Bolivia's Hecker Foundation Carbon Deal Faces Indigenous Rejection — SkimNews
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- Bolivia's constitutional court struck down the ban on carbon-market funding mechanisms in June 2024, opening the door for contracts on Indigenous land in the Pando region
- Federico Hecker Foundation signed a 30-year contract on 12 March 2024 gaining control over carbon credits across 440,000 hectares of the Multi-ethnic Indigenous Territory II (TIM II), shared by the Cavineña, Tacana and Ese Ejja nations
- TIM II's board and the Ese Ejja nation formally rejected the agreement by March 2025, saying their representatives were "surprised, pressured and manipulated" into signing — the foundation denies the allegations
- Aimé Hecker Urresti, chairman of the Hecker Foundation, was elected a national MP in 2025 and is one of four legislators who presented a bill to regulate the carbon-credit market his own foundation seeks to operate in
- Bolivia's Supreme Decree 5264 (October 2024) centralizes carbon-market control in the national government while excluding Indigenous authorities from its structure and setting no binding rules on consent or benefit-sharing on Indigenous land
- The Tacana nation refused the contract specifically because they recognized the Hecker name — the family patriarch Federico Hecker built his fortune in the 19th-century rubber boom, and Tacana families remember them as patrones under the debt-peonage system called Pongueaje
- An EU-Sweden climate programme planning document (€24m) states Bolivia's opening to carbon markets occurred "with significant support from the EU-Sweden initiative," though the EU delegation says it did not directly participate in adopting the decree
Why it matters: A sitting Bolivian legislator is writing the rules for a market in which his own foundation holds 30-year carbon rights over Indigenous territory — a structural conflict of interest that Bolivia's Indigenous organizations publicly rejected at the National Forum on Land, Territory and Environment in October 2025. The new regulatory bill mentions consultation but grants no veto rights, meaning 440,000 hectares of TIM II could be governed by contracts the communities themselves have already repudiated.
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