Daniel knew well how much it had taken for the Guarayos people to gain what they had. As one of the 36 recognized indigenous groups in Bolivia, they had long endured exploitation and discrimination, first from Spanish colonizers and missionaries from the 16th through the 19th century, and later, in the 20th century, from a Bolivian state dominated by nonindigenous groups. But they had learned how to fight back. In 1990, together with other eastern lowland indigenous peoples, they organized the first indigenous march in Bolivia to demand territorial rights. In response to the increasing pressure, the government enacted the Agrarian Reform Law (La Ley del Servicio Nacional de Reforma Agraria, INRA Law) and Forest Law (Ley Forestal) in 1996, enabling formal recognition of the land and resource rights of indigenous communities.
In the meantime, the Guarayos people created COPNAG and presented a land claim of 2,194,433 hectares to the National Agrarian Reform Institute (Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agrícola, INRA) in 1996. INRA later immobilized an area of 2,205,537 hectares, where all land transactions were supposed to be frozen until the property rights conflicts were resolved.○ However, a number of timber companies, who wouldn’t give away their previous exclusive access to forests, managed to obtain new timber concessions from INRA within the claimed area by the Guarayos people. Similarly, other third parties contested the land claim and registered their own claims with INRA.
As of 2014, 1,297,963 ha (58% of the claim) had been granted to the Guarayos people, and 518,091 ha (23%) to third parties such as ranch owners, private companies, and Andean immigrant communities.○ The remainder had not been adjudicated. The land titled to Guarayos people was mostly in a remote and inaccessible area with few settlements and artificial boundaries created by INRA that did not match the customary use patterns of the Guarayos people. In contrast, the areas where Guarayos people actually lived and frequently used—which are also the most accessible and contested by third parties—still awaited a decision.○ ○
While the demand for territory was under consideration, COPNAG was given the responsibility to govern the Guarayos indigenous territory as its administrative authority. Being a young organization originally created to represent the Guarayos people on land title issues, it wasn’t prepared for transparent and efficient governance.○ ○ It lacked a strong link to village-level indigenous organizations. It also did not have organizational mechanisms through which the community could hold officials accountable. COPNAG needed resources to restructure and establish governance capacity, but the state didn’t provide any resources to enable such structures. The costs to the Guarayos people included scandals of corruption, illegal sale of land certificates to outsiders, and a five-year conflict within COPNAG that further divided and weakened the indigenous community.
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Map: Yifan He. Data: INRA, 2014