[Excerpt translation from Spanish to English provided by Business & Human Rights Resource Centre]

"China targets Bolivia with investment in national parks and indigenous territories" - March 15, 2020

...The country (in Latin America) that does not have China as its first trading partner, has it as its second. This is the conclusion reached by the director of the Initiative for Sustainable Chinese-Latin American Investment (IISCAL), Ecuadorian Paulina Garzón, who recently presented the study "Compilation of Chinese Environmental and Social Guidelines for Foreign Operations"... The study focuses on the compilation of 24 Chinese environmental and social guidelines, applied in the countries where it intervenes with investments... Marco Antonio Gandarillas said that Chinese companies are present in all sectors, from gold mining with dredges in rivers of the department of La Paz, through road construction, to seismic exploration in the Nueva Esperanza Oil Block, in the Madre de Dios River basin, in the north of the country, by the Chinese company BGP [part of China National Petroleum Corporation, CNPC]. This company was accused by environmental and human rights organizations of generating an environmental impact in the area and putting the Tacana indigenous territory at risk, as well as the life of the uncontacted Toromona indigenous people... In 2016, the government of Evo Morales awarded the Chinese company Accidental Rositas Association [part of Ende, China International Water & Electric, and China Three Gorges Corporation] the execution of the "Engineering, Supply, Construction, Assembly, Testing and Commissioning" of the Santa Cruz hydroelectric plant, whose cost is more than 1 million. Two years later, the indigenous communities of Yumao, Tatarenda and Vallegrandinas managed to stop the work and then wanted the suspension of the work definitively, because it is expected to flood 450 square kilometres, affecting three protected areas and more than twenty communities. Indigenous peoples settled on the Beni, Tuichi and Quiquibey rivers reject the Chepete-Bala hydroelectric plant, located in the northern Pacific...