In a record year for forest loss across the tropics, more than a fifth of all the primary forest destroyed in 2024 was in Bolivia, placing the Latin American nation at the very heart of a global crisis. ‘Bolivia Burning’ is a 50-minute documentary by the The Gecko Project following Bolivian human rights lawyer Alvaro Bozo García and British journalist David Hill as they travel through the eastern Bolivian lowlands, hearing from some of the people impacted by the fires which ripped through over 12.5 million hectares of the country.
You could say that there has never been a more appropriate time to make a film about the destruction of Bolivia’s forests. Last year, when a team from the UK-based The Gecko Project visited the country to shoot footage for a documentary, Bolivia was experiencing its worst ever fire season. This year, just weeks before the film’s trailer was released, it was revealed that Bolivia lost more tropical forest in 2024 than any other country in the world except Brazil. Moreover, 2025 marks 200 years since the declaration of the country’s independence from Spain in 1825, and there are presidential elections coming up in August.
Our film, titled Bolivia Burning, has now been screened at several venues in Bolivia as we build momentum for a wider release later in the year. Conceived by The Gecko Project’s director Tom Johnson and shot by British filmmaker Leo Plunkett, it follows myself and a Bolivian human rights lawyer, Alvaro Bozo García, into the Santa Cruz region where over the last few decades the vast majority of the country’s deforestation has been occurring. Indeed, according to a recent report by Bolivian NGO TIERRA, almost 70 percent of the areas burnt last year were in Santa Cruz.
The sense of crisis, when we arrived, was immediate. There were Spanish firefighters on the same plane as us who had come to help combat the problem, haze from the fires was visible from Santa Cruz city’s taller buildings, and smoke blew in from the countryside. Ask any taxi driver what the haze was, or where the smoke was coming from, and the answer was always something like: ‘It’s burning season. They’re burning the Chiquitano…’
As Bolivia Burning reveals, those fires weren’t usually ‘wild’, as reported or implied by some mainstream media, but started deliberately to clear the forest to make way for agriculture, before sometimes getting out of control. Over the weeks that we were there, the extent of the area impacted kept on rising – up from several million hectares to more than 10. Ultimately, TIERRA estimates that more 12.5 million hectares were affected – an astonishing 11.5 percent of the entire country.
Ultimately, TIERRA estimates that more 12.5 million hectares were affected – an astonishing 11.5 percent of the entire country.
There are many complex reasons why Bolivia’s deforestation rates are so high, and numerous actors play all kinds of significant roles in this. Bolivia Burning explores the government decisions that have laid the groundwork for this environmental crisis, and focuses in particular on members of an ultra-conservative Christian denomination, the Mennonites, who have established ‘colonies’ in remote parts of the country and have become veritable experts at razing vast areas of forest to keep cattle and cultivate crops – most importantly soy.
After visiting one of the oldest colonies in Bolivia, the film tracks myself and Alvaro to a brand new colony where only six Mennonite families live in box trailers. They had only been there less than a year, but had already made quick progress bulldozing the forest.
‘Where could the jaguars have gone?’ Alvaro asks at one point during the film’s shooting which I found especially moving, as we stood with the leader of the new colony and surveyed the devastation all around us.
So many people are aware of tropical forests being razed in other countries around the world like Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, Peru, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo etc., but Bolivia remains comparatively under-the-radar. Bolivia Burning’s aim is to change that.
Some people even call what is happening there ‘ecocide’, while others, of course, have different ways of putting it. ‘We are on the edge of a precipice,’ says one Bolivian activist, Alcides Vadillo, from TIERRA, at the very end of the film. ‘If we continue in the same way, we’re going to fall into that precipice. If we want to survive, we must change course. That’s the truth.’
