Fires threaten to bring down Evo Morales as Bolivia’s Leftist leader ignores referendum in bid for fourth term

When wildfires swept through the Chiquitano forest in eastern Bolivia earlier this year, Luzdina Mercado García, 58, fought back with what little resources she had.

“We put out the flames with buckets of water, we didn’t stop, we slept in the forest," she says. It wasn’t enough. Her own house was consumed by the flames.

"We saw our lands burned, we saw birds and animals burned.”

The start of the summer rains has extinguished the worst of the forest fires on the fringes of the Amazon that captured the global media’s attention in September.

But the political repercussions could be serious for Bolivia’s socialist president Evo Morales in today’s election. Latin America’s longest serving head of…

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