Blockades, marches and human shields: Bolivia’s farmers resist as land opened up to industry

The march was part of a wave of pushbacks against the environmental policies of Bolivia’s new government, which has staffed ministries with former agroindustry leaders, struck deals to open protected areas to mining and criminalised environmental defenders.

Mass Indigenous and peasant mobilisations are not new to Bolivia. In the 1990s and early 2000s, large marches followed a similar route from the landlocked country’s Amazonian lowlands to the seat of government in La Paz.

The resistance to extractive projects continued throughout the last two decades of leftist rule. While those administrations, including that of Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president, championed pro-environmental rhetoric, they faced criticism for simultaneously pushing ecologically destructive policies.

That record – of state-backed environmental destruction meeting fierce resistance – is continuing under the country’s new administration.

Inaugurated in November, President Rodrigo Paz ran as a centrist, offering few environmental proposals beyond a plan to establish domestic carbon markets. His victory marked a political about-face for a nation long dominated by leftist rule.

Yet, eight months into his five-year term, activists and analysts argue that Paz’s policies have continued – or worsened – the extractive agendas of previous administrations.

“It’s the same old policy,” says Ruth Alipaz, an Uchupiamona Indigenous leader from the Amazon north of La Paz. “When a crisis hits, the response is to ramp up resource extraction – and that takes place right inside our territories and protected areas.”

Stasiek Czaplicki Cabezas, a Bolivian environmental economist, says the government stepped in promising “to change the model”. “Instead, the new administration has doubled down on extractivism,” he says.

One of the moves that has garnered the strongest opposition was the change in land law that drove Palomequi and hundreds of other peasant farmers to march on La Paz. Passed in early April, it allowed small family-owned plots – which are constitutionally protected from being sold, divided or seized by banks – to be converted to medium-sized holdings, exposing them to foreclosures and corporate buyouts.

While proponents argued it would help smallholders access the formal financial system, Indigenous and peasant farmers feared it would open pathways to land dispossession and fast-track the expansion of an already aggressive agroindustry frontier.

“When a small property enters a free commercial land market, it turns into a financial asset. That is essentially what a medium-scale holding is,” says Alcides Vadillo, a regional director of environmental non-profit Fundación Tierra. “From that moment on, it can be traded, sold, divided up or foreclosed on.”

Protests forced the government to repeal the law in May, with a replacement planned to be drafted later. Yet Czaplicki Cabezas believes the damage is already done.

“In 10 years, you will see that the small properties that have been converted to medium properties have had higher rates of deforestation,” he says.

The marches on La Paz came against a backdrop of unprecedented agroindustry influence in the new government. The former president of Anapo, a powerful association of soya bean and wheat producers, now leads the development planning and environment ministry. And the former president of the CAO, Bolivia’s other main agribusiness lobby, was appointed minister of productive, rural and water development.

Bolivia’s previous leftist administrations were also friendly to agribusiness, partly in a bid to win over a traditionally conservative sector. But now, corporate agroindustry “doesn’t need to negotiate with an intermediary, which is the government”, says Czaplicki Cabezas. “They are the government.”

Beyond agribusiness, activists such as Alipaz are increasingly alarmed by the deregulation of Bolivia’s mining sector, where existing laws routinely go unenforced.

In May, as large protests from various sectors paralysed the country, the Paz administration signed an agreement with mining cooperatives, lifting barriers to operating in protected areas and Indigenous lands. In April, a ministerial resolution reduced legal requirements for nearly 4,000 non-compliant mining operations.

Fuelled by lax regulations and record global prices, gold mining was already expanding across Bolivia’s tropical lowlands – contaminating Indigenous territory with mercury and encroaching on some of the world’s most biodiverse national parks. The recent deals with the mining sector “will create a complete lack of control when it comes to mining in Indigenous territories, the Amazon and protected areas,” says Alipaz.

Government deference to the mining industry is not new: small and medium-scale mining cooperatives have long leveraged outsized political representation to their benefit. With a history of organising national road blockades – such as those that gripped the country in May – the sector holds immense over the ministers.

“The government is afraid because it doesn’t want to confront the miners,” says Alipaz.

Nelly Coca, a community leader from the Tariquía national reserve in south-eastern Bolivia, spent last Christmas and new year on a remote highway, acting as a human shield to block the Brazilian hydrocarbons company Petrobras from entering the reserve. After police forcibly dismantled the blockade to allow exploratory work to begin, Petrobras immediately initiated legal proceedings against Coca and 16 other activists, seeking a criminal investigation.

Petrobras Bolivia stated that it has held an environmental licence for the project since July 2025 and that it “complies with all the legal requirements”.

Hydrocarbon activity in and around Tariquía has been a topic of dispute since Evo Morales opened protected areas to oil and gas extraction in 2015. But for Coca, the state’s heavy-handed tactics feel like a betrayal. As mayor of Tarija, the capital of the department where Tariquía sits, Rodrigo Paz had pledged to protect the reserve.

“Now he’s the chief architect of its destruction,” says Coca, adding: “If we are defending the environment, if we are protecting the water, I think we should be applauded for it – not persecuted the way we are.”

For Thomas Becker, a human rights lawyer who often works in Bolivia, Coca’s experience in Tariquía is just one example of “Bolivia’s failure to secure the free, prior and informed consent required under both its constitution and international law”. He adds: “The Paz administration’s rush to sell off Bolivia’s natural resources, alongside its growing alignment with the United States, has come at a steep cost to communities.”

Edgar Carpio Chávez, a peasant union leader who marched with Palomequi to the capital, also feels betrayed by President Paz. “We [our union] voted for him, and he invited us to his inauguration, and even paid for our travel,” he says. “Now look how things have changed – he left us with no choice but to walk more than 1,200km [750 miles] just to get him to listen.”

In just eight months, the Paz administration has also authorised the use of genetically modified HB4 soy, considered controversial hydroelectric projects, and supported parliamentary initiatives to open the country to carbon credits.

Czaplicki Cabezas warns that a lack of work to remove dry combustion material could leave Bolivia particularly vulnerable in a fire season that will probably be intensified by El Niño. “Prevention of forest fires is not part of the current government’s policy,” he says.

For Palomequi, the administration’s priorities speak for themselves. “We marched for our dignity and our rights, and the government refused to meet with us,” she says. “But when the agribusiness lobby arrives, they get meetings immediately.

“What’s clear now is that we have to remain vigilant,” she adds. “We are on high alert.”