Brazilian Minister for Defence, Celso Amorim, will today deliver two helicopters to Santa Cruz in eastern Bolivia to aid with the battle against drugs and crime on the border which the two countries share, an official source informed yesterday.

The two H-1H helicopters will be destined only for use as part of the anti-drug plan enacted between the two countries. The agreement, which was made last year by Bolivia’s president Dilma Rousseff, said that the fight against drugs should focus on the shared borders, which stretch for more than 3,400 kilometres.

The arrival of these two helicopters will “make explicit the compromise of the two countries to cooperate in the area, paying special vigilance to the airspace and combatting illicit cross-border drug trafficking”, said a Brazilian legation in La Paz.

Other commitments to be fulfilled are the donation of helicopters called Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (VANT). These will control the airspace, detecting drug factories in Bolivia even in the jungle, where many of the country’s drug manufacturers have hidden their bases.

Bolivia is the world’s third-largest cultivator of coca leaf, primary ingredient in cocaine. However, the UN has recently revealed a 12% decrease in production of the plant, a positive result of the war against drugs that the country has been fighting.

Storms with 100 km/hr winds hit Paraguay, Argentina, Bolivia and Uruguay early Wednesday morning, leaving nine people dead.

Asunción, the capital of Paraguay, was hit the hardest with over 5,000 houses destroyed, according to the Secretary of National Emergency (SEN). Storms in Asunción had winds above 140 km/hr causing electricity outages and damage to roads. Interior Minister Carmelo Caballero confirmed that five people died and 81 people were injured.

In the district of Roque Alonso, close to Asunción, four security force cadets died when their roof collapsed. “Roque Alonso will have to be reconstructed,” said Mayor of Roque Alonso, Heriberto Mármol.

In Bolivia, a mother and her son died as they were swept away by the flooding caused by torrential rain in the Santa Cruz region. In Uruguay, a man and his son were swept away and killed by the water while traveling in their car .

The northeast region of Argentina, Misiones, was also hit by the storm. There are fallen trees, electricity outages, and destroyed buildings according to the Municipal Office of Natural Disaster Prevention (OPAD).

In Buenos Aires, 26 people were evacuated due to strong winds and rain. The capital and some of its surrounding areas were put on alert yesterday after water levels in the Rio de la Plata rose dramatically.

The National Weather Service has lowered the alert to a level of orange. Thus far, 462 people have been evacuated and 140,000 homes are without electricity.

Production of coca leaf in Bolivia saw a 12% fall between 2010 and 2011, according to a report published today by the United Nations. The study reveals that there were 31,000 hectares of coca leaf plantations in 2010 in contrast to just over 27,000 hectares at the end of last year. The most significant decline was reported around Cochabamba, where a 15% reduction was reported.

César Guedes, representative of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNDOC), claimed that in 2011 the Bolivian Government destroyed 28% more coca plantations than in 2010, further reducing the production of coca leaf in the country.

Guedes praised the actions of the government for these statistics, stating: “The main factors behind these positive figures are the effective nationalisation and eradication policies and campaigns carried out by the State of Bolivia and also the increased presence of the government in areas which are vulnerable to drug trafficking.”

Guedes also affirmed the accuracy of the report, stating that it had undergone “a transparent, independent, rigorous and detailed process supervised by UNDOC and their technical teams in both La Paz and in its head office in Vienna”.

Despite lowered production, the price of the coca leaf market rose to US$353m in 2011 from US$310m in 2010. Although the high prices make the coca production industry more attractive, Guedes warned: “Growers need viable alternatives in order to lower its production for illegal purposes in the long term.”

Total coca leaf production in 2011 stood at 48,100 tonnes, lower than that of 55,500 tonnes in 2010.

From the United States, the White House last week placed Bolivia on its narcotics “blacklist” for the fourth consecutive year, branding it a nation that has “failed demonstrably” in its fight against the drug trade, making it ineligible for US aid.

Madidi National Park in northwest Bolivia has been named one of the most biologically diverse places on the planet according to the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).

The park released a list of the thousands of species of animals that live in the 19,000 km² reserved land at the Wolrd Conservation Congress in Jeju, South Korea this week.

“With Madidi’s almost 6,000-meter (19,685 feet) altitudinal range, no other protected area captures the diversity of South American habitats that pushes these numbers through the ceiling,” said Robert Wallace, Madidi landscape program director for the WCS to NBC.

The report, compiled by more than 50 scientists, states that Madidi’s wildlife includes more than 200 species of mammals, almost 300 species of fish, and 12,000 species of plant life. The park is home to roughly 11% of the world’s bird species with 1,088 types of birds building their nests in the park. In all of the United States there are only 900 types of birds.

The animals inhabiting the park range in size from the 660 pound lowland tapir, an animal that looks like a cross between a pig and an anteater, to the tiny 0.14 ounce disk-winged bat. Scientists are also excited about the number of jaguars spotted by one stationary camera. A total of nine different jaguars have passed the camera, a record for the country.

“We’re excited about the prospect of using these images to find out more about this elusive cat and its ecological needs,” WCS conservationist Robert Wallace told Our Amazing Planet. “The data gleaned from these images provide insights into the lives of individual jaguars and will help us generate a density estimate for the area.”

The bird life also ranges from the giant harpy eagle, which preys on sloths and monkeys, to the tiny coquette hummingbird, the park is home to 60 different species of hummingbirds.

The diversity of life is due to the radical difference between the park’s habitats, which varies from the snow-capped peaks of the Andes to the lowland tropical forests.

Despite the extensive list already put together by scientists, almost two thirds of the park’s wildlife has yet to be recorded. Madidi National Park is one of the big tourist attractions in Bolivia and is a part of the protected region known as the Madidi-Tambopata Landscape, one of the largest protected parks in the world.

Perhaps, 15th June will be best remembered in Paraguayan contemporary history as the date of the beginning of the end of Fernando Lugo’s presidency earlier this year. On that date, the massacre of Campos de Morombí, in Canindeyú, left 11 landless peasants and six police officers dead, and started a series of angry debates and accusations that finally led to the impeachment of the president.

However, given the massacre and its major repercussions, few recalled that 15th June 2012 was already a very important date in the Paraguayan history. It marked the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the Chaco War, which pitted South America’s only two landlocked countries, Paraguay and Bolivia, against each other in the vast lowland Chaco plains that today reaches into three countries. It became the bloodiest war of the 20th century in the Americas.

Paraguayan troops at Fort Alihuata in 1932.

Even though this conflict is mentioned with different denominations such as ‘The Chaco War’, ‘The Gran Chaco War’ or ‘The War of Thirst’ (due to the vast numbers of soldiers that died because of a lack of drinkable water in the region). In reality, the conflict might be more appropriately called ‘The War of the Poorest’ as the enemies were among the poorest countries of the Western Hemisphere.

In spite of the deep poverty suffered by both countries, there were significant differences between them, with Paraguay facing the more desperate situation. Paraguay’s population at that time was around one third of Bolivia, and though an arms race had begun in both countries in the 1920s, the Bolivian army was far larger and better equipped than its opposition. Moreover, Bolivia had more economic resources than Paraguay due to its oil and mineral wealth. Paraguay, on the other hand, was still suffering the aftermath of the Triple Alliance War (1864-70) that had slaughtered much of its male population, caused the loss of a huge part of its territory, and left the economy bankrupt.

One War, Multiple Causes

On 15th June 1932, Bolivian soldiers attacked the Paraguayan Carlos Antonio López fort which was located near the Pitiantutá Lake. Nevertheless, this attack was just only one of the many events which sparked the war.

Map of Bolivia and Paraguay before the Chaco War. Afterward, Bolivia was forced to recognise most of the region as part of Paraguay. Also, it was deprived of a potential sovereign access to the Atlantic Ocean

The Chaco War emerged as a typical Latin American conflict of boundaries inherited from colonial times, owing to the fact that the Spanish Crown never cared to set clear frontiers among the different members of its American colonies. The vast Chaco region was a long-standing issue, but it only came to prominence in the last decades of the 19th century, after Bolivia had lost is Pacific Ocean coast to Chile in the Second War of the Pacific, also called La Guerra del Guano (1879-84) and became a landlocked country.

After that war, Bolivia witnessed a rise of nationalist sectors that sought an opportunity to rebuild a national pride that had been devastated by the military and territorial loss. Subsequently, the successive governments started to look southwards and eastwards to the Chaco, a land that they considered to be Bolivian and that could provide an exit to the Atlantic Ocean via the Paraguay River.

According to some sources, Bolivia had evidence supporting its de jure claim to the region saying that the Chaco had belonged to the Spanish colonial Chiquitanías. Meanwhile, if for Bolivia, it was vital to find access to the ocean, for Paraguay it was vital not to lose more territory to the hands of another country as it continued to recover and rebuild from the Triple Alliance War.

Paraguay claimed to have strong evidence supporting the de facto ownership of the land as it had been exercising sovereignty and permanent presence over the region since, in 1878, the arbitration of then US President Rutherford Hayes recognised Paraguayan sovereignty over the Chaco Boreal (the northern area of the Gran Chaco). After the Hayes ruling, which ended an territorial dispute with Argentina, the country sold hundreds of thousands of public land in the Chaco to private Argentine investors in order to develop the area. In the 1920s, the Paraguayan government also allowed the settlement of Mennonite colonies in the wild land. Both groups would play a vital supporting role for the Paraguayan army during the conflict.

The Oil Factor

After decades of fruitless negotiations and some military and isolated skirmishes, in 1928 a new factor appeared on stage, which deepened both countries’ anxiety and urgency to exercise their sovereign rights on the Chaco. It was the discovery of oil in the foothills of the Andes, in the Bolivian region of Villa Montes, not far from the disputed land, that generated expectations of significant oil reserves in the Chaco wilderness.

The military skirmishes became more frequent and tensions more serious, with the position of both countries increasingly inflexible. This eventually led to the Pitiantutá incident of 15th June 1932 and from there, to open war.

The coincidence of the oil discovery with the deepening of the diplomatic and military crisis and the arms race in the 1920s lead some to hypothesise that the real cause of the war were the vested interests of the US and Britain in securing control of this valuable resource. The historians who support this version of history argue that American Standard Oil, which was operating in the Bolivian oilfields by that time, protected the US interests, while the Royal Dutch Shell was supporting the Paraguayan side on behalf of the British interests.

Lessons From the War

The war finished on 12th June 1935, almost exactly three years after it had started, leaving both Paraguay and Bolivia even more impoverished and in political turmoil. By this time, Paraguay had been able to take control of the complete Chaco area and even reached the surrounding regions of Villa Montes and the Parapití River (today Bolivian territory) before the US, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile brokered a truce.

E. Martínez Thedy (Uruguay), Luis A. Riart (Paraguay), Tomás M. Elío (Bolivia) and Carlos Saavedra Lamas (Argentina) negotiated the peace treaty in Buenos Aires.

The Paraguayan victory was credited to multiple factors. Among the most important were the superior tactics used by the Paraguay’s military leaders; a greater familiarity with the wilderness and hot weather of the Chaco than the Bolivian soldiers sent from the high, cold Altiplano; the use of Guaraní language for communication, which was totally incomprehensible to the enemy; and the guerrilla style fight implemented by the Paraguayan strategy.

For Paraguay, the war meant an important military victory, necessary to recover the sense of the nation after the tragedy and genocide of the Triple Alliance War. However, in the 1938 Peace Protocol signed in Buenos Aires, the country was assigned two thirds of the territory under dispute, effectively handing back one third.

For a very important part of the Paraguayan society and the army, what was a military victory became a diplomatic defeat. It caused a wave of popular anger which brought internal instability and an ever increasing role and involvement of the military in politics. This ended up bringing General Alfredo Stroessner (a Chaco war veteran) to power, whose controversial regime lasted 35 years. Paraguay only returned to democracy in 1989. Adding to the lingering sense of injustice, the existence of gas and oil fields was confirmed in the part of the disputed territory assigned to Bolivia in 1938. So far, the existence of gas and oil fields for commercial exploitation in the Paraguayan Chaco remains uncertain.

For Bolivia, the loss of the war meant more frustration and discontent in the population, and the endemic instability of the country intensified. Up until the final recovery of democracy in 1982, Bolivia lived long periods of social and political unrest marked by a succession of civil and military governments.

For both countries, due to their demographic characteristics and the size of their economies, the impact of the war on them was similar to the impact of World Wars I and II on some Europeans countries. Paraguay lost about 40,000 people and Bolivia about 55,000 in the war. The economic structure of the two countries were exhausted due to the war effort, and the instability of the postwar years prevented the development of any single long-term project aiming at national recovery.

The poorest countries that once went to war remained the poorest ones for the next decades to come.

Today, mine workers blocked the roads in Bolivia as a protest to the government’s decision to renationalise the mine. They have blocked the roads going in to capital city, La Paz, in hopes that President Evo Morales will hand over some of the tin and zinc business to them.

The workers, who belong to a private cooperative, as opposed to the salaried workers, have blocked three major highways with rocks and vehicles. Officials stated that roads from La Paz to Chile, Peru and the northern Yungas region were those that are being affected.

The conflict comes over workers rights that have become a point of confusion since the June expropriation of the Colquiri mine, which used to belong to the multinational Swiss corporation, Glencore.

A representative of the private-cooperative group, Simon Condori, expressed that the blockades will remain until a positive decision can be reached for the workers.

On the other side, a state-run mining group, Comibol, wishes the government to continue operating that mine and to ban others from mining it. The group’s representative, Severino Estallani, stated that 5,000 members of the group headed to La Paz to address this issue and were met by the private-cooperative members on Tuesday.

Interior Minister, Carlos Romero, called for both of the groups to remain calm, whilst expressing that both parties are allowed to address their right to work.

The national intervention of the mine came after violent clashes that left 18 workers injured erupted last month between the private and salaried workers. Since then, the federal government expropriated the mine, they have been renegotiating terms with Glencore for total shares and earnings.

Last year, the mine produced 2,000 tonnes of tin concentrate and was aquired by Glancore in 2005. The mine was owned by the national government previous to this year.

The renationalisation of the mine is one of many projects done by Evo Morales during his presidency. Natural gas and electric business have also been expropriated. One of the most recent electric companies was Transportadora de Electricidad, previously owned by Spain and supplier to 72% of the country’s power.

The Bolivian minister of Public Works, Vladimir Sanchez, announced that he has already consulted 32 of the 69 indigenous communities over the construction of a highway that will run through Isiboro-Secure nature reserve, known as Tipnis, where the communities reside. The other 37 communities will get to vote over the construction of the highway at the beginning of September.

The Public Works minister said that after asking the 32 tribes, all 32 rejected the intangibility law in Bolivia, finally saying that they were in agreement to accepting the construction of the road through their Amazonian land. Minister Sanchez said at a press conference that the only community to still completely reject the idea is San Miguelito, who are firmly against the road “entering the heart of the Tipnis”.

The intangibility law is a ruling put in place by Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales, to protect the nature reserves and indigenous peoples who live in them. The law was put into place in order to promote co-existence with nature as opposed to destruction.

When the law was passed, the indigenous tribes seemed to be in aggreement with it. “The intangibility is a means to preserve the most fragile ecosystems of our territory and national park, to preserve sacred areas and to ensure the land stays permanently sacred now, tomorrow and forever,” said Fernando Vargas, president of the Subcentral Tipnis, an organisation that represents 64 indigenous communities in the area.

The law was a finalised response to the eighth indigenous protest against the construction of the highway last October. After the law was put into place, the ninth indigenous march against construction arrived outside Bolivia’s executive buildings this past June.

Although Minister Sanchez remembers the protest, he claimed that the indigenous communities and the state have come to a consensus over the matter. Minister Sanchez reassured the people that even if there was not a law, the indigenous communities would have been included and informed in the building process.

The last protest occurred on the 15^th August, according to the BBC, where an estimated 500 Amazonian natives marched against the highway’s construction.

The proposed highway is to connect the highland city of Cochabamba and San Ignacio de Moxos in the lowlands. The project also hopes to connect Brazil’s south Amazon with ports in the Pacific coast. The project is being done by a Brazilian company.

Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales, remains an advocate of the highway saying that it’s important for national integration and that environmental precautions will be taken.

However, environmentalists and indigenous activist say that the road will mean more illegal logging as well as increased coca production.

Ecuador is looking to become a full member of Mercosur according to Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who announced the country’s intention in her speech yesterday.

President Fernández briefly stated that the country planned to push forward in its goal of becoming an official member of Mercosur.

Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, and Perú, are currently only associate members of the economical and political agreement, which promotes free trade and the movements of goods and currency.

Mercosur’s full members include Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Venezuela. However, Paraguay is currently suspended, while  its newest member’s acceptance, Venezuela, is the topic of hot debate.

At a Mercosur summit in December of 2011 in Montevideo, Ecuador President Rafael Correa said, “we’re hoping to become a full member,” although no substantial efforts have been made thus far to try to gain acceptance into the agreement.

Venezuela waited roughly six years before finally being accepted as the fifth country. In order to enter the new bloc, the potential new member must be approved by the Congress of each of the existing member-states, and the Paraguayan senate had kept Venezuela’s application blocked.

Correa remarked that his country’s good relationships with all of the other member countries should help speed the process.

Bolivia is also looking to become a member according to Brazilian news sources.

“The idea is to have a more open discussion so that Ecuadorians and Bolivians can become a part of Mercosur,” says the Brazilian State News Agency.

The President of Brazilian’s Special Advisor for International Affairs, Marco Aurelio García, plans on visiting Bolivia to discuss the country’s current position.

“We will be looking at how to create more opportunities for countries that are not formally included in Mercosur,” says García.

With Venezuela’s recent acceptance both Ecuador and Bolivia are renewing their intention to become full members.

BOLIVIA – President Evo Morales is meeting this week with indigenous Amazon basin lowland residents from Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS) to discuss the plans for a controversial highway that would run through their homeland, compromising both themselves and the fragile ecosystem there.

Protestors have set up in a university gymnasium, which is being used as a temporary accommodation for around 1,000 natives who walked over the course of two months from Trinidad to La Paz to protest a highway through their ancestral homeland.

Observers with the Organization of American States and the Union of South American were also present at the meeting. The discussions are aimed at asking the 33,000, predominantly indigenous, residents if they want a highway that would cut through their reserve.

The project made headlines in June when escalating tensions boiled over into a violent six-day riot. This led the Bolivian government to acknowledge they had committed “several errors” in the project and prompted the talks.

Talks will last for a month with results expected in two months, officials said. Morales’ government is eager to carry out the highway project, which is being funded with US$ 332 million by Brazil. It is to link with a network of highways linking the landlocked country to both the Pacific through Chile and the Atlantic through Brazil.

Initial suggestions to divert the highway around the reserve have been deemed too expensive and pressure to call of the project entirely has been progressively escalating since last year.

A major concern about the impact of the road is its potential to accelerate deforestation, which has been significant since waves of colonization began arriving to TIPNIS area in the 1970s. A study of the project by the Program for Strategic Investigation in Bolivia (PIEB) concluded that the road would markedly accelerate deforestation in the park, leaving up to 64% of TIPNIS deforested by 2030.

A technical report submitted by the Bolivian Highway Administration (ABC) established that the direct deforestation caused by the road itself would only be 0.03%. Similarly, President Morales has spoken of a 180-hectare deforestation, an area equivalent to a rectangle 180 km long and 10 m wide.

According to the Associated Press, Amazon natives fear that landless Andean Quechua and Aymara people from the Andes mountains, Bolivia’s main indigenous groups and Morales supporters, would use the road to flood into the area and colonize their land.

The Bolivian government acknowledged ​​committing “several errors” in the conflict with indigenous activists who oppose the construction of a highway that divided the natural reserve of Tipnis. The conflict had caused tensions between both parties to escalate significantly at the end of June.

According to EFE, the Spanish-language news agency, Government Minister Carlos Romero said that the main mistake was allowing “growing conflict” by not having “worked in a timely manner” in consulting the communities living on the indigenous territory.

“The State did not help reach an early consensus about the construction of a road and the possible line that it cut through the territory,” admitted Romero in a meeting with international media.

The minister said that the conflict escalated in 2011 when hundreds of indigenous activists marched from the Amazon to La Paz.

EFE also states that Romero said the government should have investigated the road prior to its construction and that the situation had become a political discussion about indigenous rights.

Romero´s mea culpa was followed by his staunch defence of the road project. He said that it would allow the State to develop and help control the region so that coca growers and loggers did not take over the reserve.

Negotiations over the controversial road project are still underway.