Global IssuesBOLIVIA: Native Protesters Celebrate Law Cancelling Rainforest Road
With victory cheers and predictions of future campaigns in defence of their ancestral territory, indigenous protesters from Bolivia's Amazon jungle region celebrated the new law that banned the construction of the road through their rainforest reserve.
The 66-day march by the demonstrators to La Paz and the controversy over the road undermined the backing for President Evo Morales among his main support base, the country's indigenous majority. Late Monday, Morales signed into law the agreement putting an end to the plan to build the road that was opposed by some 1,000 native protesters from the Amazon, who made the gruelling 600-km march from the rainforest to La Paz.
The demonstrators, who were subjected to a brutal police crackdown in late September near a remote village 330 km north of La Paz, were greeted as heroes by thousands of people who took to the streets on Wednesday Oct. 19 to welcome them when they reached this city in Bolivia's western highlands.
'The threat is latent, but the message sent out is that the native peoples have thought deeply about the defence of our territories,' indigenous lawmaker Pedro Nuni told IPS. The legislator, who belongs to the governing Movement to Socialism (MAS) but disagreed with the Morales administration over the issue of the rainforest road, said 'the government knows it cannot decide on the future of our land without consulting us.'
Nuni was pleased that, as he said, 95 percent of the 16 demands set forth by the protesters were addressed. The chief demand was the full cancellation of the project to build a 177-km road across the Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS).
The 415-million dollar stretch of road was one small portion of a highway funded and built by Brazil across Bolivia, which will 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 the northern province of Beni and Villa Tunari in the central province of Cochabamba, which was to cut across TIPNIS, would have reduced a 16-hour drive between the two cities to just four hours.
The local communities in TIPNIS are actually divided over the road, with peasant movements, trade unions, transport workers, shopkeepers, traders and some indigenous communities defending its construction on the argument that it would bring development.
The TIPNIS national park covers more than one million hectares in the provinces of Beni and Cochabamba and is collectively owned by some 15,000 people from three indigenous groups: the Moxeño, Yuracaré and Chimane Indians.
The law enacted by Morales was hastily approved by the legislature as the demonstrators held a vigil outside the building. The new legislation confirms the importance of the sociocultural and natural heritage of TIPNIS.
Recognition of the indigenous groups' collective right to the territory was achieved 21 years ago, when native people from the country's Amazon rainforest first marched to the highlands of La Paz and secured government recognition of four indigenous territories that were threatened by logging companies and the exploitation of other natural resources.
© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service