How do you police the world's biggest tropical rainforest? Faced with deadly violence, indigenous people have set up their own unarmed guard.

Nine nights of sacred ceremonies had passed. It was 2013, and the hundreds of indigenous leaders gathering by the remote Caquetá River in the Amazon rainforest were edging closer to a breakthrough. They had come together in a wooden, palm-thatched meeting house because their communities all faced the same dangers. Scattered across the Colombian Amazon, they were threatened by loggers, poachers and armed groups fighting over control of illegal mining and coca crops, the raw material for cocaine. In this vast and sometimes lawless region, official law enforcement had failed to protect the indigenous people and their forest.

Spurred by rituals and visions from medicinal plants, the leaders agreed to take matters into their own hands.

They decided to form an unarmed guard, following the example of indigenous communities elsewhere in Colombia, who had organised their own peaceful protection. Called the Indigenous Guard for the Amazon, its members would patrol the rainforest wearing a vest with a badge and carrying wooden staffs as symbols of their authority. Despite the dangerous nature of their work, they would carry no weapons.

Today, these indigenous patrols protect rare species, ancient forests, and even the uncontacted communities living next to them. Across Colombia, there are more than 50,000 Indigenous Guards, all with a story bound to the country's long history of conflict. As the armed groups they face gain more power, the Indigenous Guard's work becomes more challenging even as it becomes more crucial.

The guards' work collides with the interests of the ever-more-powerful armed groups seeking to exploit the forests. The NGO Somos Defensores, which tracks the attacks on human rights defenders in Colombia, reported that most of last year’s threats, disappearances, attempted murders and killings targeted indigenous leaders. In total, seven members of Indigenous Guards were murdered in 2024; most of them in Cauca, the south-western region nestled between the Andes and the Pacific. Another was killed in Putumayo, on the other side of the mountains, where the Andes give way to the largest jungle on Earth.

At that founding meeting back in 2013, there was still one detail left to decide: the colour of the banners the guards would tie to their staff. At dawn, a dim rainbow broke over the sky. "Look," said Luis Jansasoy, a leader of the Inga people, who descend from the Incas. "Here is the flag of the Indigenous Guard for the Amazon."

Not everyone agreed. Then a second rainbow appeared above the first, brighter, with an energy so intense that, Jansasoy recalls, even sceptics were convinced. "It was such a joy," he says. "For the first time, our people – especially the youth – could see that the ancestral wisdom and the energy of life are still with us. Many realised that we must not lose faith or hope."

The Indigenous Guard now exists all over the Colombian Amazon, but it's not a single, homogenous group. There are more than 60 indigenous communities in the Colombian Amazon, and not all have one. Those that do often adopt their own colours and practices. What unites them is a single purpose: defending the rainforest and all the life it holds.

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"In the Amazon, protection is spiritual," said Patricia Suárez, a leader of the Murui people, whose 12,000 members live along the main western tributaries of the Amazon. Suárez is also an advisor to the Organization of Indigenous Peoples of the Colombian Amazon (Opiac) and to the Colombian government on the protection of uncontacted peoples. She explains that this spiritual protection goes beyond the patrols: for example, she says, the communities' elders perform dances, songs, and use medicinal plants in rituals that honour and defend the forest from a spiritual point of view.

This spiritual practice is intertwined with the work of the guards who go out on patrol, says Jansasoy. "Our elders, the spiritual guards, put us in harmony and clear the path," he says.

The night before a patrol, the elders and the guards gather for a ceremony that involves drinking

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