In Bolivia’s north-west, towns built on organic cacao are trying to hold back a gold rush that brings mercury, flooding, and fast cash, turning one fight into a question about who gets to decide the fate of rivers and forests.
Cacao Against the Dredges
Under towering mahogany trees in Bolivia’s biodiverse north-west, Herminio Mamani tends cacao in a landscape that still sounds alive. Parrots cut through the air. Crops grow together instead of in neat industrial rows. The work follows the logic of agroforestry, not extraction. Mamani, a former president of El Ceibo, the country’s largest organic cacao cooperative, tells The Guardian that this model is vital not only for the quality of the cacao produced by its 1,300 members, but also for keeping gold mining at bay.
That sentence carries more weight than it first appears to. In much of Latin America, conservation is too often spoken about as if it were a luxury, something separate from work, food, and survival. The Guardian’s reporting shows something different in Palos Blancos and Alto Beni. Here, farming is not the opposite of development. It is the argument for another kind of development, one that protects international certifications, biodiversity, food security, and the daily dignity of staying put.
About 20 miles away, along the Kaka River, dredging boats and excavators work relentlessly as part of a gold rush that has rerouted waterways and pushed into forests near some of the world’s most biodiverse national parks. Mamani’s land remains protected thanks to local laws passed in 2021 banning mining in Palos Blancos and Alto Beni. He helped push for the ordinance declaring Palos Blancos mining-free, a measure framed as essential for safeguarding agriculture and food security, and Alto Beni followed with a similar one months later.
This is what makes the story larger than one municipal fight. Bolivia is showing, in miniature, one of Latin America’s oldest struggles. A river valley must decide whether it will live by the patient rhythms of farming and forest, or by the urgent logic of extraction. The first path does not promise sudden riches. The second does, and that is exactly why it keeps returning.
The Price of Fast Gold
The pressure has intensified as the price of gold has soared. The Guardian reports that gold prices surged by more than 64% in 2025, climbing from about $2,000 an ounce in 2020 to record highs above $5,100 an ounce in January amid rising geopolitical uncertainties. In the Andes and the Amazon, that kind of price movement does not remain inside commodity charts. It arrives as engines on rivers, mercury in waterways, armed interests in the shadows, and new arguments from central governments about opportunity.
The initiative to resist this wave began in 2017, when a mining dredge appeared on the nearby Boopi River, which borders Alto Beni and Palos Blancos. Both municipalities, reliant on organic agriculture, had avoided mining but had watched its devastation elsewhere. Roberto Gutierrez, a farmer in Alto Beni, says the river near Mayaya used to be deep and full of fish. Now, he says, water levels have dropped, pollution has seeped in, and the fish are disappearing. Nancy Chambi, a farmer and Alto Beni councilor, recalls how communities responded with mass protests and warned the miners to leave or have their machinery burned. The miners left.
There is a hard lesson here. Mining expansion often advances where the state is permissive, and local communities are divided. In these towns, resistance worked because the threat was recognized early and because agriculture still had enough social legitimacy to mobilize people before the mining economy took root too deeply. El Ceibo and other cooperatives opposed mining for ecological and economic reasons. Mercury contamination could strip them of international certifications. Mamani says that even if small-scale mining were permitted, it would be a slippery slope. Contamination, he argues, would be unavoidable, and if the certifications were lost, the price of their cacao would plummet.
That fear is not theoretical. The Guardian notes that record gold prices have fueled illegal mining globally, driving deforestation, mercury poisoning, armed conflict, and human and animal trafficking. In Bolivia, legal and illegal mining have spread into protected areas, unhindered by lax regulations. Severe flooding in Tipuani and Guanay has forced discussions of potential town relocations. A caption in the report notes that the rise in gold prices over the past decade has accelerated a shift from centuries-old panning practices to industrial operations that are reshaping riverbanks and contributing to flooding. In other words, what once looked like artisanal survival now increasingly resembles industrial devastation wearing a more local face.
Still, the story resists easy morality. Karen Coata, vice-president of the Organization of Indigenous Leco Women, says cacao producers in Palos Blancos and Alto Beni can access international markets, but elsewhere farmers struggle. In her territory of Pilcol, people report mercury-related illnesses such as headaches and lung pain, yet many still mine to supplement their incomes. “How else will we make ends meet?” she asks. That question is the one that extractive economies always exploit. Where states fail to build reliable markets for clean livelihoods, toxic work becomes the fallback.
A Local Wall Against a National Tide
That is why these municipal bans matter so much. They are not utopian gestures. They are defensive walls.
After four years of grassroots pressure, Palos Blancos and Alto Beni passed mining bans in 2021. A 2024 departmental law further legitimized their stance against the national government’s will. Ulises Ariñez, former environment secretary for Palos Blancos, says people came to understand that gold is temporary, while agriculture and conservation are for the long term. The laws have secured farmers’ organic status. In 2025, El Ceibo exported 2,000 tonnes of cacao, mostly to Europe and the United States, giving communities some resilience amid Bolivia’s economic crisis. Jesús Tapia, an El Ceibo producer, says that with the country’s economy in such bad shape, people there are a bit more at ease.
But the national tide still runs the other way. The Ministry of Mining and Metallurgy and the Bolivian mining authority declined interview requests. Yet, in January, the mining minister told local media that high gold prices represented an “opportunity” for Bolivia to export up to $5bn of the metal annually. In February, Bolivia’s new administration considered a decree to fast-track the regularisation of non-compliant mining operations. If approved, it would reduce legal requirements for 3,982 mining projects that had failed to comply with a 2014 law, including exemptions from environmental permit requirements.
That contrast, local bans below and regulatory easing above, says almost everything about why the problem persists in Latin America. Municipalities live with the poisoned water, the lost fish, the mercury illness, and the flood risk. National governments live with budget gaps, export anxieties, and the seduction of commodity revenue. One level of the state sees contamination arriving by river. The other sees dollar signs arriving by spreadsheet.
At least 10 other municipalities and Indigenous territories are now pursuing similar bans. Pablo Solón, the environmental activist and former Bolivian UN ambassador who has supported municipalities seeking alternatives to mining, calls this the beginning of the fight. He says a wall has to be built to stop mining from coming down the river. He is realistic enough to add that the wall will prevent the cancer from spreading, but that the cancer already exists.
That may be the most honest line in the whole story. Bolivia is not defeating extractivism. It is trying to contain it where communities still have enough cohesion, enough agricultural value, and enough memory of what healthy rivers once looked like. Franklin Quequesana, a Guanay councilor, argues for regulated mining rather than outright bans, saying mining could be done responsibly, though he doubts waste would ever be managed correctly. Alfredo Zaconeta of Cedla says national policy is needed and that unless the government clearly defines which areas are open to mining, local measures will not have the impact people hope for.
Even so, there is something important and deeply Latin American in what Palos Blancos and Alto Beni have done. They are refusing the old regional bargain that says communities must accept poisoned rivers in exchange for someone else’s idea of prosperity. The Guardian’s reporting makes clear that this resistance is fragile, incomplete, and under pressure. But it is real. And in a time of record gold prices and desperate state temptation, that may be exactly why it matters.
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