Bolivian man says it helped that he knew survival techniques after becoming separated from friends on hunting trip in January
A Bolivian man who claimed to have been missing in the Amazon alone for a month has recounted eating insects and worms, collecting water in his boots and drinking his own urine to stay alive.
If confirmed, this could make Jhonatan Acosta, 30, one of the longest-ever lone Amazon survivors.
Continue reading...‘Interspecies communicator’ consulted to track down cat lost in transit, prompting criticism of country’s state companies
Bolivia’s state airline has enlisted an “interspecies communicator” – or animal psychic – to track down a lost cat, after a passenger’s pet went missing in transit.
The incident has prompted pointed questions over the performance of Bolivia’s many state companies, a continual source of debate between the leftist government and its opposition.
Continue reading...Strike announced in Santa Cruz on Friday as Luis Fernando Camacho detained on ‘terrorism’ charge
Outside the office of the Civic Committee of Santa Cruz, a powerful umbrella organisation in Bolivia’s biggest and richest region, hundreds of people – some in Dior sunglasses, others with makeshift riot shields – were screaming for immediate action after the arrest of Luis Fernando Camacho, the region’s governor and a prominent leader of the national opposition.
After hours of deliberations, the committee announced a 24-hour civic strike on Friday, demanding Camacho’s release – with the implied threat of an indefinite strike that could cripple business and trade.
Continue reading...Santa Cruz governor and former presidential candidate flown to La Paz after what his supporters called a ‘kidnapping’
Bolivian police have detained prominent opposition leader Luis Fernando Camacho on charges of “terrorism” in a move that significantly escalates tensions between the national government and Camacho’s Santa Cruz base.
Bolivia’s state attorney’s office confirmed the detention on Wednesday of 43-year-old Camacho, the governor of Santa Cruz who unsuccessfully ran for president in 2020.
Continue reading...Mining co-ops – with oversize influence in the government – are moving into the Amazon’s Madidi national park
The footage is jerky, perhaps shot covertly. It shows a river running through a jungle: on the far side there is still thick forest, but the near bank is a mess of churned earth and muddy tracks – yet more evidence that gold miners have moved into the Madidi, Bolivia’s most famous national park.
Such mining provides a living for hundreds of thousands of people. But as miners push into the Amazon and other protected areas, the Bolivian government’s support of the industry sits awkwardly with its environmentalist rhetoric.
Continue reading...Swathes of rainforest have reached tipping point, research by scientists and Indigenous organisations concludes
Environmental destruction in parts of the Amazon is so complete that swathes of the rainforest have reached tipping point and might never be able to recover, a major study carried out by scientists and Indigenous organisations has found.
“The tipping point is not a future scenario but rather a stage already present in some areas of the region,” the report concludes. “Brazil and Bolivia concentrate 90% of all combined deforestation and degradation. As a result, savannization is already taking place in both countries.”
Continue reading...Altopía imagines the bustling working-class city that overlooks neighbouring La Paz in 2053 – with coca-chewing cyborgs and minibuses with legs
Travellers flying into the Bolivian capital of La Paz land in El Alto: a working-class, Indigenous city of countless terracotta houses. Most visitors pay it little attention as the taxi whisks them down to La Paz.
But this one-time satellite city has now outgrown the political capital – and many see it as a symbol of the country’s future.
Continue reading...Some see youth football tournament as former president’s latest attempt to remain in running for 2025 elections
Politics and football have long mixed in South America, but not perhaps to this extent. On Sunday the Copa Evo, an international youth football tournament arranged by and named after Bolivia’s former president Evo Morales, kicked off in the country’s coca-growing tropics.
The buildup was dominated by political scraps, with the opposition questioning the involvement of the national football federation in a tournament that bears Morales’s name.
Continue reading...Court finds rightwinger defied constitution during chaotic exit of Evo Morales, from whom she took over presidency
A Bolivian court has found former president Jeanine Áñez guilty of orchestrating a coup that brought her to power during a 2019 political crisis.
She was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Continue reading...Ruins of monuments, villages, causeways and canals hidden in the dense rainforest are evidence of ‘Amazonian urbanism’
Archaeologists have discovered the ruins of a vast network of settlements hidden beneath the undergrowth of the Bolivian Amazon, in what has been described as the clearest example yet of the complex societies that thrived in a region once held to be pristine wilderness.
The system of monumental centres, towns and villages spans hundreds, if not thousands, of square kilometres of the Llanos de Mojos region, a tropical savannah in the Amazonian basin.
Continue reading...Max Mendoza has been arrested after a judge said his 32-year enrollment at university on a government salary may be a crime
Max Mendoza has been a remarkably persistent student – and a profitable one: he has been enrolled at a public university in Bolivia for 32 years but never graduated, much of it while being paid a government salary to serve as a student leader.
On Monday, though, he was detained and sent to jail after a judge ordered a six-month investigation into allegations his tenure as a state-paid student leader constituted a crime.
Continue reading...Tropics lost 11.1m hectares of tree cover in 2021, including forest critical to limiting global heating and biodiversity loss, finds World Resources Institute
Pristine rainforests were once again destroyed at a relentless rate in 2021, according to new figures, prompting concerns governments will not meet a Cop26 deal to halt and reverse deforestation by the end of the decade.
From the Brazilian Amazon to the Congo basin, the tropics lost 11.1m hectares of tree cover last year, including 3.75m ha of primary forest critical to limiting global heating and biodiversity loss.
Continue reading...About half the country’s population is yet to receive a single dose of vaccine, despite availability
In a vaccination centre in El Alto, Bolivia, the staff bagged up in protective gear far outnumbered the few people sitting in plastic chairs waiting for their injection. A young doctor reeled off a list of all the vaccines available: Sinopharm, Sputnik, Pfizer, Moderna. What’s lacking is demand. They see 100 people on a good day.
South America, once the region most afflicted by the pandemic, is now the most vaccinated in the world. But this turnaround doesn’t extend to Bolivia, where roughly half the population is yet to receive a single dose – even though the state has had all the vaccines it needs since October.
Continue reading...The government has been criticised for apparent inaction as evidence mounts that mercury contamination is causing illness in fishing communities
Outside a small brick house shared by four families, Daniela Prada, who is heavily pregnant, gathers guava leaves to make a tea for her two-year-old son.
“My baby gets sick a lot,” she says, boiling a pot of water in her outdoor kitchen. “He always has diarrhoea and last night he had a fever. Most of the time I give him natural medicine.”
In an identical house nearby, town leader Oscar Lurici says fevers are a part of life in Eyiyo Quibo village on the Beni River in northern Bolivia. People of all ages suffer from debilitating head and body aches, bouts of vomiting and diarrhoea, memory loss and tiredness. Some children show signs of cognitive development delays.
Religious groups seek to force girl to give birth as intervention of the Catholic church questioned
The fate of an 11-year-old girl who became pregnant after being raped by a family member has unleashed a fierce debate between human rights activists and the Catholic church in Bolivia, as religious groups seek to force her to complete the pregnancy and give birth.
The girl was impregnated after being repeatedly raped and suffering other sexual abuse by the father of her stepfather in the town of Yapacaní, in Bolivia’s eastern Santa Cruz region.
Continue reading...As global heating sees a surge in wildfires, we hear from those tackling the blazes, who face injury, death and trauma, often without proper equipment or support
In Greece, fires take up a lot of resources. There isn’t enough money to recruit the number of [firefighters] needed or to buy the necessary equipment. Volunteers plug the gaps.
Continue reading...A roundup of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Afghanistan to Greece
Continue reading...From Bolivia’s Lake Titicaca to wildlife tourism in Nepal, we find out how the crisis has affected people in four travel hotspots – and whether or not they want the tourists to return
In March last year, it was predicted that the global travel shutdown would cause international arrivals to plummet by 20 to 30% by the end of 2020.
Six weeks later, the UN World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) revised their warning: international arrivals could fall by up to 80% – equating to a billion fewer tourists and the worst crisis in the history of the industry.
Continue reading...Undercover documentary investigates the trafficking of Latin America’s big cat to meet demand in China
Elizabeth Unger was a 25-year-old biology graduate working as a PhD research assistant for big cat and climate projects in Latin America when she heard about the Bolivian authorities intercepting dozens of packages containing jaguar fangs sent by Chinese citizens to addresses in China.
“I was really blown away as [the story] was completely under the radar,” she says. Six years later, she is making her directorial debut with a film about the trade, which is contributing to a decline in the population of Latin America’s iconic big cat.
Continue reading...Rich profits from the prized nut have failed to benefit those finding them. Now cooperatives hope to shake up the system
On a steamy March morning, Edivan Kaxarari walks with a few other villagers in single file down a trail in the Amazon rainforest of Brazil’s Rondônia state, near the border with Bolivia.
His sister-in-law Cleiciana carries her 11-month-old son in one arm and a rifle in the other, and his brother Edson clears the path ahead with a machete. It is hunting season for the seeds of the Amazonian Brazil nut tree.
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