After Kary Mariscal had spent days watching the flames sink deeper and deeper into their homeland, the deputy from the Santa Cruz department was in for a message. For a Facebook video, she posed in a field in the background blazing one of those bushfires, which is usually ignited by farmers to open fields, and the last in Bolivia on intact jungle attacked. "It's burning here in Puerto Suárez, we're asking Evo Morales to declare an international emergency and seek help from neighboring countries, our Chiquitanía is on fire, everything is burning, we're losing everything, have mercy!"
The politician's video was shot on August 21st. On that Wednesday, the world was just beginning to learn about the ecological catastrophe caused by the forest and steppe fires in several Amazon riparian states (see the background of the extent of the fires here). But at the time, worldwide attention was focused almost exclusively on Brazil, where the biggest and most raging fires. But for little Bolivia, one of the poorest states in Latin America, the drama is no less devastating.
Aizar RALDES / AFP
Fire in the Otuquis National Park in southeastern Bolivia
Days passed before Morales even responded to the catastrophe
Bolivia's indigenous president, however, did not listen to what Kary Mariscal had to say. It is normal that these days in the steppe of Bolivia burn, and it was okay that the peasants procured by clearing land for their livestock farming, Morales said last week.
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Until he understood the extent of the disaster in his country, a few days passed. The head of state did not really react until he realized that the fires could also mean a political catastrophe for him.
Morales wants to be re-elected after three terms and more than 13 years in office on 20 October. But the fires could now bring the hopes a sudden end. By the weekend, around one million hectares of forest and savanna were destroyed in the state of Santa Cruz alone. And every extra hectare costs Morales votes. Economic experts warn that the growth of gross domestic product could be halved by the fire from the predicted four percent this year to two percent.
"Support is welcome"
Only on massive pressure Morales steered. Environmental organizations, the Catholic Church and artists have been calling for rethinking for days. On Sunday, people in small groups in the country's three largest cities, the governorate of La Paz, Santa Cruz and Cochabamba gathered for spontaneous demonstrations calling for the acceptance of international aid.
"Support is welcome, be it from international organizations, personalities or presidents". Prior to that, he had chartered the "Global Supertanker", the world's largest firefighting aircraft, to extinguish the fires in Chiquitanía. On Tuesday, he announced that he would also request three fire-fighting helicopters from abroad.
Global SuperTanker
In Bolivia, not only important forests are being lost these days, environmentalists are warning that 500 species of animals are at risk, including jaguars and tapirs, and 35 other endangered species, some of which are found only in Bolivia. Because even the north of the Amazon rainforest of the country is in parts in flames. Bolivia is home to only ten percent of the six million square kilometers of Amazon jungle in its state borders. But these have already suffered severely in recent years. The Amazon network RAISG, which was formed by experts from six riparian states, wrote in June that 88 percent of the fires registered in Bolivia between 2005 and 2018 were located in the Amazon region.
Morales was never really a green guy
"It could take 200 years for the forests of Bolivia to recover," warns Miguel Crespo, director of the environmental organization Probioma. "I have never seen such an environmental tragedy". Crespo blames the government for the drama. "In large part, this is a result of populism and the vision of agro-industrial development," says the Probioma chief.
Like all left-wing leaders in Latin America, Morales was never really a Green. As President, he has always tried to reconcile an ecological agenda with the need for his country to grow economically. When he came to power in early 2006, he emphasized the importance of Madre Tierra, Mother Earth, for his policies. And in 2010, Bolivia was the first country in the world to pass a law granting rights to all living things. Previously, the United Nations General Assembly had even named him the "World Hero of Mother Earth".
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Connoisseurs of the country consider this absurd. Morales is not an "ambientalista", nobody cares about the environment, says an international expert who has been working in Bolivia for a long time and does not want to read his name in public. "It exploits the resources of the country more than any of its predecessors," criticized the expert and rely heavily on the promotion of oil and gas to the detriment of the environment. The fires in his country raged for about three weeks before Morales responded . He also signed a particularly controversial decree at the beginning of July. It allows the virtually unlimited "controlled slash-and-burn" of forests in favor of the extraction of agricultural and pastureland in Santa Cruz and the neighboring Amazonian Beni.
In recent years, Morales has subordinated environmental interests increasingly those of the economy, criticized also the environmental activist Cecilia Requena. His government has passed at least four laws and six decrees since 2013 that allow the agricultural use of vulnerable forest areas. "In recent years, Morales has repeatedly forgiven polluters and pushed the shifting of the agricultural frontier into the forests," says Requena.
In Bolivia, clearing has increased sharply in recent years. Between 2000 and 2010, the country lost 1.82 million hectares by deforestation, as the Foundation Friends of Nature (FAN) writes. But even in the recent past, the loss of forest continues to be high. In 2018, according to the World Resources Institute (WRI), the country lost 154,488 hectares of primary forest, leaving it behind Brazil, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Indonesia and Colombia with the fifth-largest losses.