**4. Current situation: environmental conflicts and an ecosystem in danger of extinction**

The dynamics of the expansion in the occupation of spaces during the last 80 years in the equatorial high mountain areas of Colombia have brought as a consequence and dramatic decrease of forests in these regions and taking into account the figure of less than 5% of existence of the original Andean forests we could affirm that this ecosystem vital for the regulation of biogeochemical cycles and ecological corridors of fauna and the flora that it lends to the whole of the Main Ecological Structure of the nation, is today in danger of extinction [8].

The following environmental problems, which have become real socio-ecological conflicts, which are at the root of this worrying situation are:

i.Expansion of agricultural frontiers to affirm the post-Thispánicos settlements in the mountain ranges, which were constituted during the time of La Colonia (1530–1819) as a basis for the creation of the Republic of Colombia from the War of Independence, which although it brought contributions from European Modernity and gave birth to a mestizo people with the peasantry, It was carried ahead with its demographic catastrophe product of violence and diseases and until the near extinction of indigenous cultures such as the Muisca, the Tairona, and others cornered them in the depths of the jungles and mountains. During this period and for the construction of nascent cities such as the cities of Popayán, Santafé de Antioquia, Cali, Popayán, Bogotá, Tunja and Pamplona, Villa de Leyva, and Guaduas among the main colonial settlements of the Andean mountain, the wood of the equatorial high Andean forests was used and use of the fauna was made that was intense until the second half of the twentieth century and still continues hunting and Illicit trade in the fauna and flora of these ecosystems. The Conquest and the Colony with its disastrous traces of destruction of nature and ancestral peoples and the peasant people, the main victim of all the violence of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, after the birth of the Republic, has not yet ended in these territories. However, despite the destruction of important forest masses during this period, until the late 1950s when the Agustín Codazzi Geographic Institute generated the cartography of Colombia

to support Law 2 of 1959 that created the Zones of Forest Reserve of the Nation, large areas of high Andean forests existed throughout the country.


municipalities to the northeast of this as are corrales, Beteitiva, Paz del Rio, and others. This has led to strong and dynamic socioenvironmental conflicts between the peasantry and foreign oil and coal companies favored by the prevailing extractivist policies [14, 15].

	- ix.This currently constitutes the basis of socio-environmental conflicts over water and in defense of forests and moors in the department of Boyacá which is one of the departments with the greatest presence of high Andean forests in Colombia, along with the departments of Cundinamarca, Cauca, Tolima, Santander, and the Coffee Axis.
