On March 30, he was attacked at a national park checkpoint when he demanded documentation from illegal miners. He is now notified for defamation and slander and must declare this July 5

He is a native of the Santa Rosa community, municipality of Apolo, today co-opted by mining.

He was a rancher, but took advantage of a call from the National Service for Protected Areas (Sernap) to discover his vocation as a park ranger and his devotion to the environment.

Since 2010, Raúl Santa Cruz (42), father of two children, one of them on the way, has become a ranger of the Madidi National Park, a job he says he loves. However, like many other guardians of the forest, he has felt for some time that this work is becoming not only more difficult, but also more risky, since four times he has been attacked.

The last time was on March 30, when he and his colleagues went to the Santa Cruz del Valle Ameno checkpoint to request documentation from the miners who were trying to cross the border that marks the beginning of the national protected area with heavy machinery.

At that time, the impasse was made public in the press, and it was said that the attacker was Ramiro Cuevas Echave, secretary of the Supervisory Board of the Federation of Mining Cooperatives of La Paz (Fecoman LP), who was later denounced by environmentalists for carrying out illegal mining in the national park.

Some time later, an agri-environmental judge ordered the militarization of Madidi to remove the miners and their machinery, but a notification also reached Raúl, and another park ranger, Marcos Uzquiano.

According to the documents, Cuevas asks for a three-year sentence for both. Raúl, must appear to testify on July 5 in Apolo, for slander and defamation.

If a sentence is handed down, both Raúl Santa Cruz and Marcos Uzquiano would be disqualified as public officials and would lose all possibility of continuing to care for the forests.

Protector of biodiversity

Santa Cruz said that he has always liked nature, and that he has a special attachment to the Madidi National Park, due to its biodiversity.

“I love nature, I like to preserve it and I would like the Madidi to remain protected. I am one of the rangers who wishes the park would not disappear, it is said that it is a treasure forever, and I have that conviction and love,” he shared.

According to Raúl, people have always dedicated themselves to artisanal mining in the Apolo area, but later mechanized mining activity arrived, especially at the headwaters of the Tuichi River.

He confessed that before it was better, since it worked well, because the ‘guards’ could enter the communities to carry out their work to raise awareness of the environment, but he regretted that with the start of illegal mining everything changed.

“In the communities there are roadblocks, it is difficult to enter, even inside the park, they do not let us carry out our duties. The problem is that the leaders of the communities coordinate with the representatives of the mining industry, saying that we harm development, etc. We enter the places, but they put conditions on us, they tell us what to do and what not to do during inspections in the areas of mining activity,” he questioned.

The Madidi guardian said that the day of the incident there were Chinese, who are the ones who now work as investors in the Virgen del Rosario community, where Cuevas is a leader.

“The Chinese are the owners of the machinery, there is a pact with the leaders of the communities, they give them gold dividends, and when we question them they answer that they are working with people from the Government, that they are protected by the Government, and that is why they are not afraid of us. We are not an obstacle for them,” he indicated.

Santa Cruz acknowledged that the miners always get away with it, that they have been exceeded, since from the communities they reach the checkpoints, and with pressure they introduce machinery, “it shows that they are protected,” lamented Raúl.