At the Boutu Reserve a campesino family has created a natural haven in a conflict corner of Colombia.
In a forest in the deep south of Colombia, where rivers flow swiftly to the Amazon, José Bolívar grasps a handful of green coca leaves.
“This is tingo strain, originally from Peru,” says José, a man who clearly knows his coca. “Now it grows wild. We don’t crop it anymore.”
The campesino gave up coca – the raw natural material for cocaine – ten years ago. Since then, the former plantation, once frequently drenched in pesticides, has regenerated into a green haven. The air is thick with the chirping of insects; birds dart through the foliage and monkeys clamber in the canopy above.
A few coca bushes, of course, are still there, but now just a few remnants, straggly and unproductive, fighting for soil and sunlight on the forest floor.
“It’s always been my dream to shift from the illicit to a legal way to make a living,” says José, as we scramble up a muddy trail.
The result is Boutu, a “natural and cultural reserve”, as José describes it, offering short stays in wooden cabins, with activities such as watching river dolphins, fishing and canoeing in the rivers and creeks, and jungle walks on the regenerated forest.
It’s a family affair, with three generations on hand to welcome visitors. José’s daughter Catalina works the kitchen and her partner John, who is from the Yagua people, also acts as a guide. Their own children join in the activities, along with Trotsky, a bouncing ball of canine energy that is José’s constant companion.
Down the Putumayo
The surprise of Botou is where it is, tucked away in Putumayo department on the Cohembi River, right on the border between Colombia and Ecuador. It’s a lawless corner ruled by armed groups dedicated to cocaine trafficking and illegal gold mining. Outsiders are not generally welcome.
At first glance tourism might seem risky, though with José, a weathered 65-year-old with deep roots in the region, I feel we are in safe hands.
“I’ve always wanted to bring people here, to show them how we live here,” he says, as we head down the Putumayo River in his canoe, after some fiddling with the small outboard motor.
I’m travelling with my son on his school holidays, and we are collected from the muddy bank close to Puerto Asis, an upper riverport for the vast fluvial network connecting Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Brazil through the Amazon basin.
“These boats go to Brazil, they take three weeks to descend the river, depending on the water levels,” says José as we pass a series of flat steel barges, cargo boats and tugs waiting to load cargo.
Punk chickens and pink dolphins
After a few bends we come to the gold miners, waist deep in water and wearing large straw hats, shovelling gravel into wooden sluices. Further on, the river gets wider and lonelier, with just a few scattered homesteads along the high banks.
Then, 90 minutes into our journey, we turn into the darker but clearer waters of the Rio Cohembi, off the Putumayo, but still a fair-sized river, and are greeted by the wheezy calls of hoatzins, a prehistoric punk chicken, perched in rows on the overhanging branches.
Here too are river dolphins, or boto as they are called in much of the Amazon, and seeing these shy creatures is a highlight of the trip (and the inspiration for the ‘Boutu’ reserve). To approach them we cut the motor, and José propels us gently with a large wooden paddle.
“There’s an adult with three youngsters,” he says confidently, as the dolphins gently break the surface for a quick breath. The largest is a rosy colour, the smaller ones greyish, and they swim in unison.
Soon after we are tied up to the riverbank and scrambling up a hill to a rigpoint that marks the international border.
“Welcome to Ecuador,” says José, beaming, as we cross the invisible line. At the top of the hill is an abandoned military post, its concrete walls overgrown with vines.
Remnants of war
“FARC guerrillas took it in a fierce attack,” explains José. “The Ecuadorian army fled and never came back. Shame, because we used to have some good football games with them.”
Later, among the trees on the reserve, he shows me a small concrete disc signalling that the area has been cleared of landmines. After two months of clearance, only one was found and so old that when detonated it “just fizzled a bit”.
The mine marker is a reminder of conflicts past and present. In previous decades the farm was a thoroughfare for Colombian guerrillas traipsing through hidden trails into Ecuador. They even had a camp close to Boutu. Like many campesinos, José and his family learned to ignore them: “They didn’t bother us, if we didn’t bother them. We never asked questions.”
Problems came, as happened everywhere in the Colombian campo, when opposed armed groups came into the zone. Once paramilitaries took José and held a gun to his head: “I thought that was the end of it. Then for some reason they let me go,” he says. Others were not so lucky.
Another time an army helicopter was shot down by guerrillas hiding nearby. The aircraft crashed in the river, close to the reserve, but the three crew survived and managed to escape their pursuers to be rescued on the big river.
“They ran down the riverbank wearing just their underpants,” recalls José. “I guess they figured their uniforms would give them away.”
The farmer and his friends later salvaged parts from the sunken chopper to sell in the local market.
Nothing but trouble
Our walk takes us to the reserve boundary. Across the fence, in harsh contrast to the cool shade of Boutu, the neighbour has felled trees and is planting green coca plants among the tangle.
José sighs. “Coca brings nothing but trouble, it always has done and always will,” he says. He has seen the coca trade come full circle: boom times when every farm had an area to process the coca into pasta, the intermediate paste product like off-white nougat that is taken to more clandestine laboratories for crystallization.
And then the aerial spraying of past decades where crop-dusting planes dumped herbicide on farms in the region. “Everything died, the cacao plants, plantains, bananas, sugar cane,” he recalls. “We had no food.”
Spraying was banned 10 years ago, with the herbicide deemed to be carcinogenic. After that came coca crop eradication, some of it as part of substitution programs promoted after the FARC peace deal in 2016.
But that didn’t last long, says José. “People took the government offers but then went back to coca. They want easy money. Everyone is cropping again.”
More crops, less profit
Sure enough, we see canoes laden with huge sacks of green leaves nosing down the river. Boutu begins to feel like an island in a sea of coca.
For now, though, the river communities are relatively peaceful, partly because the current government under Gustavo Petro has prioritised cocaine interdiction over attacking coca growers. “Petro is going after the powder, and not the leaf,” as José puts it.
But this hands-off approach has also incentivised more coca cropping. Putumayo now has 50,000 hectares of plantations, a fifth of the Colombian coverage which, added to its open border with Ecuador and smuggling routes out of Pacific ports, makes it a prized location for armed groups.
With reason, the region is marked by uncertainty; any change of government in 2026 could herald renewed military action to reduce coca cropping. The tranquility could be short-lived.
On top of that, farmers are seeing ever fewer profits, says José. Coca needs large quantities of gasoline, cement and chemical precursors to make the white paste, he explains, and the government recently removed fuel subsidies making the processing more costly.
And even with the current status quo, state forces target cocaine processing even at the pasta stage. To avoid this the armed groups have concentrated production in fewer, more protected sites, and farmers have given up making paste and just sell raw leaves, though with less mark-up.
Sign of the jaguar
Back at Boutu, breaking free from coca has allowed José to sow many other productive plants as well as turn to tourism. Sugar cane grows around the homestead. In a large shed José has installed a motorised crusher to extract the juice.
We have cut several long stalks and now feed them into the steel rollers, mixing the sweet juice that flows out with lemons and crushed ice makes delicious guarapo.
Then we cut down a papaya and pick lulo, a tangy fruit used in drinks, and collect green peppercorns. John shows us furry achiote fruit, whose seeds crush to emit a strong red dye.
“In my community we use this to paint our faces,” he explains, daubing some red lines on Sam’s face. “Three straight lines on each cheek are the mark of the jaguar. A curve is the sign of the macaw.”
Deeper in the woods, John shows us barbusco, a wild plant which some tribes use to trap fish. The milky sap deoxygenates water, causing fish to float to the surface.
Along the way are giant palms, the leaves of which provide roofing and baskets, and yagé vines which can be boiled down to hallucinogenic potions. These particular vines have another purpose: to hide the farmhouse through casting a spell on any unwanted visitors.
“We planted them here to protect the property,” says John. “The vines will confuse anyone with bad intent; they won’t be able to find their way.”
Forest spirits
Other mysteries emerge as we sit around the campfire swapping stories. Over the years José has collected sack-loads of ancient pottery he dug up in the hillside at the back of the farm.
The land itself is testimony to a lost civilisation; a flat hilltop in the forest seems man-made, fashioned with chalk and sand clearly carried in, perhaps a ceremonial terrace. Every shovel there turns up pieces of ceramic. But excavations come at a cost.
“When we were kids, we dug in the hillside and found a strange creature hiding in the hole, like something we had never seen before”, says Catalina. She ran for her life.
Digging for treasure seems to bring bad luck, such as bouts of illness and harsh weather.
Talk turns to duendes, the forest spirits, like elves or goblins, that lurk in the shadows. At Boutu, they seem to be linked to ancient inhabitants and protect their secrets. Partly to appease them, José reburied the sacks of pottery, but not before marking the hole he had dug to hide them. When he checked later, the sacks had disappeared, their contents swallowed back up by mother earth.
Dangerous beauty
At the end of the day we climb up the wooden watchtower José and his family have constructed on the highest point of the reserve. With the sunset the evening sky briefly catches fire, and we glimpse the conical silhouettes of Ecuador’s volcanos rising above the green expanse.
That night we retire to our cosy wooden cabin. A storm breaks and rain drums on the tin roof. We sit out on the porch as lightning paints the sodden jungle canvas. The duendes, if there are any, are deep in their holes.
Then I see a shadow in the rain. But it’s John, walking down to the riverbank to check the boats; with the rivers rising their tethers will need taking in. It’s a simple act, but a reminder that in the Colombian campo the work is never done.
And a reminder too that the Boutu Reserve is a testimony to the tenacity of a family bringing hope to a forgotten corner of Colombia, where the past, present and future plays out against a dramatic backdrop of beauty and danger. It’s a privilege to witness life on this wild frontier.
You can support the Boutu Reserve by visiting them. For more information, contact +57 322 348 5714. Airlines Clic and Satena have daily flights from Bogotá to Puerto Asis, and it is a short taxi ride to the Putumayo riverbank where José and his family can meet you.