‘Everything is burned’: Bolivian caravan marches across fire-ravaged region to pressure Morales
CHIQUITANO FOREST, Bolivia, (Reuters) - In Bolivia’s fire-ravaged lowlands, a caravan of indigenous protesters is marching hundreds of miles to demand President Evo Morales declare a surge in wildfires a national disaster, a move they hope will unleash international aid.
Morales has been reluctant to make the designation as he campaigns for a fourth presidential term ahead of Oct. 20 elections, despite growing calls that he acknowledge the fires - which have already burned an area bigger than Costa Rica - were beyond his government’s control.
Some 200 protesters - most indigenous Chiquitano people from Bolivia’s east - have joined the caravan since it departed earlier this month from San Ignacio de Velasco, a ranching hub where fires have forced villagers from their homes and threatened pastures that sustain half a million head of cattle.
“He hasn’t declared a national disaster despite all this misfortune we’ve suffered,” Joaquin Orellana, the organizer of the march, said of Morales as he walked along an unpaved road alongside protesters playing flutes and drums.
“Everything’s burned where I’m from. We don’t know what to do,” Orellana said of his village of San Miguel.
Protesters, including women with young children and elders, have camped out in empty lots and relied on donations of food, water and clothes from villages along the march’s 500-kilometer (311-mile) route.
They aim to reach regional capital Santa Cruz de la Sierra, where Orellana expects the demonstration to expand into a show of force of indigenous people from the lowlands whom he says feel abandoned by Morales’ government.
Morales, South America’s longest-serving leftist leader, is Bolivia’s first indigenous president, hailing from Bolivia’s largest indigenous group, the Aymara. His government has said declaring a national disaster would turn a sovereign issue over to foreigners, echoing concerns voiced by neighboring Brazil’s farright President Jair Bolsonaro, who has sparked a global outcry over his handling of fires in the Brazilian Amazon.