Over the last two decades, the 16,000 inhabitants of this county have ridden a roller coaster of booms and busts in fishing, lumbering and cocaine production.

In the process, settlers have poured into pristine savannas and forests, cutting down an estimated 1 million cedar trees, planting coca and contaminating rivers and jungles.

Environmentalists have warned of the danger to this 4,200-square-mile (11,000-sq-km) area in the state of Meta, home to three national parks, the biologically rich Sierra de la Macarena, and more than 2,200 species of plants and animals.

But recently they have been surprised to find an unlikely, if capricious ally—the 15,000-member Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the guerrilla group that has controlled La Macarena for much of Colombia’s 37-year-old civil war.

In 1992, after consulting with biologists, the Marxist organization banned all commercial fishing in the area’s rivers, reducing catches to one fish a day per person from an estimated 60 a day. In 1997, it banned all hunting, relieving pressure on threatened ocelots (leopardus pardalis), jaguars (panthera onca) and tapirs (tapirus terrestris).

Strict rules control disposal of garbage and human waste. The construction of homes and farms has been carefully regulated to protect river basins. Even cocaine production, from which the FARC earns hundreds of millions of dollar annually, has gone green.

The FARC now prohibits producers from building cocaine laboratories near water sources and obliges them to recycle gasoline, ammonia and other processing chemicals, rather than dumping them in rivers as before.

Violators are punished with steep fines. Repeat offenders are expelled from the region.

“We are working with local communities to develop rules for coexistence and the protection of the environment,” says Fernando Caicedo, a local commander and national spokesman for the FARC. “We know that in the future the struggle will not be for oil, but for water and genetic resources.”

Such eco-love might seem odd for a group that earns an estimated $600 million annually from the drug trade, kidnapping and extortion. But it has raised eyebrows all the more since November of last year, when President Andrés Pastrana ceded a Switzerland-sized swath of territory to the FARC in a goodwill gesture intended to coax the Marxist movement to the negotiating table.

Now the guerrillas rule 100,000 people in La Macarena and four other counties in the states of Meta and Caquetá. In effect, they’re using the region as a laboratory to test their social, economic and environmental ideas.

As governors, they are drawing both praise and harsh criticism for their practices in the five-county area and in other parts of Colombia, where guerrillas operate in no less than 40% of the national territory.

FARC commanders say protection of the environment is a way to guarantee the survival of the peasant economy. It’s from this peasant economy, analysts say, that the guerrillas draw economic and popular support.

The commanders emphasize that the thin, acidic topsoil of the five counties and the surrounding Amazon region cannot sustain heavy settlement, timber cutting or ranching .

They’ve brought these concerns to the negotiating table. There, environmental considerations are being linked to nationwide land reform plans so peasant colonizers from other parts of the country do not invade the region and exhaust its resources.

“If we want to halt the expansion of the agricultural frontier and stop people from hacking down forests, we need an agrarian reform in central Colombia and other fertile areas of the country,” says Caicedo. “People with land to cultivate and feed their family have no incentive to come here.”

Even skeptics acknowledge the FARC has worked to protect forests and jungles in many areas either to win popular support or to provide cover for its military campaigns. That has been the case especially in Catíos National Park, along the Panamanian border, and in Sumapaz National Park, which straddles the states of Meta and Boyacá.

In these regions, where park rangers are scarce, the FARC has prohibited peasant colonizers from cutting trees, grazing cattle and building homes. It has preserved the parks’ biodiversity and water resources and established important environmental precedents.

But the inconsistencies and hypocrisies of the FARC’s environmental stance are plain.

According to official statistics, more than 2.5 million acres (1 million hectares) of forest and jungle have been sacrificed to drug crops nationwide. Still, the FARC continues to earn a 10% tax from drug traffickers for protecting drug plantations and landing strips.

And according to U.S. and Colombian authorities, the group is largely responsible for a two-fold increase in cocaine production over the last four years.

The result has been especially disastrous for the Amazon region, which the FARC claims to protect. In the state of Putumayo, near Ecuador, 40,000 hectares of coca bush have left only small islands of what were virgin rainforests only eight years ago.

Environmentalists say the destruction has been so severe that even if the drug trade were suddenly to dry up, the area would require up to 100 years to recover from the deforestation and chemical contamination.

“The FARC’s environmental stance is extremely variable, depending on circumstances, the region, the front, and even the local commanders,” says Carlos Castaño Uribe, former head of Colombia’s national parks system. “In some places, it protects the environment and even help eco-tourists, while in others its priority is simply to finance the movement.”

Nowhere are those contradictions more apparent that in the five counties ceded by the government where the FARC runs its “state-within-a-state.”

In La Macarena, where the guerrillas have imposed many strict environmental standards, they have also helped to organize a group of 1,700 families in an ecological group called the Environmental Association of Farmers of the Losada and Guayabero Rivers (ASCAL-G).

The organization, which seeks to wean the local population from drug crops through sustainable development, has received $300,000 from the government and international donors to plant 2,500 acres (1,000 hectares) in rubber and sugar cane.

The government and the FARC view the program as a possible first step toward a multi-billion-dollar crop-substitution program that could emerge as part of the peace talks.

But biologists who have worked in the five counties say no serious feasibility and market studies have been made. They criticize the development model as promoting ever-greater deforestation through dependence on two crops. And they are upset that the FARC, which taxes timber operations, refuses to prohibit tree cutting in the area.

Such paradoxes are perhaps inevitable for a group that spends millions of dollars to train child soldiers and purchase sophisticated weapons on the international market. But as the FARC attempts to promote a progressive image abroad, it is increasingly finding that it is tripping itself up in trying to explain how it can be “green,” while living off the drug trade and the extraction of natural resources.