More is needed than moving the cabinet to Santa Cruz

Three months after the fires began and after three million hectares burned in Santa Cruz, President Luis Arce arrived in this department with his cabinet to address the problem. His presence coincided with the rain and the mitigation of the tragedy, which put out 20 of the 74 fires. It must be said that it is good that he is dealing with the matter, but it must also be noted that his concern is late because there is already a lot of pain behind this tragedy.

In the department alone, 3.3 million hectares have already burned, a large part of which is forest. Millions of animals have been burned to death. Pollution has taken over all of Santa Cruz, in the capital and in the provinces. Dozens of families have been evacuated from towns where the fires are out of control and the rest live in fear, because the fires have escalated to the sixth generation, which is the same as hell.

During this time, the Deputy Minister of Civil Defense, Juan Carlos Calvimontes, has been busy, and has had controversial actions in the process. Many times he contradicted reality, trying to minimize the disaster, while other times he explained that the effort to put out the fires was worthless if the deliberate action of those who set the fires continues.

Since the weekend, the situation has become extreme because pollution and heat waves have surpassed all records nationwide. That is why, on Wednesday, President Luis Arce announced that he would arrive with his entire cabinet in Santa Cruz to personally attend to the fires. He did so, and his presence has been more symbolic. He boarded a Hercules plane from which he unloaded boxes of water (they say with new technology) to put out the flames. At the end of the day, he returned to La Paz, but left some of his collaborators to continue working in Santa Cruz.

If we look at the problem in a broader sense, we will understand that the work to put out the fires is the emergency of the moment and something that must be done, but it is also necessary for the ruler to admit that this environmental disaster has to do with underlying policies that neither the Arce Government nor that of Evo Morales have wanted to address seriously. There is a government policy aimed at expanding the agricultural frontier and it is doing so by means of uncontrolled burning that ends with the change of land use. In other words, they are aiming for biofuels and crops at the expense of the forests in the region.

Burning land is a recurring theme, and even then it has not been possible to increase the budget for mitigating environmental damage. The consequences are what we see today.

The great fire of 2019 was the turning point for Evo Morales to be rejected by the population and the Government is making the same political mistake. That is why the last-minute concern about the expansion of the fire is not convincing if it is not accompanied by fundamental measures to change the order of things. The productive area, fiscal lands and protected areas are constantly being invaded and the Government did nothing to stop encouraging these practices. Only in August was the last arson decree approved, which legalized the taking and clearing of thousands of hectares of forests in the Choré forest reserve, turning them into an Integrated Management Area; the regulations approved by Evo Morales remain in force and the invaders continue to do their thing with impunity.

This is why the symbolic presence needs to be reinforced with concrete and real actions, so that the government’s concern about the fires is credible.