The world believes the Amazon is in trouble because of Bolsonaro. Instead, they should look to Bolivia

The Amazon is burning, and everybody is looking to Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. They should be looking a little further south. In Bolivia, wildfires have been rampaging across the dry savannah of the country for weeks. On the southwest border with Paraguay and Brazil, at least 1 million hectares of farmland have been destroyed. In the northeast, the fires have spread to the Amazon.

Leaving aside the danger to indigenous tribes and the consequences of losing that much farmland, Bolivia’s fires have grave geopolitical implications. Bolivia’s president Evo Morales refused western aid for weeks, until domestic and international pressure forced his hand on Sunday. But that initial refusal – from an inferior economic power, no less – both taunts and emboldens neighbouring strongman Bolsonaro, who is also set to reject foreign aid for the emerging crisis, preferring to scrap with Macron about his wife.

Coica, the pan-Amazon organisation, has accused both Morales and Boslonaro of environmental genocide – but it is Bolsonaro who is being targeted by the G7. While Sao Paulo was plunged into darkness from smoke last week, the world is in metaphorical darkness about the problem of Bolivia.

South America’s poorest country is a landlocked place of primarily indigenous people and atrocious digital infrastructure. Very little internal news gets out to the West, sandwiched as it is between drama colossuses Argentina and Brazil. In the last two decades, the eyes of the world’s media have moved steadily northwards from Colombia to Venezuela, to Nicaragua and Mexico. Bolivia’s relative scarcity on the world stage might explain why nobody seems to know the name Evo Morales – or how unstable he really is.

The Aymara former coca leaf grower was elected in 2006 as the country’s first indigenous president, on a platform of environmental democracy and progressive rebellion. He’s been there ever since. But unlike his fellow leftist Latinos Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez, Morales lacks a big international profile.

At a Cochabamba conference on climate change in April 2010, the supposedly progressive socialist claimed that eating chicken turned Bolivian men gay. Apparently, it’s “loaded with female hormones”. When men eat it, he warned, they “experience deviations from their manhood.” (At the same conference, he also claimed that baldness in Europe was a disease, caused by their diet.)

Casual homophobia aside – and pseudoscientific fake news, considering that producers in Europe and the US had stopped using hormones decades before – the proto-chlorine chicken kerfuffle was the beginning of the end for his environmentalist credentials.

In 2000, Bolivia shook when tens of thousands protested against the privatisation of water – because many had no access to clean drinking water. In 2003, the US-backed former president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada sparked riots later known as the Gas Wars with his plans to export Bolivia’s natural gas to the US - even though most of the poorest citizens had no access to fuel. It was in this context of ‘natural power to the people’ that Morales was elected in 2005.

He, in turn, played up his indigenous roots with a pre-Incan priest tunic and an address from the temple of Tiwanaku, and nationalised Bolivia’s oil and gas. The country became one of the fastest growing Latin economies, avoiding the downturns in commodities-driven Venezuela and Brazil, but the rapid expansion of agribusiness angered his indigenous base. In 2011, he broke his promise to protect the TIPNIS national park and ancestral indigenous land, allowing it to be carved up by a highway and firing teargas on protesters in La Paz.

Like the UK, Bolivia had its own referendum in 2016. Morales decided to bypass the constitution and put it to the people: would they let him run for an unprecedented third term in office? (In fact, it would be his fourth term: he argued that his first didn’t count as it predated his own 2009 constitution which turned Bolivia into a plurinational state. Such political pedantry and shameless U-turning set a high bar for Westminster.)

Morales’s popularity, which had always hinged on his ‘man of the people’ shtick, suffered a blow when he lost the referendum by nearly 52 per cent. But in December, in what the leader of the opposition Jorge Quiroga would call “a blow to democracy”, Morales’s party chose to disregard the referendum and elect him as their candidate. Only months later, a hugely expensive facility honouring Morales, dubbed the ‘Evo museum’, opened in one of the country’s poorest areas. Dangerous for a leader elected a ‘man of the people’.

His term runs out in January 2020, elections are this October and the streets are hotting up. There have been opposition protests across the country this summer, claiming that Morales is “ignoring the will of the people” – sound familiar? – and setting fire to his own democratic idealism, while pro-Morales rallies have countered with their own unrest. Bolivia and Nicaragua are now the only presidential democracies in the Americas not to limit re-election, which many fear could lead to Venezuelan-style dictatorship. Dangerous for a leader elected on the basis of democracy.

And, one month ago, the president declared a new law allowing ‘chaqueo’ – so-called ‘slash-and-burn’ of the forest: a cheap way for migrant farmers to clear land. This practice threatens the indigenous population in the forests, and many environmental activists believe is largely to blame for the wildfires. Dangerous for a leader elected on the basis of indigenous affiliation.

Political unrest and presidential power grabs equal potential disaster in Latin America. The Amazon rainforest is trapped, burning, between a pincer-grip of unstable left-wing Morales, and unstable right-wing Bolsonaro. The flames could be the spark that sets civil war alight, pushing Bolivia into position as the next Latin American crisis zone while Venezuela lies in ashes. But when it comes to Bolivia’s future, Morales is playing chicken.