In the middle decades of the twentieth century, Bolivian society was profoundly traumatized by the Chaco War and the loss of about thirty per cent of its national territory; before that, it had ceded Acre to Brazil and its coastal provinces to Chile. Schoolchildren learn at an early age that Bolivia lost those territories because the country failed to occupy them. Consequently, it welcomed the assistance in 1942 when a team of economists sponsored by the US Embassy outlined a strategy for focusing future development on the sparsely populated plains of its eastern lowland territories. Known as Plan Bohan, after its lead author, the document outlined a series of investments and resettlement initiatives that were referred to as the ‘Marcha hacia el Oriente’.

In the 1950s and 1960s, this strategy led to the construction of all-weather roads linking the Andean highlands with the lowlands in Santa Cruz, Cochabamba and La Paz. US financial assistance via the Alliance for Progress was part of a broader strategy to combat the spread of leftist ideologies, particularly the guerilla insurgency led by Che Guevara in 1967. Multilateral agencies subsequently supported key investments, including highways linking the Chapare colonization zone with the agro-industrial landscapes of Santa Cruz, as well as export corridors to both the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. Initiatives sponsored by the World Bank to promote food security and export commodities were leveraged with private-sector investments to create an export industry and key motor of job creation. The two landscapes impacted by these investments, Chapare and the alluvial plain of Santa Cruz, were the focus of approximately ninety per cent of the country’s deforestation between 1975 and 2010.

Throughout this period, however, the national economy experienced a severe contraction in its long-dominant mineral sector, causing it to default on private-sector, bilateral and multilateral debt. Bolivia was classified as a highly indebted poor country in the 1990s, which drastically limited its ability to borrow money and invest in infrastructure. Privatisation of the oil and gas sector led to an investment boom that dramatically increased revenue, followed by an upgrading of Bolivia’s credit rating in 2010. This allowed the government, by then headed by Evo Morales, to access sovereign debt markets and significantly increase investments in transportation infrastructure.

Migratory pathways

Starting in the 1960s, the Bolivian government actively promoted migration of highland Indigenous peasants to the lowlands. In the early years, this effort was organised and led by the central government with assistance from overseas development agencies. Over time, settlement policies changed to reflect budgets and governing philosophies, but they have transcended governments and continue to be a central pillar of the current administration. Migration has occurred in three separate regions, reflecting the interests of regional elites and the availability of a source population that provides migrants.

The oldest of these colonization corridors is the La Paz Yungas, where a series of interconnected valleys situated between the Altiplano and the Amazonian lowlands has functioned as a migratory corridor for generations. The Upper Yungas is the major source of coca leaf, which is consumed in Bolivia as a mild stimulant, and has long provided the city of La Paz with tropical fruit and other basic food commodities. In the early 1960s, a road was extended into the Lower Yungas to establish the pioneer community of Caranavi and connect to the first wildcat gold mines in Tipuani and Mapiri.

Colonizadores flocked into the region, deforesting on mountain slopes to cultivate food crops for their own consumption, as well as coffee, cacao and tropical fruits for both domestic and international markets. By the early 1970s, a gravel road had penetrated the lower foothills, opening up a region known as the Alto Beni. The road was extended in the mid-1980s to connect with the cattle ranches on the seasonally inundated savannas of the Llanos de Moxos. The easily accessible montane landscapes of the La Paz Yungas have largely been occupied; consequently, migrants are now moving into the landscapes on the piedmont, particularly the road corridor between Buenaventura and the Peruvian border.

Most of the immigrants who have populated the La Paz Yungas over the last fifty years have been Aymara-speaking Indigenous peasants from the Altiplano, many of whom have a tradition of establishing farms at multiple localities at different elevations. This multi-altitudinal production strategy diversifies and expands their production, while mitigating the risk from crop failure. It is an important Indigenous cultural adaptation that has contributed to their success as pioneers. Many families have established urban residences in La Paz or its rapidly growing sister city of El Alto, which facilitates their ability to commercialise products in urban markets.

The colonization of the Chapare

Southeast of La Paz is Bolivia’s most conflictive colonization zone, the Chapare. Large-scale immigration into this region was initiated in the mid-1960s to alleviate the overpopulation of the Quechua-speaking communities in the Andean highlands surrounding the regional capital of Cochabamba. Funds from USAID’s Alliance for Progress financed a road over the Eastern Cordillera, where the interaction of topography and prevailing winds creates a super-humid ecosystem. Precipitation exceeds six meters per year, making the cultivation of most traditional crops problematic; however, the new residents soon discovered that a subspecies of coca was well adapted to these conditions. The Chapare was soon a magnet for new settlers, and small farms, typically no larger than forty hectares, expanded across the piedmont. Immigration and settlement eventually extended further southeast towards Santa Cruz via a modern road that created a national transportation corridor integrating Bolivia’s three major cities: La Paz, Cochabamba and Santa Cruz.

Migration into the Chapare was supercharged in the late 1980s, when tin prices collapsed and the state-owned mining company terminated tens of thousands of employees. Many took their severance packages and moved their families to the lowlands to cultivate coca. The population doubled from 100,000 in 1976 to 200,000 in 1990, then doubled again by 2015. Bolivian miners are renowned for their labor activism, and migrants soon organized into syndicates, which facilitated their ability to acquire land. Among them was a young man named Evo Morales, who became the leader of the coca growers association in the Chapare and, eventually, president of Bolivia.

The largest and most important colonization zone in Bolivia is the alluvial plain of Santa Cruz, an area blessed with fertile soils and a seasonal climate ideal for tropical agriculture. The local Cruceños had already established a production model based on sugar cane, rice and beef cattle before the 1960s, when the government began the relocation of tens of thousands of highland peasants. In the 1970s, planned communities were established along three parallel roads arranged in an area known as the Brecha Casarabe. The government stopped proactively organizing the movement of people, but continued to support the spontaneous settlement of state lands by issuing provisional land titles and providing basic services.

Santa Cruz welcomed immigrants from other countries and continents, including Japanese (1950s and 1960s) and Mennonites (1970s to present), as well as investors in industrial-scale farms (larger than 10,000 hectares) from Brazil, Argentina, North America and China. By some estimates, as much as fifty per cent of the soy crop is produced by foreigners; their impact is much greater than the volume of soy they harvest, however, because international immigrants have introduced technology and capital.

The smallholder farmers, who now refer to themselves as Interculturales rather Colonizadores, have adopted many farming practices pioneered by the Mennonite and Japanese immigrants who also own relatively small farms. Many choose to produce foodstuffs for national consumers via the informal market economy that characterizes their social group, but they are increasingly being integrated into the soy-dominated industrial economy.

The population of the Santa Cruz Department has grown from about 300,000 in 1960 to more than three million in 2022. About seventy per cent of this growth has occurred within the metropolitan area of the city Santa Cruz de la Sierra, but the urban economy is highly dependent upon the farm economy. The agriculture sector’s spatial footprint continues to expand, and institutions representing agribusiness hope to double or triple that area over the next decade. The state, at national and regional levels, supports both the smallholder and corporate agendas to varying degrees.

“A Perfect Storm in the Amazon” is a book by Timothy Killeen and contains the author’s viewpoints and analysis. The second edition was published by The White Horse in 2021, under the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0).

To read earlier chapters of the book, find Chapter One here, Chapter Two here, Chapter Three here, Chapter Four here and Chapter Five here.