Petro weighs up U.S. military help to protect the Amazon

The Amazon rainforest and its over 5 million square kilometers of jungle are distributed across the territory of nine South American countries. It is one of the most biodiverse areas on the planet with more than 3 million species of animals and plants.

For many diplomatic leaders and environmental activists, this was the prism through which they followed the most recent Brazilian election, fearing what a new Bolsonaro administration could mean for the “lungs of the world” in terms of increased deforestation.

The winner, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, will be one of the most welcome participants at the upcoming UN climate change conference (COP27).

But another recently-elected South American head of state will also be in the spotlight: Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, who made environmental issues an even more central topic of his presidential campaign, and whose nation is home to the third-largest portion of Amazon territory, 10 percent of its total. 

President Petro has been trying to shift the way in which the international community thinks about his country’s jungle region, whose inhospitable, multi-border territory includes multiple isolated zones that often lack supervision – all factors that have helped turn it into a dangerous hub of drug trafficking. As such, it was one site of the U.S.-backed war on drugs that has cost an innumerable amount of lives.

During his first address at the UN General Assembly in September, Mr. Petro pointed his finger...