As world attention has focused on record fires and ongoing deforestation in Brazil, Bolivia has been suffering through devastating conflagrations of its own. The Bolivian fires broke out in July, peaked in August and continued this month, burning widely in the eastern departments of Beni and Santa Cruz. Consuming vast tracts of natural lands, they have charred Bolivian portions of the Amazon, the Chiquitano dry forest and the Pantanal wetland. Though the government has provided no estimate of the total acreage burned, the Bolivian green group Friends of Nature put the figure at 4 million hectares (9.9 million acres) based on analysis of images from U.S. and European satellites. Bolivian President Evo Morales was shown on local media taking part in firefighting, a move critics criticized as a ploy to draw attention from his controversial support for land clearing and controlled burns aimed at expanding the country’s cropland and pastureland... [Log in to read more]