Bolivia's Chacobo Forest Is Burning for a Third Straight Year
Wildfires Close In on People Living in Voluntary Isolation

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According to a July 2026 report by the environmental outlet Mongabay, the Chacobo-Pacahuara Indigenous territory in Bolivia's northern Beni department has been under threat from wildfires for three consecutive years since 2024. That year, fires consumed 47% of the territory—roughly 228,000 hectares—and in 2025, large numbers of thermal anomalies (hotspots) were detected during the same season. Now, in 2026, alarm is rising even before the dry season peaks. Within the territory lives a related group in voluntary isolation, people who have chosen to avoid all contact with the outside world, and reports say there is no way even to confirm whether the fires have reached their lands or whether they are safe.

Where the Fire Comes From

The Chacobo-Pacahuara territory is ringed by pastureland, where burning to renew grazing land remains common practice. According to the reporting, the main cause of the damage is illegal burns on these surrounding pastures escaping control and spreading into the forests of the Indigenous territory. In other words, the Chacobo are not setting these fires themselves—the fire comes from outside. The legal boundary of an Indigenous territory offers no physical barrier against advancing flames.

Chacobo leader Constantino Toledo Ortiz told Mongabay: "We have relatives living in voluntary isolation. The forest where they lived has burned, and we do not know what has happened." Groups in voluntary isolation, by definition, maintain no contact with the outside world—which is precisely why there is almost no way to learn, from the outside, what has become of them after the fires.

Across the Border, Brazil Hits a Post-2016 Low

That same July, contrasting news arrived from the other side of the border. On July 10, Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (INPE) announced that deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon totaled 1,295 square kilometers in the first half of 2026—down 38% from the same period a year earlier and the lowest level since 2016. We covered the international push to protect the Amazon as a whole in an earlier report, and improving numbers in the basin's largest country are genuinely good news.

In Bolivia, meanwhile, some observers point to the political turmoil and fiscal strain since 2019 as having weakened the country's environmental monitoring and enforcement agencies. It is the same Amazon forest, yet its fate increasingly diverges depending on which state governs it.

Climate Risks for the Second Half of 2026

Adding to the concern are climate conditions. The Climate Prediction Center of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has announced that an El Niño has formed and is expected to strengthen. During El Niño periods, the interior of South America tends to see prolonged dry seasons—and if that scenario plays out, the risk during the August-to-October peak of the fire season could run higher than usual.

The forests of Chacobo-Pacahuara have now faced fire three years in a row. A burned forest, laden with dry deadfall and undergrowth, becomes more vulnerable to the next blaze. If the cycle of burning and reburning continues, the forest may lose its very capacity to recover.

My Take

Reading these two stories side by side makes me think about the units we use for statistics. Brazilian deforestation at its lowest since 2016—that is a fact, and plainly good news. But the Amazon is a single connected ecosystem, and when national statistics improve, the forests burning at its edges never become the headline number. The more the center of the basin improves, the harder it becomes to see the crisis at the margins. It is a pattern you only notice if you deliberately look for it.

The figure "47% of the territory burned" is also easy to skim past. Some 228,000 hectares is an area larger than metropolitan Tokyo. That much forest burned in a single season—and living within it were people who had chosen not to have contact with the outside world. To me, the fact that their fate remains simply "unknown" is the true weight of this story.

Two indicators are worth watching for follow-up: the number of fires detected in August and September by SATRIFO, the fire-monitoring system run by FAN Bolivia (Fundación Amigos de la Naturaleza), and the burned-area data published by Global Forest Watch. As the dry season peaks, those numbers will tell the story.

Glossary

pueblos en aislamiento voluntario (peoples in voluntary isolation) = Indigenous groups who choose to live without contact with outside society; contact carries grave risks, including infectious disease. chaqueo = the Bolivian practice of burning land to clear fields and pasture, considered a leading cause of dry-season wildfires. foco de calor (hotspot) = a thermal anomaly detected by satellite, the basic data used to estimate where fires are starting and spreading.

A boundary drawn on a map will not stop a fire from spreading.

※ This article is the author’s commentary based on public information. Please confirm the latest figures, dates and procedures with governments and primary sources. Quotations are kept minimal and sources are cited.