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Environmental Governance Lead, USAID Amazon Alive Anamaría Talero Pilonieta

Anamaría Talero Pilonieta is an environmental and human rights lawyer with more than 15 years of experience advising and directing complex initiatives related to law enforcement on anticorruption, land rights, environmental justice, governance and prevention crimes in the Latin American Andean Region and Southern Cone.

She currently serves as the Environmental Governance Lead on the USAID Amazon Alive Project, where she leads efforts to strengthen national monitoring and public-private partnerships to prevent, reduce, and prosecute environmental crimes to reduce systemic biodiversity loss. Previously, she led the Prevention and Environmental Justice program at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) for the Andean Region and the Southern Cone which sought to impact criminal organizations and prosecute environmental crimes. At the UNODC, Anamaría served as a key legal advisor for projects that promoted inter-agency cooperation to reduce illicit crops, developed technical tools, exchange global experiences and trainings for officers and civil society actors to combat corruption and environmental crimes, and improved monitoring instruments for public entities. Prior to her tenure at UNODC, she worked in agricultural public sector to design partnership programs and centralized strategic alliances to formalize legal processes to improve land management, restitution, and establish land rights.

Anamaría holds a bachelor’s in law from the Universidad Externado in Colombia, where she also received a specialization in human rights and international human rights. She is completing her master’s in environmental and sustainability law from the Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano in Colombia.