Amazon highway

For months, barbed wire stretched over a river in the Bolivian Amazon. Indigenous communities downstream from this makeshift blockade want to keep out government officials seeking their consent to build a road through the Isiboro-Secure reserve, commonly known as the TIPNIS. Thousands of activists already marched across the country twice in just over a year to bring their protest to President Evo Morales' doorstep. The government has since opened a consultation process with the communities affected.

Fernando Vargas is a senior leader from the TIPNIS who opposes the current consultation. "There is a law for consultation, but outside the established terms and time period. We cannot be complicit in the violation of our own constitution."

"It seems this government has just remembered the TIPNIS exists, and begun to show the communities it is concerned about the TIPNIS,” he told DW. "They never did this before."

The indigenous people who historically lived in the TIPNIS are the mojeño trinitario, yuracare and t'simane, who share a collective land title and live a sometimes migratory lifestyle based on fishing, subsistence farming, and hunting. Some of their communities reject the proposed road, saying it will open their territory to land grabs and destroy the environment they have carefully tended for centuries.

On the southern fringes of that protected territory, coca leaf farmers lead a very different life tied to private land ownership, markets and a cash economy. The road is broadly supported by the government and coca farming communities that see it as a key link to markets in a country with very limited infrastructure. That conflict makes the road a crucible for tensions over indigenous land rights and development.

Nationwide protests

In September 2011, more than a thousand indigenous protesters walked 350 miles to La Paz, the country's capital. Carrying children and supplies, the marchers climbed 12,000 feet from the Amazon to the freezing, snow-capped Andean peaks that surround the city of La Paz. At the time, construction on the road that would cut through the TIPNIS was underway, as two branches of highway closed in on the park.

The government had not consulted with the people of the TIPNIS before beginning the road, as required by the Constitution, and protesters demanded the project's cancellation. The situation didn't grab a great deal of international attention until police attacked marchers with tear gas and batons at the town of Chaparina, and tried to load them onto buses to return them to their communities.

Pressured by massive public outcry, the government cancelled the road in October 2011, but months later the tide changed following a pro-road march that included some communities from the southern part of the TIPNIS. The possibility of the project was back when President Morales signed a law mandating a consultation process. Communities angered by the government reversal then undertook an unsuccessful second march against the road between April and June of this year.

“There's nothing more democratic than a referendum, nothing more democratic than a consultation,” Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera told national news outlet Fides at the time.

What is consultation?

The new Bolivian Constitution, which was approved in 2009, says indigenous peoples must be consulted via a prior, informed and good faith process about legislative or administrative measures that affect them. Bolivia also supports the two major international documents on consultation with indigenous peoples, the 1989 International Labor Organization Convention 169 (ILO 169), and the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Some leaders from within the TIPNIS agreed to the consultation. Others, particularly from the northeast section of the territory, vowed to resist, saying the process was not done in good faith.

In an August statement, Amnesty International said it was concerned the consultation process in the TIPNIS “falls short of Bolivia's international human rights obligations,” and that “failure to involve Indigenous Peoples early in this process has alienated many communities and created a climate of strong opposition to the road's construction.”

The Bolivian government rejects the criticism, and says opposition to the road is the result of just a few local leaders and environmental activists. The government recently extended the timetable for the consultation to December.

'Progress' in the Amazon

Sarela Paz is an anthropologist who began working with communities in the TIPNIS more than 20 years ago. She says experience shows that if the road goes through the TIPNIS, the yuracare, t'simane and mojeño trinitario will probably see their cultures assimilated into the coca producers' way of life.

"We're seeing two distinct ways of life colliding here, which are opposites," she told DW. "Thinking about future scenarios, and according to what we've already seen in the southern part of the TIPNIS, if they build the highway the indigenous way of life will not be able to survive it."

The Bolivian government says the route is key to linking eastern and western Bolivia, while some protestors believe the government plans to explore for oil and gas reserves in the TIPNIS. Whatever the case, the government has not embraced the possibility of rerouting the road, saying that cost and environmental factors make other routes unfeasible.

As the end of the consultation process draws near this December, resistance continues in parts of the TIPNIS, and whether any consensus can be reached on the road remains in serious doubt.