It was a bad time for a story on ecotourism. The country was falling apart.

I arrived in Bolivia’s capital, La Paz, on the second day of a three-week siege. The May 2005 protest marches by the indigenous people were paralyzing the city.

Carrying braided whips, the protesters demanded that the president nationalize the natural gas reserves. Chanting slogans for better representation in the constitution, they lashed at pedestrians who crossed their lines and attacked street vendors they viewed as traitors.

Vandals tore bricks from the streets, destroyed curbs and broke water lines. Miners left their dark tunnels and arrived in heavy trucks loaded with explosives. Dynamite exploded, and the air shook. Road blockades starved the city of gasoline, bread and tomatoes. When mobs rushed police lines, the tear gas flew in smoking arcs that popped on contact, coating throats in a chemical glaze.

Tourists and travelers fled. Some were stranded, as rides to the airport grew scarce, and then impossible. La Paz’s “gringo land” — the streets lined with souvenir shops, travel agencies and restaurants friendly to fickle bellies — was abandoned. The high season had turned disastrous.

Government officials and travel agents were fixated on the uncertainties of the moment, and I was there to question the past. Rising above the roar of political protest to divert attention back to memories was a challenge — but it was just the beginning.

Bolivian environmentalism

I originally traveled to Bolivia to improve my Spanish, but I also had to complete an environmental reporting assignment to finish my master’s degree. I soon stumbled upon a Bolivian environmentalist whose world had collapsed, and that’s where my story began.

Rosa Maria Ruiz once had a vision for ecotourism in tropical Madidi National Park in northwestern Bolivia. In the early 1990s, she started a foundation called Eco Bolivia, built a series of lodges and dedicated her life to teaching the local people how to protect their land while prospering from tourism.

Her world came undone in a series of personal disasters. The government demolished most of her lodges. The indigenous people accused her of profiting off their image and turned against her. The last lodge, a sweeping, lofty retreat perched on stilts and tucked among the trees near a major macaw nesting site, erupted in a mysterious fire in 2004.

She says she was attacked because Eco Bolivia’s work interfered with corrupt politicians looking to pillage the forest’s wealth of timber, petroleum, gas and gold.

The government says she operated there illegally, without land titles, permits or impact statements.

Interviews with Ruiz were colored by stories of harassment, threats, public whippings, community banishment, arson and attempted murder. She was convinced the government had bought off or coerced the locals into betraying her and torching her lodge.

The only way to determine if that was true was to go to the town of Rurrenabaque and travel upriver to the jungle communities. But getting information from the people who lived there meant getting them drunk, Ruiz told me. She hated saying it, but it was true — they brag when they drink.

I thought about being a foreigner, a woman alone with a bunch of drunken men speaking a language I barely comprehended in a culture I didn’t understand, 12 hours upriver in the middle of a jungle.

I asked her an unfair question — could she guarantee my safety on the river? She sipped her soup, stared me in the eye and didn’t answer.

A trip upriver

Ruiz organized the river trip, and overnight, I became an employer. For access to the communities, I hired a guide; for our meals, I hired a cook. I bought mosquito nets, coca leaves, fishing line and gas for the boat. I bought a four-day supply of food for nine people, which included my guide’s two kids, two teenagers who helped pilot the boat and the two men who accompanied me from La Paz — a translator and a church representative.

The translator and religious envoy were sponsored by Ruiz’s most strident supporter, the Franciscan church, which was conducting its own investigation into Ruiz’s downfall. The representative was a last-minute addition, a response to my growing anxiety over vanishing forever into the jungle, the collateral damage of a complicated, emotional conflict. Ruiz assured me that the church is the one thing people still respect. The man was round, barely 5 feet tall, wore a tri-colored wooden cross and breathed audibly at a walk.

The wad of cash in my pocket — courtesy of student loans — grew thin. The only way to replenish it was to take a plane back to the nearest ATM in La Paz.

We left Rurrenabaque on a peque peque. An oversized canoe outfitted with merciless wooden slab seats, it rode low on the water and puttered through knee-deep stretches with the aid of a lawn mower motor rigged to a long shaft. The river color turned from chocolate milk to rust. The jungle blossomed, sagged and died along the banks. Fallen trees hazardous to boats provided a perch for birds and turtles and coves for caimans. Occasionally, we’d pass other boats, motor-less and laden with bananas or papayas, their navigators looking like gondoliers as they pushed against the current with wooden poles.

Life on the river is spartan. Indians live under pavilion-like structures or in houses that look like giant, bamboo chicken coops. Mosquito nets hung from stakes over tarps on the ground; in a row they resembled boxy cotton coffins. Everything hung from rafters — clothes, food, tools, bows and arrows designed to kill birds, fish or monkeys. Bush meat and intestines dangled from elevated poles, drying in the sun and buzzing with insects.

The natives spoke of wanting tourists but receiving few. They needed education, medicine and motors for their boats. They showed off a primitive, sad-looking lodge that once hosted two tourists for two nights. Children wore ripped and stained cast-off clothing that tripped them up or clung too tight. Most of the communities spoke local dialects. Many have no money and die of preventable diseases. When they get desperate, they resort to logging or advocate for roads in the park.

With only a dim grasp of Spanish and ignorant of Indian culture, I struggled to balance reporting with propriety. I relied heavily on my translator, Felipe, whose translations were the mix of sterile dialogue and no-nuance conversation I had come to expect. I felt detached, reduced to being a purveyor of questions, a thief of hardship, an unwitting — but likely — instigator of fear and suspicion.

Felipe was a novice; he would stutter under the stress of making probing questions polite, relaying metaphors and deciphering pronouns.

It was easy to overlook the psychological impact of our presence. It wasn’t until my guide, Genero, warned we might be in danger that it began to feel real.

I had been asking about an illegal fire set in the middle of a protected area. Those questions may have sounded accusatory without proper context. As we left the first community, Genero worried we might be misinterpreted as investigators.

Law is an amorphous thing in the jungle; we had the right to be there, to wonder why a lodge had been destroyed and a woman’s work wasted. But that wouldn’t keep us from being boatjacked if we were perceived as a threat.

We came too close to the truth. Notebooks and pens were put away. The next community was a place razed of trees and spotted with clumps of long grass to feed cows they couldn’t afford. It was also a place inhabited with suspected arsonists.

That night, near a fire roasting the tranquil faces of decapitated pigs, I sat on a plank of wood with Felipe in a group of 12 men. My questions were vague and remote. The men responded by grunting and plying their cheeks with coca leaves. Their silence felt ominous until Felipe turned to me and said I spoke better Spanish than they did.

At the final community, we were banned from entering. It’s likely Genero’s friendship with Ruiz was to blame. He managed to sneak us in for a brief look, pointing out furniture he claimed was stolen from her lodges. Then he took us to the gaping hole in the jungle created by the fire. Three years of labor had been reduced to a pile of singed screens, broken pillars and what was now a two-story brick outhouse.

When Ruiz heard how silence prevailed on the river, she implied I’d gone up the wrong one. She said I could have found people willing to talk if I’d taken a different route, though the route I’d taken had been her design.

In researching Ruiz’s story, I got gassed, went broke and contemplated my mortality. The forces of politics, social conflict, corruption and greed had collided — deciphering the mess it made, the lives it changed forever, seemed impossible.
Months later, I was finally able to write everything down. It’s all about timing.

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Christine Fennessy received a dual master’s degree from the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry and Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications in December 2005. She is now an intern at Runner’s World.