Proposal for a New Mining Law Meets Opposition in Bolivia

A proposed overhaul of Bolivia’s mining laws has drawn protest from an unusually broad and, for President Evo Morales, uncomfortable coalition — independent miners organized in cooperatives on one side, and Indigenous and farmer organizations on the other. The two camps oppose the bill for starkly different reasons, but both groups share something notable in common: both have historically counted among Morales’s strongest bases of political support.

The First Major Overhaul Since 1997

The proposed legislation would be the first comprehensive rewrite of Bolivia’s mining code in nearly two decades, replacing the framework established under the country’s 1997 mining law. It arrives at a politically sensitive moment for Morales, whose government has built its identity in large part around the 2009 constitution — a document ratified after a two-year public consultation process that explicitly recognized Indigenous territorial rights and declared, in Article 349, that Bolivia’s natural wealth belongs to the Bolivian people.

That constitutional backdrop is central to why this bill has become so contentious. Critics on multiple sides argue the proposed law fails to live up to the participatory, rights-based framework the 2009 constitution promised.

Cooperative Miners Push Back

The loudest and most immediately disruptive opposition has come from Bolivia’s mining cooperatives, which account for roughly 35 percent of the country’s total mining output, according to figures reported by MINING.com. Cooperative miners want the right to enter directly into mixed contracts with private mining companies — domestic or foreign — without requiring separate congressional approval for each arrangement. An earlier draft of the bill, approved by Bolivia’s lower house on March 29, would have barred cooperatives from partnering with private firms at all.

That provision triggered weeks of escalating unrest. Miners blockaded major roads across the country starting March 31, a mobilization that led to 30 arrests, 43 police officers taken hostage, and, according to reporting from The Conversation, 85 miners and 20 police officers injured, along with two miners killed in the unrest. The conflict escalated far enough that Morales removed his mining minister, Mario Virreira, on April 8, and temporarily suspended the bill before the Senate could take it up.

A tense truce has since taken hold as negotiations between the government and cooperative representatives continue, but with the bill now back before parliament, the underlying dispute — how much independence cooperative miners will have to strike their own deals with capital and technology they don’t otherwise have access to — remains unresolved.

Indigenous and Farmer Groups Raise a Different Alarm

While cooperative miners fight over commercial terms, a separate and arguably more fundamental critique is coming from Indigenous and farming communities who say the bill guts protections the 2009 constitution was supposed to guarantee.

The Council of Communities of Qollasuyu, known by its Spanish acronym CONAMAQ and the largest Indigenous organization in the Bolivian Andes, argues the bill effectively puts mining rights ahead of Indigenous communities’ collective rights to land and water. The organization says the legislation fails to meet the constitution’s own consultation requirements, and goes further, criminalizing those who attempt to physically block mining activity on their land.

“We’re really just an extractivist country,” CONAMAQ representative Nilda Rojas Huanca said, capturing a frustration that echoes far beyond this single piece of legislation — a sense among Indigenous organizers that Bolivia’s economy, regardless of the government in power, remains structured around extracting and exporting raw resources rather than building a different kind of development model.

That critique is not unique to CONAMAQ. Irrigators’ associations concerned about the bill’s implications for water access, and women’s collectives raising separate gender-related concerns, have also joined the growing list of groups turning out to oppose the legislation, according to The Ecologist’s coverage of the unfolding dispute. A national social summit convened in La Paz in early May to coordinate opposition across these various sectors.

A Coalition Turning on Its Own Government

What makes the mining law fight particularly striking is who’s doing the opposing. Cooperative miners and Indigenous farming communities have, for years, formed part of the political base that carried Morales and his Movement for Socialism party to power and kept it there. Watching former allies mobilize against a signature piece of his legislative agenda marks a notable rupture — one that raises real questions about how Morales’s government reconciles its stated commitment to Indigenous rights and grassroots democracy with the practical pressures of managing a resource-dependent economy.

For now, the bill’s ultimate fate remains genuinely uncertain. Whether the version that eventually clears Bolivia’s Plurinational Legislative Assembly will restore protections cooperative miners are demanding, satisfy Indigenous organizations’ consultation concerns, or manage to do neither while pleasing no one — is a question this fight is still very much in the process of answering.