Data Data Journalism
35 days and 12 million hectares
A land law that lasted 35 days, 12.6 million hectares burned in 2024, and 120 criminal proceedings that ended in two convictions.
By Violeta Ayala — Tecnóloga Creativa
Sheet 03 · Fire
On the twenty-sixth of March 2026, Bolivia's Chamber of Deputies passed Law 1720, converting small holdings into medium ones. It authorised the land institute INRA to reclassify a titled small property as medium, voluntarily and free of charge, within a maximum of ten working days. President Rodrigo Paz signed it into law on the eighth of April at an event with Santa Cruz agro-industrial businessmen. It was in force for 35 days.
The technical point decides everything. Small agrarian property in Bolivia is family patrimony, indivisible and immune from seizure, a protection inherited from the social constitutionalism of 1938 and consolidated in the 1953 agrarian reform. Converted to medium, it loses that status. It can be mortgaged. And it can be auctioned when a harvest fails, a price drops, or a drought arrives.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 26 Mar 2026 | Chamber of Deputies passes Law 1720 |
| 8 Apr 2026 | Paz signs it with agro-industrial businessmen · march departs from Pando |
| Apr–May | 27–30 days on foot, over 100 km, 34 organisations |
| — | Government offers an added territorial-protection clause; the march rejects it |
| 13 May 2026 | Assembly passes Law 417, repealing 1720 |
| 14 May 2026 | Paz signs the repeal, announces 60 days to draft a new statute |
| mid-July | The 60-day window expires |
| Item | Extent |
|---|---|
| Holdings of 100–500 ha | 7,000 parcels |
| Total area they cover | 1.7 M ha |
| Already under mechanised agriculture | ≥ 30% |
| Registered as small property, used as agro-industrial estate | 2.5 M ha |
| Value of 400 ha of soy land, soil only | ≈ USD 800,000 |
In the Santa Cruz cadastre, the category of smallholder stopped describing a smallholder some time ago.
What the fire did meanwhile
1,000 cells = 12.6 M hectares burned in 2024, the highest figure ever recorded in Bolivia. The second worst year was 2019, at 5.3 M.
| Indicator | Value |
|---|---|
| Area burned, national total | 12.6 M ha |
| Santa Cruz | 8.5 M ha · 68% |
| Beni | 3.4 M ha · 28% |
| Share of burned area that was forest | ≈ 60% · 7.6 M ha |
| Share of affected area in Indigenous territories | 28% |
| Primary forest lost in 2024 | 1.8 M ha |
| Emissions | 120 M t CO₂ |
| National forest 1985 → 2022 | 63 M ha → 55 M ha |
The side with the least population, the least parliamentary representation and the least litigation capacity absorbed the largest share of the damage. The same peoples who appear in the census with a hundred thousand members, or with fourteen.
| Stage | Cases | |
|---|---|---|
| Criminal proceedings opened | 120 | |
| Convictions | 2 | |
| People involved | 4 |
The full circuit
A municipal institution withdraws a room one day early to stop the launch of a book documenting how a regional power nucleus was formed. That book identifies 39 families and 600,000 hectares in the agrarian distribution, inside a structure where the largest 20% of holdings control 93.5% of the land.
A demographic stereotype, contradicted by the state's own survey which places the highest fertility in Beni and Pando, keeps the conflict sorted into two ethnic sides and removes the cadastre holder from the frame. And the agricultural frontier advances regardless, law or no law, across the titled territories of the smallest peoples, at a 1.7% enforcement rate.
The new land law is being drafted now. All three sides are at the table. Only one of them wrote the last one.
Two questions will organise scrutiny of that text when it appears. Whether it touches the cadastre: everything else is administration, and while the 93.5% stays where it is, any land law is a discussion about the margins. And whether the agricultural census is updated: without a new one, every side argues blind, except the one that already knows its own hectares.
Sources · Fundación Tierra, Incendios Forestales 2024: Tras las huellas del fuego, and research by Gonzalo Colque, 2026 · CEJIS · Instituto Boliviano de Investigación Forestal · Autoridad de Fiscalización y Control Social de Bosques y Tierra · INRA · Bolivian Official Gazette, Laws 1720 and 417 of 2026 · National Agricultural Census 2013.