The landscape of asphalt and concrete that defines La Paz can give way, within just a few miles, to hot, dense forests clinging to the mountainsides. The steep, unforgiving streets north of Bolivia’s administrative capital are replaced by thick vegetation and winding rivers that descend more than 5,000 meters toward the Amazon.

It is in this region that the tilcayo (Leopardus tilcayo), the first wild cat identified in more than a century, was recently described. But the area is also home to significant gold deposits that are drawing companies, mining cooperatives and local communities eager to capitalize on record gold prices and the severe economic crisis gripping the country.

The extraction of this mineral poses a threat not only to the tilcayo but also to the habitat of thousands of animal species. In the municipality of Coroico, one of the seven municipalities that make up the Yungas region, there are around 16 mining areas authorized to operate and another 129 awaiting approval or under review, according to a 2025 survey by the Administrative Mining Jurisdiction Authority (AJAM). The agency carries out frequent inspections because many of those 129 sites are already operating despite not having completed the regulatory process.

Although some mining is carried out underground, the dominant method is open-pit extraction along riverbanks. Dump trucks, excavators and heavy-haul vehicles move earth, gravel and sediment in search of gold. The sight of felled trees across vast cleared areas signals the arrival of this machinery. The effects of mining are also visible in the vegetation lining the rivers, much of which has collapsed into the water due to landslides caused by soil removal.

One such landslide has opened a crater at the very entrance to the Senda Verde Wildlife Refuge, home to the tilcayo specimen that led scientists to identify the new species.

“We’re incredibly proud of the feline,” says Vicky Ossio, founder and director of Senda Verde since it was established in 2003. “It made us turn our attention back to the natural world. In Coroico, a law has already been passed to protect the tilcayo. How can you do that and at the same time allow mining that affects all wildlife?”

“With the noise from the [gold-mining] machines, the capuchin monkeys would run away. That noise drives them away. There were even big cats that could be seen crossing the road,” continues the founder of Senda Verde, which is home to about 1,200 animals from 70 species, cared for by a dozen rangers and volunteers.

In fact, the tilcayo that gave the species its name, a specimen known as Tigrino, was itself the result of this forced displacement. A member of the local community found it by the roadside when it was still a cub. It was kept as a pet until 2017, when its rescuer handed it over to the refuge. Nine years passed before scientists formally recognized the discovery of a new species. Since then, Senda Verde has been featured in media outlets around the world.

Ossio says she is inundated with calls from visitors, journalists and officials hoping to see Tigrino, who is around nine years old and belongs to a species that typically lives between 13 and 15 years. But visits to his enclosure are prohibited. “He’s settled — why would we take him out and stress him? To satisfy people’s curiosity?” asks Ossio.

She wants the focus instead to be on the latest incursion by mining cooperatives, the one that left a large crater at the entrance to the sanctuary. Senda Verde and its surroundings have been targeted by the gold rush almost since the refuge opened its doors, but the threat has never been this close.

The mining cooperative behind the latest push is claiming rights to an area caught in a legal gray zone that affects around 30 properties in Coroico. The AJAM classifies these as areas with “pre-existing rights”: concessions granted before the 2014 Mining and Metallurgy Law that must now be brought into line with newer environmental regulations, including the requirement to obtain an environmental license.

The cooperative asserted its extraction rights, while staff at Senda Verde demanded updated documentation. Tensions escalated until three members of the mining cooperative were arrested. They were released three days later.

Mining is also affecting other areas that provide refuge for the tilcayo and nearly 930 vertebrate species in the Yungas, a transitional bioregion on the eastern slopes of the Andes Mountains in Peru, Bolivia, and northwestern Argentina. In Cotapata National Park, one of the three legally protected areas in Coroico, a mine entrance was recorded in 2025. Most local communities have sought legal protection by creating nature reserves, as the advance of extractive activity threatens not only wildlife but also water by muddying it, altering its course and contaminating it with mercury.

The 12 communities that make up the Río Negro Reserve, just under two miles from Senda Verde, are finalizing the management plan required to secure state protection for their 6,200 hectares against mining. “Every day there is a mining threat. We have identified between four and six cooperatives that threaten 80% of our territory,” says Víctor Álvarez, a reserve member and community representative.

Álvarez acknowledges that although most local residents oppose mining, some community members engage in artisanal or small-scale extraction. This activity is recognized under Bolivia’s Mining and Metallurgy Law, which defines it as mining operations that are labor-intensive and involve low levels of capital goods. “With the economic crisis, there are more and more,” says Álvarez. “They go down to the river in seasons when they don’t have crops. There is also no detailed regulation.”

EL PAÍS observed a group of around 20 of these gold prospectors, known locally as barranquilleros, on the banks of the Coroico River, less than 100 meters from Senda Verde’s rewilding area. They operate from tents where they store pickaxes, gold pans and motor pumps, machines that combine combustion engines with hydraulic pumps to move large volumes of water.

For the refuge’s director, the damage caused by the barranquilleros is no different from that caused by mining cooperatives. “That’s not artisanal mining. They’re using engines and hoses,” she says.

The municipality of Coroico agrees that small-scale mining is increasingly dependent on more sophisticated machinery. “In addition to motor pumps, they use suction dredges to remove rocks, creating what are effectively pits,” says Ana Carranza, Coroico’s director of environmental affairs. “This affects the riverbanks because it increases sediment and water turbidity, while also destroying aquatic habitat.”

The divisions among local residents over how much mining should be allowed have eroded community structures. In the Yungas, mining is no longer seen only as an environmental problem but also as a social one, extending well beyond Coroico.

In the municipality of Coripata, residents confronted the mayor, challenging him to drink water from the rivers that supply the community, accusing him of turning a blind eye to illegal mining. In the municipality of La Asunta, tensions escalated even further: local residents attacked a mining cooperative last September, injuring several people and setting part of its machinery on fire.

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Recently, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who leads the world’s most powerful military, declared that he will be restricting who can join the ranks: “No fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals. Just warriors.” And, not long before that, Trump proclaimed that there are only “two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable.”

This is binary thinking, which, despite the radical diversity of life – demonstrated time and time again by science, biology, the humanities and anthropology – only allows for two categories. The feminist Gloria Steinem jokingly wrote: “Sometimes I think the only real division into two is between people who divide everything into two and those who don’t.”

Well, that’s certainly where we are as a society.

In the United States, in Russia and in Argentina – and in far-right projects everywhere – there’s backlash against the LGBTQ+ movement and against the inclusion revolution, which has been breaking down hierarchies and privileges for decades now.

Given this reality, it’s not a bad idea to turn to Michel Foucault (1926-1984), one of the intellectual bêtes noires of the right. October 15 marks the centenary of his birth. Among other fields of knowledge, Foucault – who was born in Poitiers and died in Paris – provided the theoretical foundation for gender studies and queer theory, later developed by Judith Butler. This, coupled with his studies on power, has placed him at the forefront of contemporary culture wars.

Foucault argued that power doesn’t exist as an essence, but that it’s actually fluctuating. There are simply people exercising it and trying to maintain it, meaning that it can be seized.

The Foucauldian works released between 2022 and 2024 include some of the thinker’s previously-unpublished works and lectures, such as La question anthropologique (“The Anthropological Question”), Le Discours philosophique (“The Philosophical Discourse”) and Nietzsche.

One unpublished work – written in 1978 – was intended to be a chapter in Foucault’s four-volume The History of Sexuality. Released in 2025 as a single book, it is titled Les hermaphrodites (“The Hermaphrodites”).

The book is important because it develops the crucial distinction between anatomical sex and sexuality. This is explained by Arianna Sforzini – who co-edited the original French manuscript of The Hermaphrodites – in an email to EL PAÍS. The text re-examines issues “related to sexual differences, gender-based power relations, as well as denaturalized and historicized perspectives on sex, gender and sexuality.”

In contrast to the relative autonomy of intersex people in earlier times, while looking through the medical-legal archives of the 19th century (the century of taxonomies), Foucault discovered a process of pathologization directed at them. Perhaps this was because they were figures who challenged the prescribed order, double agents who broke the accepted connection “between anatomical sex, legal sex and social sex.”

“These [different facets] of sex have to coincide and place us in one of the two pillars of society,” the French philosopher points out in the text. He was referring to the case of Herculine Barbin, an intersex person. In 1860, following a medical examination, Barbin was legally and socially forced to change her identity from female to male, which eventually led her to suicide.

With this and other works, Foucault – whose father was a surgeon and professor of anatomy – broke with the tradition of Western thought, centered on ideas, in order to study the body as a guide to knowledge.

“His fundamental contribution lies in understanding that power permeates the body,” explains Paul B. Preciado, a philosopher, in a telephone interview with EL PAÍS. The author of the Countersexual Manifesto (2002), Preciado emphasizes the importance of Foucault’s investigation into the history of sexuality. This wasn’t done from the perspectives of medicine or psychology, but rather by “considering the technologies of power and how these define certain forms of subjectivation, some considered normal and others pathological. It marked a turning point for what would later become queer and gender theories.”

The paradox lies in the fact that Foucault (who was gay) shied away from the notion of identity – “do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same,” he wrote, in The Archeology of Knowledge (1969) – and didn’t delve deeply into the question of gender. “And he gave little thought to women,” Preciado points out. “The question of sexual reproduction in the organization of power completely eluded him.”

With all his contradictions, the author of Discipline and Punish (1975) demonstrates that desire and pleasure are controlled by what a strictly binary identity says is legal and legitimate. “We are what has been said,” Foucault warns. That is, we’re the result of what words, norms and institutions say about us.

Based on this, the Frenchman’s research – undertaken by someone who considered himself more of an “artificer “ or “pyrotechnician” than a philosopher – is based on a novel approach: understanding our society through its systems of exclusion, rejection and denial.

“It seemed to me interesting to try to understand our society and civilization in terms of its system of exclusion, of rejection, of refusal, in terms of what it does not want, its limits, the way it is obliged to suppress a certain number of things, people, processes,” is how he explained his process to French professor John K. Simon, in 1971.

In his work, Foucault dissects the shameful aspects of power, showing how it constructs and alters supposedly “natural” models of human behavior (which aren’t natural at all), consisting of the “normal” and the “abnormal.” Driven by his three fundamental values – refusal, curiosity and innovation – his work paves the way for other ways of being and existing in the world. In fact, for Foucault, we live “in a legal, social, and institutional world, where the only possible relationships are extremely scarce, schematized and impoverished.”

By studying social exclusion, Foucault revealed the dynamics of conflict. “He’s the thinker of possibility, resistance and emancipation,” reflects Rodrigo Castro, a Foucault specialist who holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Complutense University of Madrid. “He leads us to consider freedom in the face of power structures that aspire to domination… something that’s highly relevant today.”

Castro reveals that “like Nietzsche, Foucault believes that ‘Truth’ with a capital ‘T’ does not exist. [And], just like the German philosopher, he reflects on the consequences of the nonexistence of truth.” Therefore, the work of both philosophers goes beyond mere decoding: it involves “a search for a life-affirming philosophy.”

Foucault’s work also paved a new way forward for the left, which had long been monopolized by Marxism. And, Preciado points out, in the manner of Marx – who popularized terms like surplus value, capital and class struggle – the Frenchman created and redefined certain concepts, such as dispositif, episteme and heterotopia. The author of The Order of Things (1966) – who saw philosophy as a workshop – considered these concepts to be tools. He would use them to examine and hammer away at the source of so much suffering and thus be able to change it.

Today, as we’re faced with anti-gender campaigns and an epidemic of transphobia, the duty is to resist. “Everything is connected. The rights of trans people also transform the rights of the entire population,” Preciado warns, emphasizing the importance of another of Foucault’s beliefs: no struggle is more important than another. All must take place, simultaneously, everywhere.

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