Lacandona, the great Mayan jungle that extends through the state of Chiapas in southern Mexico, is home to natural wealth and indigenous peoples' settlements that are once again threatened by the probable reactivation of abandoned oil wells. Image: Ceiba

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Jan 19 2024 (IPS)

The Lacandona jungle in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas is home to 769 species of butterflies, 573 species of trees, 464 species of birds, 114 species of mammals, 119 species of amphibians and reptiles, and several abandoned oil wells.

The oil wells have been a source of concern for the communities of the great Mayan jungle and environmental organizations since the 1970s, when oil prospecting began in the area and gradually left at least five wells inactive, whether plugged or not."The situation is always complex, due to legal loopholes that do not delimit the jungle, the natural protected areas are not delimited, it has been a historical mess. The search for oil has always been there." -- Fermín Domínguez

Now, Mexico’s policy of increasing oil production, promoted by the federal government, is reviving the threat of reactivating oil industry activity in the jungle ecosystem of some 500,000 hectares located in the east of the state, which has lost 70 percent of its forest in recent decades due to deforestation.

A resident of the Benemérito de las Américas municipality, some 1,100 kilometers south of Mexico City, who requested anonymity for security reasons, told IPS that a Mexican oil services company has contacted some members of the ejidos – communities on formerly public land granted to farm individually or cooperatively – trying to buy land around the inactive wells.

“They say they are offering work. We are concerned that they are trying to restart oil exploration, because it is a natural area that could be damaged and already has problems,” he said.

Adjacent to Benemérito de las Américas, which has 23,603 inhabitants according to the latest records, the area where the inactive wells are located is within the 18,348 square kilometers of the protected Lacandona Jungle Region.

It is one of the seven reserves of the ecosystem that the Mexican government decreed in 2016 and where oil activity in its subsoil is banned.

Between 1903 and 2014, the state-owned oil company Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) drilled five wells in the Lacandona jungle, inhabited by some 200,000 people, according to the autonomous governmental National Hydrocarbons Commission (CNH), in charge of allocating hydrocarbon lots and approving oil and gas exploration plans. At least two of these deposits are now closed, according to the CNH.

The Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve, in the Lacandona jungle in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, faces the threat of oil exploration, which would add to phenomena such as deforestation, drought and forest fires that have occurred in recent years. Image: Semarnat

The Lacantun well is located between a small group of houses and the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve (RBMA), the most megadiverse in the country, part of Lacandona and near the border with Guatemala. The CNH estimates the well’s proven oil reserves at 15.42 million barrels and gas reserves at 2.62 million cubic feet.

Chole, Tzeltal, Tzotzil and Lacandon Indians inhabit the jungle.

Other inactive deposits in the Benemérito de las Américas area are Cantil-101 and Bonampak-1, whose reserves are unknown.

In the rural areas of the municipality, the local population grows corn, beans and coffee and manages ecotourism sites. But violence has driven people out of Chiapas communities, as has been the case for weeks in the southern mountainous areas of the state due to border disputes and illegal business between criminal groups.

In addition, the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), an indigenous organization that staged an uprising on Jan. 1, 1994 against the marginalization and poverty suffered by the native communities, is still present in the region.

Chiapas, where oil was discovered at the beginning of the 20th century, is among the five main territories in terms of production of crude oil and gas in this Latin American country, with 10 hydrocarbon blocks in the northern strip of the state.

In November, Mexico extracted 1.64 million barrels of oil and 4.9 billion cubic feet of gas daily. The country currently ranks 20th in the world in terms of proven oil reserves and 41st in gas.

Historically, local communities have suffered water, soil and air pollution from Pemex operations.

As of November, there were 6,933 operational wells in the country, while Pemex has sealed 122 of the wells drilled since 2019, although none in Chiapas, according to a public information request filed by IPS.

Since taking office in December 2018, leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has strengthened Pemex and the also state-owned Federal Electricity Commission by promoting the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels, to the detriment of renewable energy.

The state of Chiapas is home to hydroelectric power plants, mining projects, hydrocarbon exploitation blocks and a section of the Mayan Train, the most emblematic megaproject of the current Mexican government. Image: Center for Zoque Language and Culture AC

Territory under siege

The RBMA is one of Mexico’s 225 natural protected areas (NPAs) and its 331,000 hectares are home to 20 percent of the country’s plant species, 30 percent of its birds, 27 percent of its mammals and 17 percent of its freshwater fish.

Like all of the Lacandona rainforest, the RBMA faces deforestation, the expansion of cattle ranching, wildlife trafficking, drought, and forest fires.

Fermín Ledesma, an academic at the public Universidad Autónoma Chapingo, said possible oil exploration could aggravate existing social and environmental conflicts in the state, in addition to growing criminal violence and the historical absence of the State.

“The situation is always complex, due to legal loopholes that do not delimit the jungle, the natural protected areas are not delimited, it has been a historical mess. The search for oil has always been there,” he told IPS from Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the capital of Chiapas.

The researcher said “it is a very complex area, with a 50-year agrarian conflict between indigenous peoples, often generated by the government itself, which created an overlapping of plans and lands.”

Ledesma pointed to a contradiction between the idea of PNAs that are depopulated in order to protect them and the historical presence of native peoples.

From 2001 to 2022, Chiapas lost 748,000 hectares of tree cover, equivalent to a 15 percent decrease since 2000, one of the largest sites of deforestation in Mexico, according to the international monitoring platform Global Forest Watch. In 2022 alone, 26,800 hectares of natural forest disappeared.

In addition, this state, one of the most impoverished in the country, has suffered from the presence of mining, the construction of three hydroelectric plants and, now, the Mayan Train, the Mexican government’s most emblematic megaproject inaugurated on Dec. 15, one of the seven sections of which runs through the north of the state.

But there are also stories of local resistance against oil production. In 2017, Zoque indigenous people prevented the auction of two blocks on some 84,000 hectares in nine municipalities that sought to obtain 437.8 million barrels of crude oil equivalent.

The anonymous source expressed hope for a repeat of that victory and highlighted the argument of conducting an indigenous consultation prior to the projects, free of pressure and with the fullest possible information. “With that we can stop the wells, as occurred in 2017. We are not going to let them move forward,” he said.

Ledesma the researcher questioned the argument of local development driven by natural resource extraction and territorial degradation as a pretext.

“They say it’s the only way to do it, but that’s not true. It leaves a trail of environmental damage, damage to human health, present and future damage. It is much easier for the population to accept compensation or give up the land, because they see it is degraded. A narrative is created that they live in an impoverished area and therefore they have to relocate. This has happened in other areas,” he said.

Troops from the special military battalion set up to protect Nicaragua’s forests confiscate an ilegal shipment of logs in the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve. Credit: José Garth Medina/IPS

By José Adán Silva
MANAGUA, Jun 19 2014 (IPS)

More than 30,000 members of the Mayagna indigenous community are in danger of disappearing, along with the rainforest which is their home in Nicaragua, if the state fails to take immediate action to curb the destruction of the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve, the largest forest reserve in Central America and the third-largest in the world.

Arisio Genaro, president of the Mayagna nation, travelled over 300 km from his community on the outskirts of the reserve in May to protest in Managua that the area where his people have lived for centuries is being invaded and destroyed by settlers from the country’s Pacific coastal and central regions.

In early June, Genaro returned to the capital to participate in several academic activities aimed at raising awareness on the environment among university students in Managua and to protest to whoever would listen that their ancestral territory is being destroyed by farmers determined to expand the agricultural frontier by invading the protected area, which covers 21,000 sq km.

The Mayagna chief told Tierramérica that in 1987 the nucleus of what is now the biosphere reserve had a total area of 1,170,210 hectares of virgin forest and an estimated population of fewer than 7,000 indigenous people.

In 1997, when it was declared a Word Heritage Site and Biosphere Reserve by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the reserve covered more than two million hectares of tropical rainforest, including the buffer zone.

By 2010, when the indigenous people living in the reserve numbered around 25,000, the jungle area had been reduced to 832,237 hectares, according to figures cited by Genaro. The presence of non-indigenous settlers within the borders of the reserve had climbed from an estimated 5,000 in 1990 to over 40,000 in 2013.

“The y are burning everything, to plant crops. They cut down forests to raise cattle, they log the big trees to sell the wood, they shoot the animals and dry up riverbeds to put in roads,” Genaro told Tierramérica.

Antonia Gámez, a 66-year-old Mayagna chief, also made the trek from her community to speak out in towns and cities along the Pacific coast about the situation faced by her people in Bosawas, whose name comes from the first syllables of the main geographical features that delimit the reserve: the Bocay river, the Salaya mountain, and the Waspuk river.

“All of our families used to live on what nature provides; the forest is our home and our father, it has given us food, water and shelter,” she told Tierramérica in her native tongue, with the help of an interpreter. “Now the youngest ones are looking for work on the new farms created where there was once forest, and the oldest of us don’t have anywhere to go, because everything is disappearing.”

Gámez said that in the forest, her people planted grains and grew and harvested fruit, and hunted what they needed for food with bows and arrows. She added that there were abundant crabs and fish in the rivers and wild boars, tapirs and deer in the forests.

“Now the animals have gone. With each bang from a gun or mountain that is cleared, they either die or move deeper into the jungle. There aren’t many left to hunt,” she complained on her visit to Managua.

Part of the reserve is also inhabited by Miskitos, the largest indigenous group in this Central American country, where by law native people have the right to collectively own and use the lands where they live.

The complaints by the indigenous people were corroborated by Tierramérica in conversations with independent academics and activists as well as government officials.

Anthropologist Esther Melba McLean with the Atlantic Coast Centre for Research and Development at the Bluefields Indian and Caribbean University has led studies that warn that if the invasion by outsiders and destruction of the forest are not brought to a halt, both the Mayagna people and the native flora and fauna of Bosawas could disappear in two decades.

“The destruction of the forest would mean more than the end of an ethnic group; it would mean the end of the site where 10 percent of the world’s biodiversity is found,” she told Tierramérica.

The reserve is home to endemic species like the Nototriton saslaya salamander and the crested eagle, which are listed as endangered by local environmental organisations that point out that there are still many species that have not even been documented.

According to environmentalist Jaime Incer, an adviser on environmental affairs to the office of the president, if the destruction of the indigenous territory continues, “in less than 25 years the jungle will have completely disappeared.”

A study published in 2012 by the German development cooperation agency, GIZ, Nicaragua’s National Union of Agricultural and Livestock Producers (UNAG), the European Union and the international development organisation Oxfam warned that it would take 24 years to lose the forest in Bosawas and 13 years to lose the buffer zone around the reserve, at the current rate of deforestation.

Incer told Tierramérica that in response to the indigenous community’s complaints and the backing they have received from environmentalists, the administration of President Daniel Ortega, who has governed since 2007, has begun to take measures against the destruction of the forest. “But they have been insufficient,” he acknowledged.

Ortega ordered the creation of a military battalion of more than 700 troops to guard the country’s forests and nature reserves. The government also organised a committee of national authorities aimed at coordinating actions and applying a zero tolerance approach towards people and organisations accused of destroying the environment.

Alberto Mercado, the technical coordinator of Bosawas in the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources, said at the Central American University in Managua on Jun. 10 that the government has been carrying out actions to curb the destruction of the reserve.

He said the authorities had removed dozens of non-indigenous families from the nucleus of the reserve, and that they had brought people to trial who were dedicated to illegally selling land in Bosawas.

Mercado said dozens of lawyers have been investigated and suspended for allowing sales transactions involving indigenous property. In addition, he said, the authorities have been combating trafficking in local fauna and flora.

“But the struggle is huge…traffickers identify the ‘blind spots’ and that’s where they make their incursions into indigenous territory, fence it in, claim it is theirs, and that’s how the trafficking of land starts,” the official said, sounding discouraged.

The complaints of the indigenous community have gone beyond national borders, and have reached international human rights organisations. The non-governmental Nicaraguan Human Rights Centre also filed a complaint with the Organisation of American States (OAS).

Vilma Núñez, director of the Human Rights Centre, told Tierramérica that she had denounced the situation faced by the Mayagna people during the 44th OAS General Assembly, whose main theme was “development with social inclusion”, held Jun. 3-5 in Asunción, Paraguay.

“The state and the government should guarantee the right of the Mayagna and all indigenous people in this country to live on their own land, and defend them from extermination,” Núñez said.

A view of the Peruvian Amazon. Credit: Jake G/CC-BY-SA-2.0

By Milagros Salazar
LIMA, Jan 17 2013 (IPS)

Peru’s economic growth is largely dependent on its wealth of natural resources, which provide over 50 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) and 80 percent of exports. In view of this fact, the government is developing a project for the valuation and protection of this natural bounty.

“There is a natural infrastructure tied to the physical infrastructure, which the state must protect,” Fernando León, an economic incentives advisor to the Initiative for Conservation in the Andean Amazon (ICAA), told IPS.

By way of example, he noted that “if you only worry about the pipes and other infrastructure for a drinking water treatment project, and not about the river basins that provide the water that will go through the pipes, then what will you treat for the population to drink in the future?”

Until late 2011, León headed up the Ministry of Environment’s Department for the Assessment, Valuation and Financing of Natural Resources, where he advocated the promotion of projects for the protection of these resources under the National System of Public Investments (SNIP).

His successor, Roger Loyola, who has continued with these efforts, announced that by the end of the year, a so-called “Green SNIP” will begin to operate.

Loyola and his team have been working in coordination with the Ministry of the Economy and Finance (MEF), which oversees SNIP, to draw up the guidelines, conceptual framework and terms and conditions for the environmental projects envisioned.

This process has posed a challenge for the financial specialists, because they have had to demonstrate that these initiatives will be economically profitable for the country, for example, by demonstrating the economic benefits of protecting an endangered species, explained Loyola.

During this stage, projects are being studied in the areas of biodiversity, climate change, land management and zoning, and protected natural areas, all of which fall under the remit of the Ministry of Environment (MINAM).

Sources at the MEF investment policy office told IPS that “the first step being undertaken is to assess which of all these projects qualify as public investments.”

Once a conceptual consensus has been reached within MINAM to serve as a reference for other sectors and the environmental and economic considerations have been reconciled, they will move on to developing the guidelines and methodology for the design and approval of individual projects.

Biologist Sandro Chávez, national coordinator of the environmental NGO Foro Ecológico and former head of the National Protected Natural Areas Service, believes the Green SNIP initiative to be a generally positive step.

However, speaking with IPS, Chávez warned of the danger that the government will make the mistake of taking environmental issues into account only with regard to investments in conservation projects, “when the environmental component should be mainstreamed in all of the projects presented by all sectors of the state to ensure that they are sustainable.”

León, for his part, stressed that the specific projects promoted by MINAM should be seen as a first stage, since he knows first-hand from his experience promoting the development of a Green SNIP as a public official that it will not be easy to convince the Ministry of the Economy to take this step.

But despite this resistance, he noted, a number of “green” projects are already being undertaken by the MEF.

Last September, at a regional workshop on financing for biodiversity public policies and conservation in the Andean Amazon, Mónica Muñoz Nájar from the MEF investment policy office announced that 15 environmental projects were being carried out under the SNIP.

These include a project undertaken by the government of the northern region of San Martín for the recovery of ecosystem services that provide water for the population.

Loyola reported that there are high expectations among regional governments planning to submit environmental projects for financing under the Green SNIP. León added that initiatives should be prioritised as soon as the new system is up and running, “because what we consume in the cities is connected to rural areas, to what is in the interior of the country.”

The experts believe that reports should be prepared on an ongoing basis to demonstrate the benefits provided by environmental resources and the losses incurred when the environment is mistreated, in order to dispel the myth that nature’s resources are freely available and infinite.

In an analysis of the environmental situation in Peru in 2007, the World Bank concluded that the environmental damages inflicted on this country have an economic cost of 3.9 percent of GDP and primarily affect the poorest sectors of the population.

The World Bank report estimated that “the impact of environmental degradation on the poor in comparison with the non-poor is 20 percent greater in terms of impact per 1,000 people and 4.5 times greater in terms of impact per unit of income.”

An inter-sectoral committee comprising 28 institutions and headed up by the Statistics and Information Institute (INEI) was launched in Peru last August to establish a system of “green accounting” that contemplates environmental degradation, water and forests, with technical assistance from MINAM.

The goal is to “incorporate environmental variables into national accounting practices,” said Araceli Urriola, an environmental accounting specialist at the Department for the Assessment, Valuation and Financing of Natural Resources. “In other words, the supply and demand (in environmental terms) of all economic activities,” she told IPS.

Mexico, Guatemala and Colombia have made significant progress in this area, noted Urriola. In Peru, however, this process of valuing environmental benefits and losses and establishing a green GDP is just beginning. The members of the inter-sectoral committee are expected to meet before the end of this month to agree on a work plan, the INEI told IPS.

“Environmental impacts are cumulative and are not always felt immediately. Because of this, some governments have not placed any importance on conservation and preservation. That is why, through the valuation of environmental damage, we hope to highlight the importance of conservation, because otherwise, we will pay for it tomorrow,” stressed Loyola.

(END)

Orangutan survival is seriously threatened by palm oil plantations. Credit: Kafil Yamin/IPS

By Kafil Yamin
JAKARTA, Aug 10 2012 (IPS)

When four men were sentenced to eight months in jail in March for the ‘murder’ of orangutans, it was the first time that people associated with Indonesia’s booming palm oil industry were convicted for killing man’s close relations in the primate family.

Conservationists were not happy with the ‘light’ sentences handed down by the court in Kutai Kertanegara district, East Kalimantan, on Mar. 18, to Imam Muktarom, Mujianto, Widiantoro and Malaysian national Phuah Cuan Pun.

“As expected, the sentences were light, much lighter than what the prosecutors demanded. Such punishments will not bring any change to the situation of orangutans,” Fian Khairunnissa, an activist of the Centre for Orangutan Protection, told IPS.

Indonesia’s courts have generally looked the other way as the palm oil industry relentlessly decimated orangutans by destroying vast swathes of Southeast Asia’s rainforests to convert them into oil palm plantations.

In April, a court in Banda Aceh, Sumatra, dismissed a case filed by the Indonesia Environmental Forum (WALHI) against PT Kallista Alam, one of five palm oil firms operating in Tripa, and Irwandi Yusuf, former governor of Aceh province, for the conversion of 1,600 hectares (3,950 acres) of carbon-rich peat forests into palm oil plantations.

The court admonished WALHI saying it should have sought an out-of-court settlement with PT Kallista Alam –  which never paused clearing its  1,600-hectare concession, granted in August 2011.  

Mysteriously, just before the WALHI case was to be heard in court, numerous fires broke out in the Tripa peat swamps, including in the concession granted to PT Kallista Alam.

Community leaders in Tripa point out that the concessions fly in the face of a presidential  moratorium on new permits to clear primary forests, effective in Indonesia since last year as part of a billion dollar deal with Norway to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

 “The issuance of a license to Kallista is a crime, because it changes the Leuser ecosystem and peat land forests into business concessions,” Kamarudin, a Tripa community spokesman, told IPS.

The Leuser Ecosystem, in the provinces of Aceh and North Sumatra, covers more than 2.6 million hectares of prime tropical rain forest and is the last place on earth where Sumatran sub-species of elephants, rhinoceros, tigers and orangutans coexist.

The survival of orangutans,  a ‘keystone species’,  is critical for the wellbeing of other animals and plants with which they coexist in a habitat.   

A statement released in June by the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme estimated that there are now only 200 of the red-harired great apes left in Tripa compared to  about 2,000 in 1990 and said their situation was now ‘desperate’ as result of the fires and clearing operations carried out by palm oil companies.

During the last five years, the oil palm business has emerged as a major force in the Indonesian economy, with an investment value of close five billion dollars on eight million hectares.

Indonesia plans to increase crude palm oil (CPO) production from the current 23.2 million tons this year to 28.4 million tons by 2014. This calls for an 18.7 percent increase in plantation area, according to Indonesia’s agriculture ministry.

But the price of the planned expansion would be further shrinkage of orangutan habitat by 1.6 million hectares because oil companies find it cheaper to burn forests and chase away or kill the orangutans. 

“If you find orangutans in palm oil plantations, they are not coming there from somewhere else… they are in their own homes that have been changed into plantations,” said Linda Yuliani, a researcher at the Centre for International Forestry Research.

“But plantation company people see the orangutans as the encroachers,” she said. “Confused orangutans can often be seen wandering in plantations, and with their habitat gone, they forage on young palm trees,” she said.

A joint survey by 19 organisations, including The Nature Conservancy, WWF and the Association of Primate Experts, found that some 750 orangutans died during 2008-2009, mostly because of conflict with human beings.

It has not mattered that Indonesia is one of the signatories to the Convention on Illegal Trade and Endangered Species, which classifies orangutans under Appendix I which lists species identified as currently endangered, or in danger of extinction.

“Clearing peat land also releases huge volumes of carbon dioxide, similar to amounts released during  volcanic eruptions,” Willie Smits, a Dutch conservationist who works on orangutan protection, tells IPS.

Reckless clearing of peat swamp forests has already turned Indonesia into the world’s largest emitter  of carbon dioxide, after the United States and China.

“The government may earn some money from oil palm investment, but there are far bigger losses from environmental destruction,” says Elfian Effendi, director of Greenomics Indonesia. “There is a multiplied effect on the local economy and loss of biodiversity.”

But, even to some conservationists, stopping the oil palm business in Indonesia – which feeds a vast range of industries from fast food and cosmetics to biodiesel – is impractical.

“What is needed is enforcement of schemes that allow the palm oil business and orangutans to co-exist,” Resit Rozer, a Dutch conservationist who runs a sanctuary for rescued orangutans, told IPS.

Palm oil companies that are members of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), a convention to encourage importers to buy only RSPO-certified CPO, see no advantage in the scheme that requires them to set aside a forest block for orangutans within plantations and provide safe corridors for the apes to move from one spot to another.

“U.S. and several European countries still buy non-certified CPO as the RSPO certificate does not gurantee purchase,” Rozer told IPS. “The West told us to practice environmentally-sound business, but they do not buy RSPO-certified CPO because implementation has been delayed till 2015,” Rozer said.

 “For companies that have invested in RSPO certification, the delay has been a heavy blow. They feel cheated,” said Rozer who helps palm oil companies in creating orangutan refuges and corridors.

After a 62-day march from Bolivia’s tropical lowlands, over 1,000 indigenous protesters opposed to the construction of a road through a pristine rainforest reserve reached the seat of government Wednesday, just a few hours after the police called off a six-day national strike.

The native demonstrators say they will camp out in the capital until the left-wing government of Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, promises to protect their homeland in the Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS), the country’s largest nature and freshwater reserve.

On the last stretch of the march, from the outskirts of La Paz to the presidential palace, the protesters steered clear of a demonstration by pro-Morales native Aymara protesters, in order to avoid a clash.

Tension was running high on Wednesday due to the presence of the combative “ponchos rojos” or “red ponchos”, a radical Aymara faction who sent representatives as a sign of political support for the president, who is himself Aymara.

They were joined by members of trade unions and other organisations that back the governing Movement to Socialism (MAS) party.

Just before the protesters from the Amazon rainforest reserve, located in the central province of Cochabamba and the northern province of Beni, reached La Paz Wednesday, the government and the rank-and-file police protesters reached an agreement that put an end to the police mutiny over low pay.

The agreement signed by the police and the government in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, after a six-day strike, granted a 14 dollar a month raise and a 30 dollar bonus, increasing the base pay for a police officer to just under 300 dollars a month, retroactive to January. The government also agreed to reform a strict new disciplinary code.

“Our march is not only demanding the preservation of TIPNIS. It is an act of defence of the dignity of Bolivians and the respect of indigenous territories, as well as the defence of biodiversity, the environment, Mother Earth, and the constitution (of 2009),” the leader of the protest, Fernando Vargas, told IPS.

The head of the Pacha Amuyu Foundation, Aymara anthropologist Juan Ángel Yujra, told IPS that “being met by an indigenous counter-march has caused a great deal of pain.”

Yujra said the narrowly averted clash between indigenous people from the jungle and Aymara from the highlands reflected a rupture between social sectors that in the past were all part of the alliance that brought Morales to power.

“It is a test of strength” to see who has the power to decide on what kind of development model Bolivia will follow: one in which transnational corporations impose their will, or another in which the country’s natural areas are protected, with support from foreign donors and governments, he said.

The indigenous peoples of the Amazon region make up 10 percent of the 10 million inhabitants of Bolivia, where over 60 percent of the population are native people, mainly belonging to the Quechua and Aymara ethnic groups concentrated in the western highlands.

Since 1990, the native people of the rainforest have marched to La Paz nine times. In October 2011, at the end of the eighth march by the communities grouped in the
Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of Eastern Bolivia (CIDOB), made up of 11 regional indigenous associations, Morales enacted a law defending TIPNIS and cancelling the plans for the road.

But the government backtracked on its decision following a February 2012 march from TIPNIS to La Paz in favour of the road, by pro-MAS outsiders and coca growers who have settled in the park. They pressured Morales to enact law 222, which calls for a consultation with the local population, leaving open the possibility of building the controversial road.

The indigenous protesters holding a vigil outside the seat of government are demanding the repeal of law 222. They are also calling for the creation of a legal framework for prior consultation of indigenous people on all development projects involving native territory.

The 177-km road across TIPNIS is one small portion of a highway funded and built by Brazil across Bolivia, to form part of an international corridor for the transport of goods from Brazil to the Pacific Ocean.

The 300-km stretch joining the cities of San Ignacio de Moxos in Beni and Villa Tunari in Cochabamba would reduce a 16-hour drive between the two cities to just four hours.

But opponents of the road say it will pave the way for illegal loggers, drug labs, and agribusiness projects to grow transgenic and biofuel crops in the nature reserve.

A study by the Bolivian Forum on the Environment and Development likened the impact of the road to “the passage of a tornado that would destroy everything in its path, with the expected disappearance of the 64 communities who live in TIPNIS,” comprising some 15,000 people from the Moxeño, Yuracaré and Chimane indigenous ethnic groups.

Lawmaker Pedro Nuni, who represents people in Bolivia’s Amazon jungle region, told IPS that the protesters were hoping the government would agree to talks on the issue.

Before the marchers reached La Paz, Vice President Álvaro García Linera said a dialogue would be held on the legal foundations indicated by the Constitutional Court, which requires reaching a consensus on how the consultation process on the TIPNIS road is to be carried out.

The marchers, supported by university students and people from lower and middle-income sectors, tried to march through Murillo square, the centre of political life in Bolivia. But they were beaten back by the police – the same police who a few hours earlier were demanding social justice and the right to protest.

“This is discrimination,” said the president of the ninth march, Bertha Bejarano. “President Morales does not own the square, it belongs to everyone.”

The exhausted marchers, who included pregnant women, mothers carrying children, and youngsters, were welcomed and cheered by thousands of people in La Paz. Yujra said this was a sign of recognition for people “from different cultures, whose lifestyles and rights are linked with nature.

“Only an agreement can help resolve the conflict and ease the tension in the country,” said the anthropologist, who predicts a lengthy struggle for land and in defence of the environment.