About Agencia de Noticias Ambientales

Agencia de Noticias Ambientales

The Agencia de Noticias Ambientales, known as ANA or ANA Bolivia, is an independent, specialised environmental news agency based in La Paz, Bolivia, publishing in Spanish at anabolivia.org. It groups journalists and researchers specialised in the environment, climate change, extractivism, biodiversity, the rights of Indigenous peoples, environmental defenders and human rights, and it supplies its reporting both to the general public, through its own website, and to other media, which republish its dispatches. ANA is the journalistic arm of the Unión de Periodistas Ambientales de Bolivia (UPAB), the union of environmental journalists founded in La Paz in 2008. Unusually for a news agency, ANA began not in a newsroom but as a Facebook account: after an experimental period of specialised journalism on social networks, it became, during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, an agency with its own structure and website. It works with a small, largely voluntary staff, describes itself as an independent medium in the process of achieving self-sustainability, and has consolidated itself, in UPAB's assessment, as a national reference point in Bolivian environmental journalism.

Roots in the Unión de Periodistas Ambientales de Bolivia

ANA cannot be understood apart from UPAB. The Unión de Periodistas Ambientales de Bolivia was born on 22 December 2008 in the city of La Paz, bringing together communicators and journalists — and, as the organisation developed, environmental engineers, biologists, teachers and other specialists — committed to placing environmental questions on the Bolivian public agenda. Its president, Carlos Lara, has explained the difficulty at the heart of that mission: environmental journalism is hard, he told Coca-Cola Bolivia's media centre, because the environment only becomes news when there are forest burnings, droughts or floods. UPAB says it brings together about 150 specialised professionals. Over its first decade and a half the union worked in stages that its own anniversary histories describe: building alliances with mass media, including ERBOL and state and private outlets, to disseminate its messages; incorporating professionals from environmental engineering, tourism, ecology, medicine and other fields as advisers and honorary members; and campaigning on concrete issues, from solid-waste management and the contamination of watercourses to the conservation of forests and wildlife and the problem of urban rubbish. ANA emerged from that trajectory as the union's own publishing instrument — the means by which its members' investigations could reach media and public directly, rather than depending entirely on other outlets' willingness to carry environmental stories.

Birth during the pandemic: from Facebook to an agency

ANA's founding story is told consistently in UPAB's anniversary accounts. The agency began as a Facebook account and passed through an experimental period of specialised journalism distributed through social networks. In 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, it took the step of becoming an agency with its own structure and a public website, anabolivia.org. The platform was built by the IT specialist Derick Mercado. UPAB's fifteenth-anniversary account, published in December 2023, calls ANA one of the union's most transcendental achievements and says it had by then consolidated itself nationally in environmental journalism thanks to the voluntary work of a small group of committed journalists. The timing mattered: ANA was born at a moment when Bolivia's environmental emergencies — forest fires, drought, the expansion of mining in the Amazon — were intensifying, and when the pandemic had pushed Bolivian media consumption decisively online. A digital-first agency, unencumbered by a print plant or a broadcast licence, fitted both the subject and the moment.

People and structure

ANA's early staff is documented in UPAB's fourteenth-anniversary history. Carlos Lara, UPAB's president, served as the agency's director; Nelson Fernández was deputy director; Jimena Mercado was general editor; and the journalists Vladimir Ledezma, José Luis Vargas and Tania Imaña — the latter in charge of social networks — completed the core team, with collaborators including Nelson Fernández, Adriana Gutiérrez and Eloísa Molina. The fifteenth-anniversary account repeats substantially the same small team, naming Jimena Mercado as general editor, Vladimir Ledezma as journalist-editor and Tania Imaña as responsible for social networks. Readers should note that later documents name the agency's leadership differently, and this profile does not resolve the discrepancy: ANA's report of the renewal of its alliance with ERBOL records the agreement as signed for ANA by a director named Raúl Pérez, while La Región's 2026 report on its alliance with ANA, and its photograph caption, name Raúl Albrecht as ANA's director — ANA's own text of that alliance spells the surname "Albecht" once. What those later reports establish is that the directorship passed from the founding team to a successor named Raúl; the exact form of his surname is rendered inconsistently in the sources. Structurally, ANA is explicit about its economics: it is an independent medium in the process of self-sustainability — en proceso de autosostenibilidad — sustained in its first years largely by voluntary work.

Coverage: the Amazon, gold mining and mercury

The centre of gravity of ANA's coverage is the Bolivian Amazon. In its alliance reporting, the agency states that it has set a wide environmental agenda with emphasis on socio-environmental impacts in the Amazonian departments of La Paz, Beni and Pando, above all those resulting from illegal gold mining. Its reporting has examined the illegal alliances between gold-mining cooperatives, holders of mining rights and foreign capital — including the Chinese dredges and Colombian planchones, the large floating platforms working the Kaka River — and the mercury contamination that gold extraction releases into Amazonian rivers and food chains, with its consequences for Indigenous and rural communities whose rights, ANA stresses, are violated by the activity. UPAB's anniversary summary lists the same core file: gold mining and its socio-environmental impacts and rights violations, mercury contamination, transgenic crops, deforestation and the trafficking of minors are among the subjects ANA says it has addressed responsibly and in depth. This Amazon and extractivism beat — mining, hydrocarbons and the advance of the agricultural frontier at the cost of forests and ecosystems inhabited by Indigenous, peasant and original peoples — is what distinguishes ANA from general news agencies in Bolivia, none of which maintains a comparable single-subject focus.

Coverage: fire, wildlife, biodiversity and everyday ecology

ANA's agenda extends well beyond mining. Forest fires occupy a central place: UPAB's fifteenth-anniversary meeting made support for education and information to prevent a repetition of the burning of Bolivia's forests a core axis for 2024, pressing for the repeal of the norms that encourage burning and noting official figures for 2023 of 3,500,833 hectares of forest lost to fire, principally in Beni, Santa Cruz, La Paz and Cochabamba, with damage to forests, wildlife, communities, the atmosphere and aquifers. ANA has also reported on the hunting and illegal keeping and trafficking of wild animals, on deforestation, on agroecological fairs and on adventure tourism — the positive, livelihood side of its environmental brief. Its site organises its journalism in the classical genres of news, interview, chronicle and reportage, together with opinion articles, all tied, in its own formulation, to the preservation of nature, environmental quality and rights. By October 2026 its website ran to 229 pages of articles, a substantial archive for a small voluntary agency and evidence of continuous publication since 2020.

The plastic-bag campaign and the UPAB inheritance

ANA inherited from UPAB one of Bolivian environmental journalism's clearest policy campaigns: the drive to reduce single-use plastic bags. UPAB and ANA are credited with installing that campaign in public and political debate, under the banner "Desembólsate Bolivia" — a pun urging Bolivia to un-bag itself. The campaign promoted a draft Law for the Gradual Reduction of the Use of Plastic Bags before the Plurinational Legislative Assembly, a proposal that UPAB's histories say was developed with the technical backing of national legislative authorities, seven ministries, international cooperation bodies and Swiss Contact, and was promoted through public actions such as a joint awareness event by UPAB, the National Police and educational institutions at La Paz's Plaza San Pedro and the neighbouring Rodríguez market, where cloth bags were given to shoppers and vendors. Carlos Lara, evaluating UPAB's first thirteen years in 2021, claimed the plastic-bag fight as the union's signature achievement: the organisation had, he said, been the leader in placing the reduction of plastic bags on the table of dialogue. The campaign matters to ANA's profile because it shows the model the agency serves — journalism intended not only to inform but to build a green agenda in the media and in politics, in Lara's phrase, and to amplify investigations across media formats.

Alliances: ERBOL and La Región

Lacking a distribution network of its own, ANA has grown through alliances with established media. Its strategic alliance with ERBOL, the national educational radio network, was first signed more than two years before the renewal that ANA reported from La Paz on a Friday in March, when ERBOL's executive director Inés Gonzáles and ANA's director signed the renewed agreement at the network's premises. The renewed alliance committed both organisations to deepen their synergies for the dissemination of information about the global, national and local climate and environmental crisis through journalistic work, to seek funds that would allow investigative journalism to be developed, and to train the communicators and journalists of both organisations. For ANA, association with ERBOL — a federation of more than a hundred community radios — offered reach into rural Bolivia that a La Paz website could not achieve alone. In July 2026 ANA added a second documented alliance, an interinstitutional support agreement with La Región, the Santa Cruz digital magazine specialised in environment and tourism. Signed in La Paz, it committed the two independent outlets to share journalistic content, develop joint investigations and widen the reach of reporting on biodiversity conservation, the rights of Indigenous peoples and human rights, extractivism and the climate crisis. La Región's content director, Rocío Lloret, called it a privilege to add her outlet's work to ANA's, describing the agency's work as of vital importance for the country; ANA's director, in turn, stressed the two outlets' coincidences of vision, interests and approach.

Projects: the Madidi conservation corridor

ANA's project work shows the same alliance model applied to a defined territory. The agency took part, with Prodena and the Fundación para el Periodismo, in a project to strengthen journalists for the conservation of biodiversity in the corridor formed by Madidi, Pilón Lajas, Cotapata and Apolobamba — the CMPLC, one of the most biodiverse protected-area complexes on earth, spanning the Andes-to-Amazon transition in northern La Paz and Beni. The reports produced under the project were published in a dedicated "Corredor" section of ANA's site and were replicated by national television, digital platforms and other media, multiplying the reach of the participating journalists' work. UPAB's anniversary accounts likewise list the corridor among the themes ANA has covered. The project illustrates ANA's working method at its most developed: specialist journalists, supported by conservation and journalism foundations, producing in-depth reporting on a threatened territory, published first by the agency and then amplified through partner media — precisely the green-agenda mechanism its founders described when the agency was created.

Position and significance

ANA occupies a small but distinctive place in the Bolivian media system. Bolivia has two general news wires of long standing — the state agency ABI and the Jesuit agency ANF — and a powerful radio-network agency in ERBOL; ANA is the country's specialist environmental wire, and, so far as its own and its partners' records show, the only Bolivian news agency devoted exclusively to the environment. Its significance is therefore not measured in subscriber counts but in agenda-setting: the Kaka River dredges, mercury in Amazonian fish, the norms that licence forest burning and the fate of the Madidi corridor all reached Bolivian media through, or were kept alive by, its reporting and its alliances. Its weaknesses are equally documented in its own pages: a small, largely voluntary staff, an unsettled public record of its own leadership after the founding period, and a self-description as still working toward self-sustainability. For readers and researchers, ANA's dispatches, datelined La Paz and signed simply "/ANA/," are a primary source for how Bolivia's environmental crisis — and the Indigenous and human rights entangled with it — has been reported from within the country since 2020.

Basic facts

Agencia de Noticias Ambientales (ANA Bolivia) is an independent, Spanish-language environmental news agency based in La Paz, Bolivia. It was created as an initiative of the Unión de Periodistas Ambientales de Bolivia (UPAB, founded 22 December 2008 in La Paz), began as a Facebook account, and became an agency with its own website, anabolivia.org — built by IT specialist Derick Mercado — during the pandemic in 2020. Its founding team was led by director Carlos Lara, with Nelson Fernández as deputy director and Jimena Mercado as general editor; later alliance reports name a director Raúl Pérez and, in 2026, Raúl Albrecht. It covers the environment, climate change, extractivism, biodiversity, Indigenous peoples' rights, environmental defenders and human rights, publishes in the genres of news, interview, chronicle and reportage plus opinion, and maintains strategic alliances with ERBOL and La Región. Its official website is anabolivia.org.