Hayley Stuart
In Bolivia, Indigenous groups fear the worst ...

The Bolivian government has revived a long-held plan to build a hydroelectric plant in a corner of the country’s western La Paz department, sparking concerns about the potential displacement of more than 5,000 Indigenous people from the area.

In Bolivia, Indigenous groups fear the worst from dam project on Beni River

CONTIOCAP rejects MAS decision to eliminate 2/3 vote requirement

During the last session of the Senate, MAS representatives enacted changes to internal regulations that resulted in elimination of the need for two-thirds of the votes. Future decisions such as military promotions, ambassadorial appointments, creation of special investigative commissions, challenging the election of deputies and senators, changing the agenda or ending the debate on a law now only require a majority vote.

According to this Spanish-language article, "Contiocap denounces before the national public opinion the arbitrary and undemocratic attempt of the MAS to annul the 2/3 required in the ALP for the approval of specific norms and to do so by majority absolute using his parliamentary roll, "denounced Alex Villca, spokesman for Contiocap (National Coordinator of Rights of Indigenous and Peasant Territories and Protected Areas).”

Fire consumes 26.6% of protected areas in Bolivia

According to this Spanish-language article, fires continue to burn throughout Bolivia this year: “According to the latest report from the Forest and Land Authority (ABT), between October 12 and 18, 4,436 heat sources were registered in protected areas, equivalent to 26.6% of burns that took place in that period.” The daily average of events in 2020 (2,382) is “higher than the record for 2019 (of) “1,582 sources per day’. Madidi is one of the affected reserves. Half of the fires are occurring in “areas with forests and scrub.” rather than agricultural land. To date, “600 administrative proceedings have been opened against people who cause fires.” 

Indigenous people separate themselves from parties in Bolivia after Evo Morales

Sunday, October 18 was the first time in 18 years that former President Evo Morales was not running for re-election in Bolivia. It also was the first time that indigeneous independent candidates were running for President. According to Alex Villca, spokesperson for the National Coordinator of Indigenous Peasant Native Territories and Protected Areas (Contiocap), Evo Morales and his party “favored some native peoples over others.”

Alex Villca then stated “"When we talk about Bolivia, it is associated with the highlands and it seems somewhat hegemonic, as if they were only Quechuas, Aymara and even the Guarani. It is not understood that there are many other nations and indigenous peoples that inhabit the Amazon basin. The Amazon basin represents at least 70% of the national territory, and our Quechua and Aymara brothers live in the remaining 30%.”

He raised concerns about all the candidates: “"We do not see in the proposals of these parties in a forceful and concrete way include the issue of indigenous peoples, protected areas and the environment. It is very superficial," he added. The Contiocap spokesperson admitted that when Morales came to power in 2006, "the majority of indigenous peoples hoped that Evo Morales, an Aymara ethnic group, could truly leave behind more than 500 years of marginalization and systematic exclusion. to indigenous peoples ". However, he considered that, during the MAS government, native peoples have been violated in their "fundamental rights." "If the MAS candidate returns to power, for us it implies that we are going to experience greater violence," he warned.

You can read the entire article in Spanish here.

What do Bolivian indigenous people expect from the October 18 elections?

This Spanish language article discusses potential impact of the October 18 elections on issues of concern to indigeneous communities throughout Bolivia. Alex Villca, spokesperson for the National Coordinator for the Defense of Indigenous Peasant Territories and Protected Areas of Bolivia (CONTIOCAP), was quoted in the article. When asked “what he expects from the new general elections to elect president, vice president, senators and deputies “ he replied “Basically nothing.”

Although “more than 49% of the Bolivian population self-identifies as indigenous",” not all voices have been heard equally. Per Villca: “Aymara and Quechua brothers have been gaining a more visible space in politics, which has allowed them to expand their domination over other indigenous peoples.” The constitutional “right to prior, free, informed and good faith consultation", has been breached “during the government of Evo Morales and the current transitory government.” He also expressed concern that “The need to reactivate the economy, hit by the pandemic, will probably serve as a pretext to “direct extractive projects and megaprojects (mining, oil, hydroelectric, agricultural, forestry, etc.) within indigenous territories and areas with more violence. protected areas of Bolivia, which today hold the greatest natural and cultural wealth in the country.”

MAS’s economic boasting falls flat with Indigenous peoples who resisted Evo Morales’s development projects

With Luis Arce winning the October 18, 2020 Presidential election in Bolivia, this commentary by Viviana Herrera Vargas in Medium is of particular interest. Luis Arce was the Evo Morales’s Economy and Finance minister for almost 12 years. Unfortunately, the economic success of Evo Morales’ administration was at the expense of indigeneous rights and ecosystems, especially in the lowlands and the Amazon. In Ms. Vargas’ commentary she quotes Carlos Arze of Cedla (a Bolivian research institute): “The problem with the MAS economic miracle is how it was achieved: by deepening extractivism and increasing dependency on transnational capital”.

Ms. Vargas notes that “territories in the Amazonian lowlands were opened up to road infrastructure, mining, gas exploration, agro-industrial, and energy infrastructure projects, and the arrival of a myriad of actors: from highland colonizers to transnational capital, including Chinese.” She also notes that “Five of the thirty-five hydroelectric dams envisioned in this energy plan were located in protected areas and the Amazon.”

Of particular concern is that there was “no free, prior, and informed consultation on these projects as required by Bolivia’s Constitution and the International Labor Organization’s Convention 169 on Indigenous people, which Bolivia has ratified.”

In response, multiple organizations have been formed. “At the national level, the Coordinator for the Defense of Indigenous, Native, Peasant Territories, and Protected Areas (Contiocap) has become one of the major organizations against the construction of megaprojects. Made up mostly of women (95%), this organization brings together more than 30 local resistance groups opposing a myriad of projects, including mega hydroelectric dams in the Amazon.”

The impact of these megaprojects in Madidi National Park and and Pilon Lajas is specifically discussed in this commentary:

“In November 2016, in the Amazonian north of La Paz, Indigenous peoples led a blockade against the Italian firm Geodata as it attempted to conduct a feasibility study ahead of the El Chepete-Bala dam project. After kicking out the company, the communities declared themselves in permanent alert and demanded that their right to free, prior, and informed consultation was respected. Ruth Alipaz and Alex Villca, both indigenous Uchupiamona from the communities of the rivers Beni, Quiquibey, and Tiuchi are the General Coordinator and spokesperson respectively of Contiocap. They denounce El Bala-Chepete hydroelectric megaprojects for their devastating effects on the territory which encompasses two National Parks (Madidi and Pilón Lajas); including, the displacement of more than 17 Indigenous communities; destruction of biodiversity, archeological sites, and Indigenous-led ecotourism initiatives; and the disappearance of indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation. Over the years, Villca and Alipaz described diverse tactics used by MAS officials to fracture their organizations: from slandering them; questioning their indigenous identity for having university degrees and being ecotourism entrepreneurs; co-opting their organization by creating parallel ones aligned with the government; to promising infrastructure projects in exchange for support for the projects. Ruth has spoken at numerous international forums, including the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, to bring attention to these violations, and to demand that the Morales’s government respected the rights of Indigenous peoples to free, prior, and informed consultation.”

The fire affects towns and protected areas in 5 regions of Bolivia

Last week, the Bolivian government declared a national disaster situation due to drought and fires that are spreading through several regions in the country according to this Spanish language article. All five departments are now affected by fire, with Santa Cruz particularly hard hit.

“In Madidi National Park, the fire got out of control and the locals warn that the fire is active in an inaccessible place to fight it, so they ask for help to prevent the fire from reaching nearby communities .

“The fire approached the population, homes, fields, water sources and productive areas. Brigades were made, we put out several fire points but on Friday everything got worse, "said a resident of the natural reserve.

The fire started in zone “A” of Madidi, within the municipality of Apolo, in the north of the department of La Paz.

“We require tools and water pumps to attack the fire by land; but we need you to support us by pouring water from the air. We can only wait for the fire to reach these flat sectors, ”said the villager.”

Many Rivers, Too Many Dams

In an Opinion piece published in the New York Times, Dr. Philip Fearnside, an ecologist at the National Institute for Research in Amazonia in Brazil, “one-fifth of all of the water that runs off the surface of the Earth ends up in” the Amazon basin. This area has been called a “hot spot for future hydropower expansion” since “The flows of these rivers can generate a lot of electricity…At least 158 dams are either operating or under construction now in the river basin, according to a study last year in the journal Nature Communications, and an additional 351 have been proposed.”

Brazil, Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador “have big plans for Amazonian dams.” Unfortunately, “plans for these big, disruptive projects are often shrouded in secrecy.” Mega dam building in the Amazon region is “driven by the country’s agricultural and heavy industrial interests, is being carried out with little regard to the impacts on Indigenous people and the environment, is proceeding with little effort to capitalize on the nation’s vast renewable energy potential, and is often fueled by corruption.”

Dr. Fearnside reports that the negative environmental impacts of megadams include:

—”some lowland dams in the Amazon actually may exceed the carbon emissions rates of fossil fuel plants.”

—”Dams can block annual fish migrations… after Brazil built one dam on the Madeira, in 2011, and another in 2013, fish catches in what had been the world’s second greatest riverine fishery plummeted in Brazil, Bolivia and Peru.”

—”nutrient-rich sediments carried by these rivers are trapped behind dams rather than carried downstream and deposited on flood plains, where they are essential for agriculture. “

—”forests…drown in the sprawling reservoirs behind them and are cut down to make way for the accompanying development and to clear paths for transmission lines strung across vast distances”

—”Mercury that occurs naturally in the soil as well as in runoff from gold mining operations that can often be found upriver of dams can be transformed into highly poisonous methylmercury through a chemical reaction at the bottom of reservoirs, where there is almost no oxygen in the water”

—”the lack of oxygen at the bottom of these reservoirs also causes another chemical reaction that produces methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas”

—”A 2014 study in the journal Energy Policy warned that “in most countries large hydropower dams will be too costly in absolute terms and take too long to build” to make sense.”

You can read the entire Opinion piece here. Translation into Spanish and Portuguese is also available.