In a wooden schoolhouse surrounded by this region’s rich tropical forest, some 30 members of the Yuqui indigenous community gathered recently to discuss the first two years of their timber-management plan. “Before the management plan we would have destroyed the whole forest,” explains Jonathan Isategua Guaguasu, Vice-President of the Organization for the Indigenous People of the Tropic of Cochabamba (CPITO) and a former cacique, or community leader, of the Yuqui council. “This is a great advance we have made, one we never could have dreamed of before.” The Yuquis traditionally lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers in the Bolivian Amazon. Then five years ago they, along with members of the Mojeño, Mobima, Trinitario and Uracare communities, were given rights to the 300,000-acre (120,000... [Log in to read more]