The Promised Land

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Land reform policies in Bolivia are turning the Amazon jungle in to the promised land for many poor, landless campesinos. Recruited by government redistribution programs, settlers come to the sparsely-populated department of Pando in the North with few resources, receive little food, live in tents and are caught in an intricate bureaucratic doldrums in an attempt to claim their piece of up to 75 hectares of the Earth and the better life that comes with it. Environmental, social and political consequences loom as this human migration plays out in the rainforest. Bolivia has a comparatively strong reputation for protecting their small piece of the world’s largest rainforest, but largely because so few people have lived in it. So as campesinos move in to the jungle, whether they will actually be able to thrive there, whether the government will fulfill their promises of support and whether settlers will be the saviors or the destroyers of the Bolivian rainforest remains an unanswered question. Their story is symbolic of the challenges between economic development and environmental protection in the rainforest.

Through its agencies INRA (Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria) and the Viceministerio de Tierras, the Bolivian government under president Evo Morales is accelerating preexisting programs to distribute government-owned land in the northern department of Pando, which is 92% Amazon jungle and has a population of only 67,000 (2005 Census). The government and its supporters claim the programs are redistributing wealth and opportunity to campesinos in Latin America’s poorest country. Critics claim that president Evo Morales is trying to shift the electorate in support of him and his party, MAS (Movimiento al Socialsimo) in a region that has been less supportive of his government as the rest of the majority-indigenous departments, produced the only serious contender to Morales 2009 re-election and was the site of a clash between government supporters and.