Bolivia Is Poisoning Indigenous Peoples to Death. Canada Is Signing the Cheques.
They refused my interview requests. They burned his house. She has cancer. Hundreds displaced. I'm writing it anyway.
I have been to hard places. I have sat inside grief that has no floor. I have stood in territories so shattered by industry and indifference that the land itself seems to be holding its breath, waiting for someone to notice.
It always affects me. I struggle. Anyone who tells you this work doesn’t reach inside you and take something is either lying or hasn’t been paying attention.
But I wasn’t expecting it to hit me like that. Not in that room. Not in that moment.
I was at the 25th session of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York last week when Cultural Survival presented two documents. Their annual In Memoriam report — “Defending the Land, Paying with Life”— documenting 46 Indigenous land defenders murdered in Latin America in 2025 alone. And their advocacy brief on Bolivia: “When Mining Erodes Entire Indigenous Communities.”
They opened with a video. Updates from the field. Faces and voices from the territories.
And then — Pastor. Guadalupe.
I left the room. I couldn’t stay. I was crying before I made it to the door.
Because I know these people. I sat with them. I walked their dying land with them. Last August, I was in Bolivia on assignment for Cultural Survival — I reported from their territories, looked into their eyes, felt the weight of what they carry. And hearing their names and faces appear on that screen in a United Nations chamber — Pastor still displaced from his home, Guadalupe now fighting cancer — split me straight through.
Some things don’t announce themselves before they arrive. That was one of them.
What Greed Looks Like Up Close
In Pastor’s territory — Seque Jahuira, an Indigenous Aymara community in the Department of La Paz — I could not breathe without covering my nose and mouth.
I am not speaking metaphorically. The air was visibly thick. You could see the chemicals vibrating in it. Cyanide. Mercury. Sulfuric acid. The byproducts of 26 mining operations that have moved into this territory, most of them illegal, none of them with the community’s free, prior, and informed consent. The rivers that once ran clear and held fish now run a sickly brownish-green, carrying the smell of death. Where families raised cattle and grew potatoes for generations — since before colonization — there is now a toxic wasteland.
The garbage. The dead animals. The silence where there should be life.
There was a deep heaviness I felt not just in my chest but in my body and spirit. A weight I still carry.
Cultural Survival’s documentation confirms what I witnessed: mining operations have contaminated water and soil with arsenic, lead, cadmium, zinc, and cyanide at levels exceeding Bolivia’s own legal limits. Pastor’s community of 60 families has been reduced to just 5 still living on the land. The rest displaced — scattered to cities, cut off from their ceremonies, their language, their Elders, their identity. When the land goes, everything goes. This is not collateral damage. This is the intended outcome of extraction without conscience.
Pastor himself has been forced out of his own home. His son was savagely beaten by miners on June 26, 2025. His house was burned to the ground in September. He receives anonymous phone calls at all hours — callers who hang up or stay silent on the line, a calculated campaign of psychological terror. He lives in hiding.
And Mama Guadalupe.
Sweet, fierce, relentless Mama Guadalupe. She has faced dynamite and death threats and attacks and displacement. She has hidden in creek beds and mountains to escape violent miners more than once. She has kept fighting anyway. And now she is battling cancer — a tumor in her tonsils, diagnosed mid-2025 — in the same contaminated territory where mining companies have poisoned the air, water, and soil she has breathed and grown food from her entire life.
The Cultural Survival advocacy brief, presented at this week’s Permanent Forum, does not mince words: her cancer and the contamination surrounding her cannot be separated.
Since Pastor and Guadalupe traveled to New York last year to testify at the 24th session of the Permanent Forum — a space that is supposed to be sacred and safe for Indigenous peoples — the reprisals against them escalated. They were verbally threatened inside the UN building by an associate of Bolivia’s ruling political party. Security guards photographed their identification badges mid-intervention in what both described as deliberate intimidation. When they returned home, it got worse.
Defamation campaigns. Social media attacks. Anonymous threats. A bomb threat against the office of the organization supporting them. And the burning of Pastor’s home.
This is what happens when you speak truth to power from the floor of the United Nations. You go home to ashes.
What the “Green Transition” Is Built On
The Bolívar Mine in Guadalupe’s territory — one of the primary sources of devastation in the Ayllu Acre Antequera — is not some rogue operation run by local bandits. It is jointly owned by the Canadian company Santa Cruz Silver Mining Ltd. and Bolivia’s state-owned Corporation COMIBOL. It extracts silver, zinc, and lead. It consumes 800,000 liters of water daily in an arid landscape where water is already scarce, while discharging contaminated wastewater into the Antequera River at levels that violate even its own lease agreement.
Santacruz Silver Mining Ltd. is incorporated in British Columbia and headquartered in Vancouver, Canada. It trades on the TSX Venture Exchange and the Nasdaq Capital Market under the symbol SCZ. Under a profit-sharing agreement with Bolivia’s state-owned Corporación Minera de Bolivia — COMIBOL — Santacruz receives 45 percent of profits from the Bolívar Mine while the Bolivian government retains 55 percent. Read that again. The Bolivian state is not just the regulator failing to protect these communities. It is a direct financial beneficiary of the mine destroying them. The government has a profit motive to look the other way. And it does.
I went to the La Paz office of Santa Cruz Silver. I demanded an interview with officials. They refused.
I hand-delivered letters to multiple Bolivian government ministries — Ministry of Mining, Ministry of Environment and Water, Ministry of Cultures. My requests were officially stamped. As of this writing, not a single ministry has responded.
The tailings pond — the toxic waste reservoir — sits directly parallel to a small water hole that mining representatives tell community members to bring their livestock to drink from. One narrow, man-made dirt road separates the poison from the so-called fresh water. The communities are offered a choice between death by dehydration or death by slow poisoning.
That is not a choice. That is environmental murder. Slow, deliberate, profitable, and shielded by governmental silence.
54 percent of transitional mineral deposits — the minerals powering the so-called green energy revolution in wealthy nations — are located in or near Indigenous territories. The “clean energy transition” the Global North is celebrating is being paid for with the bodies, lands, and lives of Indigenous peoples in Bolivia and communities like it around the world.
That is not a transition. That is colonialism with better branding.
The Numbers Are People
Cultural Survival’s In Memoriam 2025 report names 46 Indigenous defenders killed in Latin America last year alone. Forty-six people with names and families and communities and sacred obligations to their territories. A high percentage of them were young.
Since 2012, more than 2,253 land defenders have been documented as murdered — 799 of them Indigenous. In more than 95 percent of cases, the reason for the attack was simply this: they were defending their land.
Latin America is the most dangerous region in the world to be an Indigenous land defender. But the supply chains of that violence run straight to boardrooms in Vancouver, London, and beyond.
The UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Dr. Albert K. Barume, stated it plainly at this year’s Permanent Forum: “There is a crisis Indigenous people are currently experiencing, and it’s because many Indigenous peoples are killed, many are under arrest, many live in hiding. This is because Indigenous peoples’ land and territory are often not protected enough.”
That is the highest level of the international human rights system confirming what communities like Seque Jahuira and Ayllu Acre Antequera have been screaming for years.
Nobody is listening loudly enough.
I’m Saying It Plainly: This Is Genocide
I am a journalist. I am careful with words.
But I am also Cree and Iroquois. I am from a people who know what it looks like when a government and its corporate partners systematically destroy a people’s land, water, food sovereignty, cultural continuity, and physical safety — and then criminalize those who resist.
This is genocide. Not metaphor. Not hyperbole. The deliberate destruction of the conditions necessary for a people to survive and exist as who they are.
When you poison someone’s water and then tell them to drink it anyway. When you burn a man’s house down after he testifies at the United Nations. When a woman who has spent her life defending her community is now fighting cancer in the polluted territory her persecutors have surrounded her with. When a constitutional court orders environmental studies and the government simply ignores it. When the ombudsman says its role is to legalize the illegal mining — not defend the people.
That is not negligence. That is complicity.
Bolivia’s constitution guarantees free, prior, and informed consent. The country has ratified ILO Convention 169. It has adopted the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Not one of those commitments has been honored in these territories. Not one.
And Canada — which brands itself a nation of reconciliation — needs to look at what its mining companies are doing in Bolivia and ask whether reconciliation that stops at the border is reconciliation at all, or just reputation management.
I Will Keep Going Back
I know the weight I am carrying right now is also the weight of connection. Of love, actually. Because to know Pastor and Guadalupe is to love them. To walk their land is to belong, even briefly, to something that reaches back through generations and forward into a future that must not be extinguished.
So I am writing this. I am saying their names.
Tata Pastor Carvajal. Mama Guadalupe Fernández.
I am telling you what I saw in their territories with my own eyes, in my own body, in my own spirit. And I am asking you to do something with it.
Share this. Learn about Cultural Survival’s campaigns for Bolivia. If you are Canadian, pressure your government to hold Santa Cruz Silver Mining accountable. Demand that these companies be named and confronted until they cannot move in polite international society without facing the truth of what they are funding.
The land remembers who defended it. So do we. So should you.
Hiy Hiy. ❤️
Brandi Morin is an award-winning Cree/Iroquois/French journalist from Treaty 6 territory. Her reporting from Bolivia was published in Cultural Survival Quarterly. She is the author of the national bestselling memoir Our Voice of Fire. To support independent Indigenous journalism, subscribe to Indigenous Insider.
Sources & Further Reading
- Cultural Survival, When Mining Erodes Entire Indigenous Communities”— Advocacy brief presented at the 25th UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, April 2026
- Cultural Survival, In Memoriam 2025: “Defending the Land, Paying with Life”
- Brandi Morin, “All Eyes on Bolivia: Environmental Devastation and Human Rights Abuses Caused by Unregulated Mining in Seque Jahuira,” Cultural Survival, October 2025
- Brandi Morin, “Indigenous Resistance in Bolivia’s Mining Wasteland,” Cultural Survival Quarterly, December 2025
- Cultural Survival, “Cultural Survival Denounces Harassment of Indigenous Delegates at International Fora,” May 2025
- Grist / Indigenous News Alliance, “Indigenous land defenders are being killed, and AI is scraping their knowledge,” April 23, 2026
- Dr. Albert K. Barume, Statement at the 25th Session of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, April 2026
Here’s the link to the Canadian Ombudsman for Responsible Enterprise if you’d like to file a complaint on behalf of these desperate Bolivians:
https://core-ombuds.canada.ca/core_ombuds-ocre_ombuds/filing_a_complaint-deposer_une_plainte.aspx?lang=eng
I don’t understand how anyone on this planet does not understand how clean drinking water is a basic human right. There can be no argument against this, no excuse that justifies the intentional polluting of this vital human necessity.