Evo Morales - a man without honour

When Ovidio Teco’s Amazon homeland was declared “untouchable” by the Bolivian government in 2011, he thought he had won and that their beautiful and ancient land would not be carved in two by a 190-mile highway. He and others endured teargas and truncheons at the hands of the authorities, but they persevered. The road was shelved and the Isiboro Sécure Indigenous Territory and National Park (Tipnis) was granted a new special status, rendering it off limits to such major and invasive building projects.

But now, six years on , the Bolivian government has backtracked. A bill rushed through congress, culminating in the stroke of a pen by Morales on Sunday 13 August, nullifies the park’s status as untouchable, paving the way for the road to be built after all.

Teco a small-time farmer of cacao, the base product of chocolate, in the Mojeño community of Gundonovia, a remote settlement of about 40 families in the north-east of the park explains, “They lied, nothing more. After the march we thought the park would not be touched. This situation is all lies.”

Spanning an area of 1.2m hectares, Tipnis is home to close to 14,000 inhabitants, mainly indigenous people of the Mojeño-Trinitario, Yuracaré and Tsimané groups. A 2011 study by the Programme for Strategic Investigation in Bolivia forecast 64% deforestation of the park within 18 years if the road is built.

“It’s not the road itself. It’s what comes with it. Coca producers will go and settle down and get new land inside the park. And after that comes, they take the wood, plant coca leaves, etc. And where the road will run is the richest part,” says Pablo Solón, a former ambassador to the UN, who resigned from the Morales administration in 2011 over the Tipnis dispute.

The government repeatedly cites a 2012 consultation that indicated the move was backed by locals.A joint assessment by the International Federation of Human Rights, the Bolivian Permanent Assembly of Human Rights and the Catholic church in 2016 concluded that the consultation had been “neither free nor informed and did not respect the principle of good faith”.

For Teco it is part of a wider stand-off between those who want to protect the environment and external interests that would seek to harm it. “The environment gives us life,” he says. “The day that they raise the block on this zone, it collapses. We already feel climate change. Worldwide, human beings are going to suffer. We’re going to continue fighting to the end,” he adds. “So long as we have life, we will continue fighting.”