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Evicted at gunpoint from the vast Bolivian national park she helped set up, Rosa Maria Ruiz is still battling to protect threatened areas of rainforest

WE ARE two hours into our journey down Bolivia’s Beni river in a motorised dug-out canoe when I notice a strange movement under Rosa Maria Ruiz’s loose shirt. I try not to stare, but when a black, hairy arm emerges between her shirt buttons, it is impossible to stay silent.

“Rosa, do you have a monkey under your shirt?” She reaches in and pulls out a 4-week-old spider monkey. “The hunters injured him because he was clinging to his mother when they shot her for bushmeat,” she says. “I’m nursing him back to health and when he’s ready, we’ll release him into the reserve.”

Here, in Bolivia’s Amazon rainforest, hunting and trafficking of wild animals is a growing problem, one that Ruiz has spent much of her life trying to counter. In 1995, she was instrumental in setting up the , which, at 18,500 square kilometres, is one of the largest protected areas in the world. Her efforts cost her her home, her business and very nearly her life. Despite this, the future of this patch of the Amazon basin is far from certain.

We are heading to Ruiz’s latest venture, , an 81 square kilometre reserve which she set up four years ago to protect the forest from poaching, logging and other threats. As we journey downriver, Ruiz feeds the monkey a banana and milk from a syringe, and points out the sights: sunbathing river turtles, giant rodents called capybaras, and capuchin monkeys playing in the trees. We also pass other, less attractive sights: gold-mining camps that dump mercury into the river, logging settlements with piles of illegal hardwoods, and a boat laden with bags of dead monkeys.

They are sights that Ruiz has seen hundreds of times, but she is nevertheless visibly upset. “I’ve spent decades living in this jungle and trying to work with the indigenous people here to protect it and we found a solution that was workable for everyone,” she says. “This terrible destruction is just so unnecessary.”

Ruiz was perhaps born into her vocation. Her father died when she was 7 months old, leaving her mother, Lucie, to scratch a living selling pharmaceuticals in poor tin-mining communities. What Lucie saw during those years turned her into one of Bolivia’s most celebrated human rights activists, working to protect indigenous people and their natural resources from exploitation – a passion she instilled in her own daughter.

Ruiz spent her childhood split between the Andean mining families (where her friends began working underground at the age of 8 and died, on average, aged 26), and the indigenous Tacana people of the Amazon rainforest. Preferring the latter, she moved to the Amazon and, in the 1980s and 1990s, helped the semi-nomadic Tacana communities organise into politicised groups. This allowed them to claim land titles and ensure their ancestral areas were safeguarded from the commercial interests that were threatening the region, such as mining.

It was out of this work that Ruiz first conceived a plan for a large national park. The idea was to protect one of the world’s most diverse areas, a region that is home to more than 1000 species in habitats ranging from glaciers to cloud forest, dry forest to pampas and rainforest. The park would be created with the backing of the 1700 people living there, with sustainable tourism providing jobs for the park’s tribes and protection for its wildlife.

To make this vision happen Ruiz, together with her mother, created the conservation organisation Eco Bolivia Foundation and set out to convince the world that this precious part of the Amazon needed protection. Despite initial opposition by the Bolivian government, Ruiz managed to get the World Bank to support the park’s creation. Madidi national park opened in 1995: a huge area of pristine forest, home to tapirs, jaguars, maned wolves, sloths and giant otters.

The commercial and political interests in the park’s resources, however, did not cease and Ruiz was becoming a thorn in the side of many people, including Bolivia’s government due to her criticism of their conservation efforts. Still, she clung on, continuing to work from the house she had lived in for 30 years, despite difficulties with the government and the park authorities and what she describes as a sustained campaign to discredit her.

Events started to come to a head in 2001, when an arson attack nearly killed three of her staff. The following year, armed men evicted Ruiz from her property and the park. “A project, my dream, that took me 30 years to put together came down in a few hours,” she says. “They took everything, even my books, smashed my solar panels – it was heartbreaking.” In 2003, Ruiz received death threats and another arson attack destroyed her eco-lodge and 26 forest cabins.

That year, however, a revolution ousted the president and installed a new leader. Then, in 2006, the country’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales, was elected and Ruiz was invited to the justice ministry to negotiate compensation for her lost business in Madidi. But disaster struck again a month later, when she was attacked by a black caiman while swimming in a lake. She spent three years in hospital, emerging only last year.

Now, Ruiz says, she wants to move on. She cannot stop the logging and hunting of wild animals in Madidi, but she is having some success stopping it in the smaller Serere Sanctuary. Morales is accelerating the provision of land titles to indigenous groups, so Ruiz is helping to provide these communities with sustainable livelihoods. She hopes that ecotourism will help the Tacana people bordering the sanctuary switch from hunting, logging and mining to protecting the forest.

“My dream continues to be for a ‘Madidi Mosaic’, a tapestry of protected areas, where the lands in this region are owned and looked after by the indigenous people who live here, and where they benefit from the natural resources here in a sustainable way,” Ruiz tells me as we alight from the boat. “When I was a child, I spoke Tacana here. Now it’s a forgotten language; everyone speaks Spanish. And people who used to chop trees and hunt in the forest only for their own needs now use machines and guns and sell the forest’s resources as far away as China.”

Madidi now faces perhaps its greatest threat: Morales has re-introduced a shelved plan for a hydroelectric dam at the Andean headwaters of the Beni river. The dam would drown more than a million acres of rainforest in Madidi and the neighbouring . It’s a plan that the Eco Bolivia Foundation successfully fought a decade ago. True to form, although barely out of hospital, Ruiz travelled to the Bolivian city of Cochabamba in April last year for the , where she spoke out against the dam project.

Ruiz feeds the baby spider monkey again, and reflects on how Serere was when she bought the land. “We had to remove 20 tonnes of garbage from the forest,” she says. “The animals had been hunted so long they were terrified of people. We reforested, planting more fruit trees to raise the animal-carrying capacity. In just a few years, we already have a healthy top-predator – jaguar – population here.”

We walk slowly for 2 kilometres, past giant trees, whose buttress roots dwarf us. Beside us, the forest is alive with noise: the crashing of monkeys in the canopy and shrieks of birds calling in the dense foliage. “This is what is so important to protect,” Ruiz says, gesturing to the noisy foliage. “This is my home and our country’s heritage.”