The contemporary organizations of lowland indigenous peoples emerged in the 1980s and coalesced around the Indigenous Confederation of Eastern Bolivia (cidob). The event that put cidob definitively on the national public stage was the March for Territory and Dignity, which traveled from Trinidad to La Paz over thirty-four days in 1990. The motivations behind the march emerged especially in the department of Beni, as a reaction against the appropriation of ancestral indigenous lands by logging companies, and to the south of Moxos province, as a reaction against encroachment by illicit coca growers.

The march had a profound national...