Event Description
Ruth Alipaz Cuqui is an environmental defender from a remote Uchupiamona community in the Bolivian Amazon. In this Brown Bag lecture, she will speak about the threats her region faces and local strategies to defend what may be the world’s most biodiverse terrestrial protected area: Madidi National Park and its sister park, Pilon Lajas Bio-Indigenous Reserve. In the past ten years, upstream gold mining has aggressively intensified, poisoning downstream communities with mercury and other heavy metals. The Chepete-Bala mega-dam proposals threaten to flood 771 km2 of the Amazon rainforest and displace over 6,000 people from Tacana, Ese Ejja, Leco, Mosetene, and Tsimane communities. Alipaz Cuqui will speak about the drivers behind these threats, the intrinsic importance of this region, and what is being done to protect it. She will discuss the multi-year initiative underway among Indigenous communities, and in collaboration with the non-profit organization Ríos to Rivers, to halt the destruction and empower Indigenous youth in particular, to lift up their voices to protect their rivers, peoples, and cultures.
Speaker
Ruth Alipaz Cuqui is the general coordinator for Bolivia’s National Coordination for the Defense of Indigenous, Campesino, and Protected Areas (CONTIOCAP). Alipaz Cuqui’s efforts and leadership significantly contributed to halting the Chepete-Bala mega-dam proposals in 2016 and facilitating gold mining contamination studies in Indigenous communities in 2021. In 2018, Ruth spoke at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and denounced the Bolivian government regarding the Chepete-Bala mega dam proposals.
Cosponsors
Hosted by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and co-sponsored by UC Berkeley Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management; UC Berkeley Science & Environment; UC Berkeley Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, and Ríos to Rivers.