Marta Lucía Hernández was baptized into Colombia’s troubled parks system in 1988. She took her first job as a ranger in Cocuy National Park, shortly after the park’s director had been killed by guerrillas from Colombia’s leftist National Liberation Army (ELN). That meant starting her career amid the tension that followed the killing, as guerrillas entered the park to establish a semi-permanent presence in the páramos, or highland plains, of the Andean states of Boyacá and Arauca. Violence struck again while she was director in the mid-1990s of the 946,000-acre (383,000 ha) Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta National Park on Colombia’s Atlantic Coast. The country’s other Marxist insurgents, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), and their right-wing paramilitary opponents murdered... [Log in to read more]