“We Marched for This Consultation”: Exploiting the Indigenous Right to Free, Prior, and Informed Consultation in Defense of Bolivia’s Territorio Indígena y Parque Nacional Isiboro Sécure

In February 2012, Bolivian president Evo Morales announced his government’s plan to implement its first free, prior, and informed consultation with the indigenous communities of the Territorio Indígena y Parque Nacional Isiboro Sécure (TIPNIS) over the construction of a highway through the indigenous territory and national park. The announcement prompted criticism from national and international indigenous rights and environmental movements, who argued that the consultation violated the principles of a free, prior, and informed consultation established in the ILO Convention 169, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and Bolivian law. The Subcentral TIPNIS, the official representative of the TIPNIS, refused to participate in the process, accusing the government using the consultation process to manipulate the TIPNIS communities into approving the highway project despite the promulgation of Law 180 for the Protection of the TIPNIS banning construction of the highway and affirming the TIPNIS’s dual status as an indigenous territory and “intangible” national park months earlier. The political opposition argued that the highway would open the TIPNIS to settlement by his main political base, the coca-leaf growing Aymara and Quechua highland migrants, cocaleros, whose territory encompasses the TIPNIS’s southern colonization zone. Analyses of the consultation in the TIPNIS have prioritized the discourses of the government and its pro-highway allies and the Subcentral TIPNIS and its allies while obscuring the voices of the communities who participated in the consultation process. By analyzing the government’s official report on the consultation in the TIPNIS and media coverage of the consultation in the inaugural communities of Oromomo and San Miguelito, this paper will reveal the agency of the TIPNIS communities, who exploited the consultation process to make demands for territorial rights, development, and environmental conservation developed over a fifty-year struggle to protect their territory.