Indigenous Posted on January 27th, 2017 by

17-01-24

On our last night at Madidi Jungle lodge we asked Alejandro if he’d talk to us about his community and the impact of the dams proposed for the Rio Beni.  He recruited the manager of the lodge, Henry, to talk with us as well and used a map hanging in the gathering area to illustrate the consequences of the dam.  But better than simply showing us how many hundreds of acres of biodiverse forest would be flooded, Alejandro gave us a history of the San Jose de Uchupiamonas community.  Last year (2016) was the 400th anniversary of the community’s founding in 1616.  (For context, recall that Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts was first settled in 1620!) Luckily Alejandro skipped over most of that history by commenting that for more than 300 years they relied on hunting, farming, and the richness of the rain forest for survival.  But by the 1980s the community was facing an existential crisis:  better opportunities in the nearby cities of Rurrenabaque, San Buenaventura, even distant ones like Santa Cruz and La Paz, were luring people away.  By the 1990s it was clear they’d need to do something different to keep their young people.  At the same time the river Tuichi saw an influx of outside loggers with chainsaws who cut 300 to 400-year old mahogany trees and hunted out the wildlife.  In 1992 the community met and decided that their future would be better based on eco-tourism, and in that same year the Chalalan Ecolodge was begun.  In 1995 Madidi was set aside as a national park, and in the 20 years that followed the animal populations rebounded–but the giant mahoganies were still gone.  It wasn’t until 2005 that the local people were granted much of the area around Rio Tuichi as a communal territory of original peoples (TCO) as part of an “integrated management area” within the park. It’s in this area that the community has been building eco-lodges, and this is the area that will be flooded by the El Bala dam.  Now, Alejandro said, young people have great opportunities, and the community uses the rain forest sustainably for environmental education.  Young people from the community can work in the lodges (as guides, cooks, maintenance workers), learn english in school (opening other doors besides guiding people like us!), and go on to university.  “Now it’s great,” he said.  “We have opportunities.”

Henry added that getting permission for ecotourism ventures is difficult–far more difficult that getting government approval for road-building, lumbering, even building dams.  All 22 national parks, he said, have extractive concessions within them granted by the government.  The Morales government, he said, is run by indigenous people from the highland, the western altiplano.  These “chollas,” he said, don’t understand the forest and see it simply as a resource to be used up.  (People in the low eastern lands are called “cambas.”)

The next day we met Henry’s brother Alex, who has taken a higher profile role in arguing for the conservation of this area, helping to organize 18 communities that will be affected by the dams.  (Alex also is the one who helped arrange our visit, remembering us from his days running Chalalan lodge.)  The new constitution states clearly that the government must consult with local people before a project such as a dam can even be planned.  This has not happened. President Evo Morales dismisses local opposition, saying the opposition to the dam is being coordinated by foreign NGOs and conservation groups and financed by the United States.   He also dismisses Alex as a leader of the opposition, saying that he’s not really indigenous because he has a university degree.  We found it ironic and sad that the country’s first indigenous president would label anyone who disagreed with his policies as “not indigenous,” as a way of trying to silence and discredit his opponents.

Alejandro (center, in vest) explains about a lunch feast at San Miguel del Bala, near the site of the proposed dam

 

 

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