Good morning, this is Kasmira. Last month, 30 Bolivian Indigenous and environmental rights defenders came to Geneva to appeal to states ahead of their country’s periodic human rights review in January 2025.

I met with two of them – Ruth Alipaz and lawyer Franco Albarracin – who say the country’s gold mining and other extractive activities go against its world-famous laws protecting nature and risk driving their communities to extinction.

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Kasmira Jefford

20.12.2024

On our radar

Photo article

Ruth Alipaz (left) pictured with other Indigenous and environmental rights defenders at an event organised by Spanish NGO Alianza por la Solidaridad in Valencia, Spain. (Orriols Convive)

Ruth Alipaz rests her head in her hands. Sitting in the Palais des Nations’ Serpentine Bar at the end of a cold and rainy day, her small frame sinks, as though under the weight of years fighting Indigenous rights violations in her home country of Bolivia, which she has come to Geneva to denounce.

Alipaz is from the Uchupiamona Nation in the Bolivian Amazon. Her community of around 700 inhabitants lives within the Madidi national park northwest of La Paz – one of Bolivia’s largest protected areas, stretching from the Andes mountains to the rainforests of the Tuichi river, and one of the most biodiverse regions in the world.

But over the past two decades, her Indigenous group and others in the region have watched with alarm as a booming gold mining industry has increasingly encroached on their lands, destroying the environment and threatening their way of life, health, identity and their very existence.

Read the full story on Geneva Solutions.

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