“Officials with up to 30 years of experience as park rangers of the national protected areas were dismissed on Monday, January 11. In the previous four days, five chiefs were dismissed.”
The spokesperson for the National Coordinator for the Defense of the Indigenous Peasant Territories and Protected Areas of Bolivia (Contiocap), Alex Villca, spoke about all these exits. He expressed his concern.
“We are aware of a sequence of memoranda that is being imparted to different protected areas nationwide. At the moment they are hierarchical positions. They will surely make changes at the administrative level. We are concerned that this situation reaches the level of park rangers, because they live in the communities, they come from indigenous communities, they live in the area of influence, ”he explained to Página Siete Digital .
The park rangers - who have training on the protection of these areas - are local and go into the forests for 24 days every month; they fear retaliation and regret this systematic dismissal of team leaders.”
Sernap did not communicate any justification at the time of dismissing the heads of the protection body. The Contiocap representative pointed out that intercultural leaders were appointed to replace the chiefs of protection.
Villca commented in this regard that in the Madidi National Park, where he lives, a new chief park ranger was assigned, who has no knowledge of the management of the protected area…MAS and their attitude towards the environment is practically negative for those of us who live in the lowlands. The interest they seek is economic, materialistic, they see these spaces as a place where they have to obtain profits, profit ”
One of the chief park rangers said: “What we question is that it is not the way to designate the personnel of protected areas. The representative of an (intercultural) organization cannot be the head of a park ranger because those organizations are where offenders are born and our day-to-day fight is against them ”, he warned.”