Bolivia is in the midst of a gold rush caused by record gold prices and growing international demand. This gold rush has been facilitated by permissive mining regulations that blur the line between legal and illegal.
The spread of mining throughout the country and the broader Amazon in the last few years has left deep environmental scars. Mining has become one of the main drivers of deforestation and is threatening protected areas and native communities.
Unlike other Amazon countries, such as Peru and Colombia, the main mining players in Bolivia are mining cooperatives. Their economic and political power, and the loosely regulated national industry they operate in, have emboldened them to expand their mining operations to the most remote corners of Bolivia’s Amazon, including protected areas. But their operations are too often associated with flagrantly illegal acts, as they operate without environmental license or in alliance with dubious Chinese and Colombian companies.
*This article is part of a joint investigation by InSight Crime and the Igarapé Institute on illegal mining, wildlife, timber, and drug trafficking in the Bolivian Amazon. Read the other chapters here, or download the full PDF.
Prospectors are tearing up Bolivia’s Tuichi River in search of gold. The waterway descends into Madidi National Park, a natural wonder, home to more than 1,000 species of birds and some 200 species of mammals.
As the miners have grown more brazen in breaching the reserve, patrols by park rangers have been cut back, said Marcos Uzquiano, Madidi’s former director. When rangers do head out, they reduce their inspections to merely noting illegal activity, such as cylinders of diesel fuel being carried in. But lately, they fear doing even this, after having received threats. In certain sections of the park, the miners “decide who enters,” Uzquiano said.
“We have reached a point where all authority has been lost,” said Uzquiano, who was transferred from his post after speaking out about the situation.
Using heavy machinery that includes backhoes, dump trucks, and front-end loaders, the miners level embankments and dig pits. Mounds of rubble are left behind, and the once-clear river has become choked with silt, Uzquiano said.
“All the mining waste is being dumped directly into the river without any mitigation measures,” he said. The waste, also known as tailings, includes toxic mercury used in the separation of gold. “It’s completely out of control,” Uzquiano said.
Bolivia’s government, though, has not stopped the plunder, despite having established the reserve in 1995 to form one of the world’s most biologically diverse protected areas. Rather, it has encouraged gold mining, handing out concessions within the reserve, which runs along Bolivia’s upper Amazon River Basin.
SEE ALSO: Beneath The Surface of Illegal Gold Mining in the Amazon
Bolivia is in the grips of a gold boom, stoked by soaring prices. Eight of Bolivia’s nine departments produce gold. Gold production came from 6.3 tons in 2010 to 42 tons, worth about $1.7 billion, in 2019. Between 2010 and 2021, Bolivia exported 240 tons of gold. The previous decade, it exported just 70 tons. The open secret is that Bolivia’s gold rush is fueled by its having virtually no controls on the mining, sale, or export of the precious metal. “There is no monitoring, from the operator at the site all the way to commercialization,” said Alfredo Zaconeta, a mining researcher at the Center for Labor and Agrarian Development (CEDLA).
Digging Into Gold Mining Cooperatives
Nearly all of Bolivia’s gold is produced by small-scale mining cooperatives, known locally as cooperativas. These sometimes act like mafias. Politically powerful, the cooperatives have been known to hold the government hostage, to corrupt and coerce mining agency officials, and to have shady dealings with Colombian and Chinese mining outfits. These miners enter protected areas and employ destructive techniques, including using wildcat equipment such as excavators, massive dredges, and poisonous mercury. They operate in a near state of impunity, thanks to gray areas in Bolivian law and little oversight by the government’s mining agency, the Jurisdictional Mining Administrative Authority (AJAM).
“There is a level of flexibility and exceptions (…) that give the cooperative mining sector the possibility to really behave like an illegal miner,” said Oscar Campanini, who has investigated mining as director of the Documentation and Information Center Bolivia (CEDIB), a non-profit organization that reports on social issues.
Though they existed even earlier, mining cooperatives emerged in the 1980s after the…
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