Andean Group - March 2020

BOLIVIA | Fracking. On 3 March Herland Soliz, the president of Bolivia’s state-owned oil company Yacimientos Petroliferos Fiscales Bolivianos (YPFB), insisted that “at no time did we declare that we were going to do fracking”. This came in respone to concerns about his 18 February announcement that a study had been launched into the viability of the hydrocarbon extraction technique in the Miraflores area of Chuquisaca department. 15 indigenous Guaraní communities declared a state of emergency in response to this announcement, warning of the risk of water contamination posed by fracking. Fermín Romero, president of the Chuquisaca Guaraní council, said that fracking would “threaten human life, plant life, and animal life” in the region, and promised to “fight for life”. Soliz told local daily, Los Tiempos, that his comments had been “misrepresented”, that “in no way are we going to allow, as Bolivians, the contamination of any place”, and claimed that this new study simply sought to “understand the potential” of natural gas deposits in Miraflores.

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