does it exercise, nor has it exercised at any time, any type of possession, occupation or tenure over these collective territories." And that this would mean, the document concludes, that there is a "usurpation and dispossession of the communal lands awarded to the ethnic groups" and that the contract for the sale of carbon credits "lacks veracity and is contrary to the factual and legal reality."

That is, a conclusion diametrically opposed to the one defended by the Tángara Forest businessmen.

Local communities or occupiers?

Although the Tángara project documents describe the two properties as private, in many places they speak of people and families living in the territory, referred to at times as "forest custodians", "occupants" or "families settled as mere usufructuary tenants." These are people who, in the vision of the PDD prepared by Biofix for Tángara Forest, "despite having inhabited the area for some years, do not exercise the functions of lord and owner, nor do they act as owners, since they recognize that the property is owned by the legitimate owner of the property." There is, the document continues, "a tacit agreement between the parties that recognizes the right of dominion in the exclusive head of the owner, who in turn recognizes the presence of these families settled within the domain of his property."

But the so-called forest custodians are also, according to this and other documents, those responsible for deforestation there, which is why Tángara considers their participation in the project led by the company important. According to a 2021 monitoring report prepared by Biofix, "the occupants of the properties are the main agents and drivers of deforestation within the territory, which is why their participation in the project is essential" and "although it is necessary to include them in the participation process, but not in decision-making, it is imperative to highlight the difference and functions that apply as occupants and proponents."

To this end, the PDD of the Tángara project speaks of a plan with these inhabitants to achieve "territorial governance and awareness of the importance of conservation." These activities include reducing deforestation, wildlife release, borojó fruit production, sustaining the collection of piangua — a small edible mollusk that usually lives among the mangrove roots — and ecotourism.

However, the economic benefits from the sale of carbon remain with the business proponent of the project. "The property rights over the areas are clearly defined with the owner and should be extended to the ownership of the carbon and the units of reduction of emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, highlighting that within the project implementation area there is no collective territory legally recognized by the Ministry of the Interior," warns the PDD of the project prepared by Biofix for Tángara Forest.

Although Tángara Forest defends that the land is its property, the company argues that it thought of incorporating the neighboring communities from the beginning of the project, on the advice of a community relations consulting firm. "Our spirit has always been to work with the communities and support them so that they can develop and improve socioculturally," project manager Carlos Eduardo Domínguez told this journalistic alliance.

Among the economic benefits described by the company are 60 direct and indirect jobs, a motor boat, a mangrove nursery, a program called BioVive Manglar and a donation of 300 million pesos for the community council of Mayorquín and Papayal to finish setting up a health post (which during a visit in August 2024 this journalistic alliance found abandoned). According to Tángara Forest, they held multiple meetings with the communities and made these investments in alliance with them, even signing an agreement with one of the community councils, but this process was damaged — in the words of Domínguez — "when the project was shown to be robust and other people began to try to bombard what was being done."

The inhabitants of the community councils, on the other hand, feel excluded from the project. In their view, any environmental project carried out within the lands collectively titled to them should have consulted them following the rules of free, prior and informed consultation, incorporated them in its decisions as stakeholders and included them as direct beneficiaries of the money raised through the sale of carbon credits. “The company told us they wanted to do conservation projects and some of us started working on the recovery of mangroves and they paid us. When we realised, in the documents they were saying that we were the ones who were cutting down the trees,” says Juana Rentería, a leader of the Mayorquín community council. “They said we were deforesters, the custodians of our own territory,” adds her husband, Norbey Valencia, a fisherman and also a member of the community council board.

“This project has divided us, it has done us a lot of harm," concludes Rentería. "It hurt us because by now we would have other projects up and running, but because they [Tángara Forest] are there, it hasn't been possible.”

No presence of communities or no need for prior consultation?

Part of the problem in Mayorquín and Raposo appears to lie in the fact that the Ministry of the Interior, the national government entity responsible for the rights of ethnic minorities, officially told the developers that in the area where they wanted to develop a carbon project there was no need for free, prior and informed consultation.

"The issuance of the administrative act of certification is not required, since (...) this project responds to research activities of forest conservation with respect to which it is not predictable that there would be a direct affectation to collective subjects that are susceptible of constitutionally protected rights, this direct affectation understood as an intolerable intrusion to their quality of life and customs, and therefore it is not required to advance the administrative process of prior consultation," the Ministry director of prior consultation, Luis Fernando Bastidas, responded to the then legal representative of Biofix, Ana Milena Plata, on October 19, 2018, in a letter provided by Tángara Forest to this journalistic alliance.

Consulted by this journalistic alliance, Biofix's CEO, Carolina Jarro, explained in December 2024 that the company asked the Ministry, as part of its due diligence process when structuring the project, for a certification of presence of ethnic communities in the project area to determine whether or not prior consultation was appropriate. The response they received, says Jarro, "allows the project proponents and other bodies involved in the project to infer that there is no presence of ethnic communities and that prior consultation is not appropriate for the Tángara REDD+ project according to the Ministry of the Interior."

The problem is that the Ministry of the Interior never stated this. In its response, the direction of prior consultation stated that "prior consultation should only be exhausted in those events in which the project, work or activity directly affects the interests of ethnic communities" and that environmental activities do not fall into that category. In doing so, it was repeating a vision that prevailed in the national government until mid-2024, when a Constitutional Court ruling set a legal precedent on the issue. Following the Pirá Paraná case, which CLIP investigated, the highest constitutional court ruled that prior consultation may be required in carbon projects in cases of possible direct impacts and may even require an even higher standard, free, prior and informed consent (FPIC), if there could be intense social, cultural or environmental impacts, especially one that puts their existence at risk. At the time Tángara was implemented, the government understood that carbon projects, different to a mine or a road, did not require prior consultation.

The Ministry of the Interior's response to Biofix, however, does not state that the lands known to the Tángara project developers as Loma de Auca and Playa de Cuchas were not inhabited by Afro-Colombian or indigenous communities.

Despite this, the Tángara project documents categorically state this. The PDD of the project prepared by Biofix states that, in response to its request for certification of the presence or not of ethnic groups in the area of influence of the project, "the Ministry of the Interior replied (...) as follows: 'No issuance of administrative act of certification is required and therefore no prior consultation' because there is no presence of collective territories or indigenous reserves in its jurisdiction.'"

However, those last words, that there is no presence of collective territories in that area, do not appear anywhere in the response from Bastidas, the then director of prior consultation.

One of the auditors opted for an interpretation similar to that of Tángara Forest and Biofix. In its 2018 audit report, Icontec noted that "the response from the Ministry of the Interior (...) states that within the project execution area there is no collective territory legally recognized by that ministry."

In an interview with this journalistic alliance, Tángara Forest held a similar view. "The Ministry of the Interior certified that there was no need for a prior consultation, to make an announcement or to make a interaction with the communities because it clearly states that we have full ownership of the land, that there are no communities and that it is not required to advance the administrative process of prior consultation," explained project manager Carlos Eduardo Domínguez.

Consulted this January 27 for any document in which the Ministry of the Interior indicates that there is no presence of collective territories or indigenous reserves in the project area, Biofix sent the same certificate on the non-applicability of the prior consultation.

The surrounding communities believe that, as the project's PDD and the first audit state, the Ministry of the Interior did indeed certify that they do not live there. This is one of the facts that most outrages them in the whole conflict. "How is it that in 2018, with the existence of the community council and the [collective] title, the Ministry of the Interior is going to certify that there is no community?" asks José Nieves, one of the historic leaders of the Mayorquín community council.

Although José Nieves and other inhabitants of the two community councils had no way of knowing, that was not what the Ministry of the Interior responded to the project's promoters.

Auditors raised alerts but gave the project a pass

In their assessments of the Tángara project, the two companies that audited it noted the existence of Afro-Colombian communities there. However, they gave credibility to the developers' version that these are private properties covered by property certificates and that the Colombian State, through the Ministry of the Interior, corroborated that there were no ethnic communities there whose presence would have obliged the project to carry out a prior consultation.

In its December 2018 audit report, the Colombian company Icontec observed — as a note among its observations of non-conformities — that "it should be highlighted that during the field visit, settlements of Afro-Colombian communities were evidenced within the property." However, their auditors were convinced that it is a "private area" in view of the fact that "the property rights over the areas are clearly defined in name of the owner who presented (...) the deeds on the land" and that "the response from the Ministry of the Interior (...) states that within the project execution area there is no collective territory legally recognized by that ministry." For them it was clear that "there are settlers in the project area," but that these "will be integrated into the project in accordance with the alternative activities to the deforestation mentioned."

A similar view is presented in the audit report of the Spanish company Aenor of November 2019, which explains that "for the moment the settlements within the two properties considered have not been consulted, although they are allies of the project and in the short term will participate in the project activities." The auditors also found it convincing that "all the properties that make up the project area have certificates of dominion (...) that guarantee the legal and private tenure of the land in the name of the company Tángara Forest Zomac S.A.S.," with which they concluded that "the information provided corroborates the legal quality of the right to use the land and the area within the boundaries of the project."

Regarding the inhabitants, which Aenor's auditors described as 13 to 15 settlements composed of a couple of families each, "they do not have any type of recognized right of ownership or use of the land" but that "given their presence for several decades, the owner respects their presence in the area (and) there is a good relationship." Their report explains that "it is contemplated that they will be an active and central part of the project, mainly through monitoring activities, beneficiaries of sustainable production systems, etc." However, the auditing company pointed out, this will happen later on because "due to the presence of armed groups and the historical inertia of the conflict, the owner prefers not to generate economic expectations among the communities until they have developed human and social capital, which they are already working on.”

The most recent audit report, made by Icontec in July 2021 and when the project was already underway, stresses that "the land rights were claimed by the community councils adjacent to the project area" but that "the property titles showed the titling of the project lands with dates prior to the declaration of the councils." After describing them as "people from Afro communities who do not have property rights, but who contribute to the degradation and deforestation of the ecosystem," it explained that Tángara Forest "interacts with these communities" and that "within the lines of action the work [with them] is contemplated, making them part of the project for the conservation of the territory."

All of this allowed Icontec to conclude that the project "has respected the occupation of the Afro population within its lands and formulated a work plan to implement actions with them" and complies with the social and environmental safeguards for carbon market initiatives.

This journalistic alliance wrote by email to Icontec and Aenor on January 7, 2025, to ask them if during the audit process they had any news of the existence of Afro-Colombian communities within the project area and, if so, how they corroborated or assessed the information. It also asked them if they had any indication that the audited project might have a land conflict. Neither company had responded by the date of publication of this report.

Identical questions were asked by email to the certifier BioCarbon Registry on December 1, 2024. No response was received. 

In contrast, none of the entities in the carbon value chain that reviewed and validated the Tángara project seem to have realized that there was an overlap with one or two community councils, even though a consultation of the polygons of the National Land Agency or the Agustín Codazzi Geographic Institute could have raised red flags.

When asked if it searched for the polygons of the properties in the geographic and cartographic data of these land agencies, the structuring company Biofix responded that it "analyzed the cadastral records and codes issued by the IGAC of the properties on which the project was developed" and based on this official information it delineated the polygon of the project. The company did not answer if it had consulted ANT. Neither the auditors, Icontec and Aenor, nor the certifier BioCarbon responded whether they reviewed the polygons of community councils that are held by these two public entities.

This is despite the fact that one of the social and environmental safeguards for Redd+ initiatives that Colombia outlined in its national interpretation is that they "respect the collective and individual territorial rights of ethnic and local peoples and communities" and that they obtain free, prior and informed consent. 

Tángara goes to court

When the inhabitants of the three community councils learned that the land they have legally held since the late 1990s also appeared to be owned by Tángara Forest, they wrote to multiple state entities. Beginning in July 2021, the boards of Mayorquín, Anchicayá and Raposo sent joint information requests to the Ministries of the Interior and Environment, the National Land Agency, the Agustin Codazzi Geographic Institute, the Superintendence of Notaries and Registry, the Inspector General's Office, the Ombudsman's Office and Buenaventura Town Hall. They also wrote to Icontec, one of the two auditors of the project.

Among other requests, their legal representatives asked the Mayor's Office of Buenaventura to "resolve the undue occupation and legal dispossession that the Tángara Forest Company has been exercising", the Superintendence of Notaries and Registry to annul the registration folios, and the Ministry of Environment to intervene so that Biofix does not sell any carbon credits from the project and to annul the "contract of sale of carbon credits signed between Tágara and Biofix," as this journalistic alliance was able to see in documents provided by the communities.

However, of the ten or so requests made by the community councils to the public entities, few got substantive responses. The ANT transferred the consultation to the Ministry of the Interior. The Afro communities direction at the ministry confirmed that the community councils are registered there, but that "in view of the problems presented, it is recommended that they go to the ordinary justice system" and transferred the questionnaire to its colleague in the direction of prior consultation, which never responded. The Inspector General's Office expressed in its response that it was not competent and transferred the request to the Superintendence of Notaries and Registry and to its delegated inspector for environmental and agrarian matters. The Superintendence said that Tángara Forest had complied with the requirements to register the land in its name.

They also sought out the carbon project proponents. On July 21, 2021, the community councils jointly sent a letter to Oscar Javier Peláez, the legal representative of Tángara Forest, to "warn him about the unlawfulness of Tángara's conduct for using an illegal and non-existent title to accredit private property over 14,200 hectares of the collective territories". The company responded by requesting a rectification for using the qualifiers of "unlawful conduct". The legal representatives of the collective territories did not respond and Pelaez filed a protection action against them for not responding to the request. In February 2021, the Buenaventura court ruled in favor of Tángara's legal representative and ordered the leaders of the community councils to respond to the company within 48 hours. After challenging the decision but seeing it ratified by a second instance judge, the community had to respond to Pelaez in March 2022. "We sent the title study and the reasons why we believe the unlawfulness of Tángara's conduct in response. They never communicated with us again," said Evangelista Aragón, one of the leaders of Mayorquín who was also a councilman of Buenaventura in representing the black river communities. Regarding this protection action, Carlos Eduardo Domínguez said that "we do not accept that they treat us as dispossessors."

In September 2022, following the information requests that were not answered in substance by the public entities, the community councils agreed in a general assembly to initiate legal action for the possible violation of their right to collective property. With the support of the legal land clinic of the Javeriana University, they filed a protection action arguing that, according to the document seen by this journalistic alliance, they had "tried to go to all State entities with responsibility for the protection of collective property and [had] not achieved a response that would stop this complex strategy of usurpation of property."

"No governmental entity that is responsible for it has been activated. We have made petitions, we have sent documents to everyone, we have knocked on every door there is. And we have had no response," says Kenny Aragón, a Mayorquín leader.

The Third Labor Court of the Buenaventura Circuit denied the legal action in May 2022, considering it inadmissible, arguing that the situation did not show "elements of necessity and urgency that make the protection of fundamental rights imminent" and that it was not appropriate to do so through constitutional channels, but rather through an ordinary process with a specialized land judge. The communities challenged this decision in order to elevate it to a second instance. However, according to several leaders of the community councils, the Land Restitution Unit filed before and without consulting them the restitution claim they had been preparing before a specialized land judge in Cali, officially informing him of the acts of violence suffered by the inhabitants of the community council at the hands of the guerrillas (including, but not linked to the above, the current conflict over land ownership with Tángara Forest). 

That miscommunication meant that the restitution claim ended up taking precedence in court and will have to be resolved first. "This created a problem for us because we are claiming the same right in two ways. Therefore, the one we had made was withdrawn and the one from the Unit remained. The entity filed the claim in an inconsistent manner in October 2022. We had agreed to file the lawsuit after solving the protection action procedure," says Evangelista Aragón. 

The arrival of the conflict in court seems to have had an effect on the project's side. When asked if it was aware of the land restitution processes, the structuring and trading company Biofix BIC told this journalistic alliance that, although it is up to a judge to confirm or rule out the existence of a land conflict, "when these events became known after an internal evaluation, Biofix made the decision not to continue with a subsequent verification of the project." The company did not answer what income it derived from its relationship with the Tángara project, arguing that "the confidentiality agreements established in our commercial relations (...) prevent us from disclosing information related to the derived income".

All roads lead to the restitution judge

In the end, both Tángara Forest and the community councils whose territory overlaps with the Tángara project agree that there is a land conflict. 

In the absence of any action by any of the seven public entities that have been aware of this conflict, neither the communities nor the company can see a solution other than that the two civil courts of the Circuit Specialized in Land Restitution of Cali that are already hearing the cases define the ownership of the lands that the Afro communities defend as part of their collective territory and that the company claims as part of its private lands. 

Carlos Eduardo Domínguez, manager of Tángara Forest's carbon project, says they hope that the land restitution judge will rule correctly and that they will be able to keep the land they have been defending as private property since the 19th century. "No authority has told us 'you have to leave the territory'. The time will come when we will see what happens. For now we have been attending the process, showing all our evidence and actions, where we show that we have not violated the communities and that, on the contrary, we have been willing to support and contribute to their economic benefit," he said.

The community councils hope that the restitution judges will recognize the overlap, so that they can finally think about their carbon project. "We have no reason to doubt, we are fully convinced [of our position]. We are interested in cleaning up the territory and that there is an economic redress for what they benefited from our territory," says Evangelista Aragón of Mayorquín. "We have the idea of talking with other [actors in the carbon market] and that they explain to us how it works," said Germán Valencia, one of the leaders of Raposo.

Meanwhile, a new problem has arrived in the marshes and rivers south of Buenaventura: as the banners that can be seen every few kilometers show, the area has once again become territory claimed by illegal armed groups. Tied to mangrove trunks and branches, some of them already frayed and others still shiny, they announce the presence of the Jaime Martinez Mobile Column and the Western Bloc of the Central General Staff, to which the latter belongs. These are two structures of the dissidents of the former FARC that did not embrace the peace agreement signed in 2016 and remained in arms.

Their presence underscores the deteriorating security conditions there, which have already had several consequences. For the project developers it means that, as manager Dominguez pointed out, they have not been able to bring in a new team of auditors for a new validation of carbon credits. And for the communities, a return to times of confinement and displacement.

All of this means that there is still no solution in sight for the conflict in the only active private carbon project in the Colombian Pacific, whose theoretically private lands overlap with those of several Afro-Colombian communities that today do not benefit directly from it.

This report was supported by the Heinrich Böll Foundation.