Bolivia’s Dilemma: Development Confronts the Legacy of Extraction

This is an article written by Linda Farthing, I have included her bio below but more than her bio she is a good friend of ours so give it a read!!

Linda Farthing is a writer, educator and activist. She has written and edited books and articles on Mexico, Peru, Panama, and Bolivia, worked as field producer for documentary films in Colombia and Bolivia, and administered college semester abroad programs throughout the Americas.


Bolivia’s Dilemma: Development Confronts the Legacy of Extraction
by Linda Farthing

As with so much else in South America’s landlocked and impoverished heartland, Bolivia’s natural environment excels in superlatives: It is home to the world’s largest salt flat (Salar de Uyuni in the southwest); the world’s highest navigable lake (Titicaca, straddling the border with Peru); and the second-largest high mountain plateau (the altiplano), after that of Tibet. The result is an often breathtaking landscape of magnificent snow-covered mountains surrounding windswept plateaus and lakes of an almost unimaginable deep blue, high valleys unfolding eastward into dense, vast jungles to the north, and open savannas to the south.

Less fortunately for both Bolivia’s environment and its people, the exploitation of the country’s considerable natural resources has also been nearly unparalleled: The country was once home to the Spanish colony’s richest silver and gold mine (Potosí); boasted one of the world’s richest tin mines (Siglo XX); and today has two of the world’s largest silver mines (San Cristóbal and San Bartolomé), an estimated half of world’s lithium reserves (Salar de Uyuni), the future largest iron ore mine (Mutún), and the second-largest proven gas reserves in South America (after Venezuela’s). It comes as no surprise that Bolivia’s history and environment have been dominated by relentless extraction.

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