The political movement that brought Evo Morales to power incorporated a latent conflict between highland and lowland Indigenous communities. The lowland nations are intent on recuperating their ancestral territories, which had been appropriated by families of European extraction or, more recently, allocated to timber companies as long-term forest concessions. The promise of recovering these lands […]
The adage ‘possession is nine-tenths of the law’ is not legally true, but the concept reigns supreme on frontier landscapes in the Pan Amazon. Land grabbers and peasant pioneers share a modus operandi: they occupy land that does not belong to them. Historically, this process was condoned by the state, and conflict occurred only when […]