Downstream

Sheet 01 · Gold

Bolivia is an Amazonian country. The Amazon basin covers 65% of its territory: two out of every three Bolivian hectares drain toward that river. According to the Amazon Cooperation Treaty, no country has a larger share of its territory inside the basin. The Bolivian Amazon spans Pando, Beni, and the north of La Paz, Cochabamba and Santa Cruz.

This series follows what flows down those rivers. It starts with gold.

Mining cooperatives produce 99.2% of Bolivia's gold. They pay between 1.5% and 2.5% in royalties. That pair of figures sums up the country's biggest business: in 2025 gold was the leading mining export at USD 1.192 billion, more than all hydrocarbons combined, which reached 1.077 billion. In 2026, by May alone, exports had already hit 1.023 billion. At this pace the year doubles the last one.

The mining power bloc does not hold hectares. It holds concession grids. And the grids sit on the Amazonian rivers of northern La Paz.

The same trick, another mineral

In the eastern lowlands, the captured category is small agrarian property: 2.5 million hectares registered as peasant family plots and worked as parts of agro-industrial estates.

In gold mining, the captured category is called marginal production. The rule says a cooperative qualifies as a marginal producer if it stays under 20 kilos of gold a month. That classification grants the minimum royalty rate: 2.5%. The exception became the norm: cooperatives exporting by the tonne declare marginal gold when registering their sales. On top of that come the other benefits of the cooperative regime: exemption from the additional profits tax and zero-rate VAT on the first domestic sale.

An industry worth over a billion dollars a year is taxed as if it were a man panning the Kaka river with a wooden dish.

Cochabamba: 277 million exported, 7 in royalties

By September 2023 Cochabamba had exported five tonnes of gold worth 277 million dollars, a 3,597% jump in one year. It received 7 million in royalties. The other 270 stayed in private hands.

Gold came to represent 48% of the department's exports, displacing gas and urea. Cochabamba became a mining department and almost nobody noticed, because the rent never arrived.

Córdova puts it plainly: the royalty should be up to four times higher, but the government cannot withstand the pressure of the cooperatives, which wield economic, political and social force, and ends up yielding at the expense of regional governments, municipalities and the public.

The numbers that do not add up

The Mining Ministry and the national statistics institute report different export values for the same years. CEDLA researcher Alfredo Zaconeta systematised the series and found gaps going back to 2013, the year of the widest one: 577 million dollars according to the ministry, 330 according to the INE. A 246 million dollar difference in a single year.

Cooperatives sell to intermediaries who move the metal out of the country irregularly, producing under-registration and a minimal fiscal contribution. In 2024 exports fell to 693 million and the official explanation was smuggling. Two weeks ago, four suitcases of gold were seized at Viru Viru airport in Santa Cruz.

One figure dismantles the excuses. In 2025 the then mining minister, Alejandro Santos, himself from the gold sector, blamed the production drop on fuel shortages. Zaconeta answers that with gold above 4,000 dollars an ounce, some cooperatives could afford to pay up to 20 bolivianos per litre of diesel. Production did not fall. It stopped being recorded.

Bolivia has no gold traceability. It cannot say which river an ingot came from or which border it left through.

Three tonnes of mercury for every tonne of gold

The structure repeats with precision. In the eastern lowlands, agribusiness fires hit Indigenous territories first: 28% of the affected area in 2024. In the west, cooperative mercury flows down the rivers toward the same Amazonian peoples. Different power bloc, different poison, same bodies.

The revenue the country needs and does not collect

The gas rent is running out: hydrocarbons fell to 1.077 billion, and the Direct Hydrocarbons Tax that financed the state for twenty years is fading with them. Zaconeta points to the obvious replacement: gold is a strategic resource that could cushion that exit. It is flowing at record volumes, at record prices. The country would only have to collect.

The Mining Summit is debating the new gold law these very weeks. The minister wants more sales to the Central Bank to rebuild reserves, which fell from 42.5 to 22.5 tonnes. The cooperatives want to keep the regime that treats them as marginal producers.

Eleven hundred cooperatives against a state that needs the money. The last time that strength was measured, the royalty stayed at 2.5%.

The full map

The stereotype of the lazy camba and the invading colla serves both blocs equally. While the country argues about identities, nobody audits concession grids or cadastres.

Sources · Instituto Nacional de Estadística, gold export series 1992–2025 · Ministry of Mining and Metallurgy, quarterly statistical bulletins · CEDLA, systematisation by Alfredo Zaconeta and statements to Correo del Sur, August 2026 · Héctor Córdova, statements to Los Tiempos, January 2024 · UDAPE, mining sector diagnosis 2022 · Ministry of Mining, analysis of the cooperative gold subsector of La Paz · Minamata Convention on Mercury · Amazon Cooperation Treaty.