Political Report # 1274 Why is Evo Morales Reviving Bolivia’s Controversial TIPNIS Road?

By Emily Achtenberg. NACLA

On August 13, President Evo Morales promulgated a new law ending the special "untouchable" status of the Isiboro-Sécure Indigenous Territory and National Park (TIPNIS) in the Bolivian Amazon, and allowing construction of a controversial highway through the reserve. Almost six years earlier to the day (on August 15, 2011), some 1,000 indigenous TIPNIS residents and their supporters began a 360-mile trek from the Amazon lowlands to La Paz to protest Morales's inauguration of the proposed 182-mile road, whose central segment would bisect the 4,630 square mile reserve. The TIPNIS, doubly "protected" as an indigenous territory and a national park since 1990, is the ancestral homeland of the Chimáne, Yuracaré, and Moxeño- Trinitario peoples, who collectively own most of its land. Some 8,000-12,500 native indigenous subsist on fishing, hunting, and foraging activities throughout the park, which is among the most biodiverse regions in the world. In a spectacle that shocked the nation, the march was brutally repressed by police at Chaparina, leaving at least 70 wounded. In the wake of the tragedy, Morales agreed to cancel the road. In October 2011, he signed a law banning its construction and protecting the reserve as an "untouchable" zone. This effectively put the road on hold-even after a bitterly-contested government-sponsored consulta concluded that 80% of the TIPNIS communities polled supported it. The TIPNIS conflict, which pitted pro-road campesino and cocalero (coca grower) sectors against dissident lowland indigenous groups, is widely viewed as a turning point in Bolivia's "process of change." It profoundly altered the country's political and social landscape by rupturing the Unity Pact, the insurgent alliance of social movements that brought Morales to power in 2005. It exposed the contradictions of Morales's global championship of indigenous and environmental rights while promoting destructive projects at home. It also sparked a new grassroots resistance to the extractivist development model which has increasingly challenged Morales and the ruling MAS (Movement Towards Socialism) party.