69-Year-Old Native Leader Heads 1,500-Km March

[Judi Lynn]

69-Year-Old Native Leader Heads 1,500-Km March
By Franz Chávez

LA PAZ, Jun 25, 2010 (IPS) - Indigenous elder Ernesto Noé, 69, is once again leading his people on a long march from Bolivia's Amazon jungle, to protest environmental damages caused by the oil industry and demand respect for native land rights.

The 1,482-km trek from Trinidad, the capital of the northeastern province of Beni, to La Paz in the western highlands will be his seventh protest march.

The 700 indigenous protesters set out on Jun. 21 and expect to arrive in the capital in two months.

Noé was one of the leaders of the first march by native communities from the country's eastern lowlands, in 1990, when some 600 people walked the same route, to protest the intense pressure from landowners, ranchers and loggers constantly encroaching on their ancestral lands.

That first march created a new public awareness on the plight of native groups in the Amazon, and the growing pressure prompted the government of Jaime Paz Zamora (1989-1993) to issue decrees that prevented logging on certain tribal lands in Beni, restored land to indigenous groups, and marked out several collectively-owned indigenous territories.

That 1990 march, considered a landmark event in Bolivian history, helped spark the process of political and social changes that culminated in the new constitution rewritten under President Evo Morales, who took office in 2006.

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