The disaster may have been, at least partly, a result of human miscalculation. Some studies indicate that dams downstream on the Madeira River in Brazil may have exacerbated the flooding because their design did not allow the huge amounts of water upstream to flow down as quickly as necessary.

Indigenous territory buffers against deforestation

The February floods made food security and economic opportunities a priority for community leaders, says Nicolás Cartagena, president of CIPTA.

"We went hungry, because we couldn't work and families had no money," he says.

He and other leaders would like to open plants to process fruits and other forest products, riding the acai fruit wave in neighboring Brazil.

Projects like that, however, require capital, training, and lots of time. But without employment opportunities, he says, young people abandon the communities for cities far from the TCO Tacana. Some work in tourism, but many are drawn into logging. Still, there are not enough jobs for all the teenagers who graduate from high school.

From the tourist and trading town of Rurrenabaque, where the Tuichi River meets the Beni, boats ferry passengers to San Buenaventura. From there, a dirt road skirts the Madidi Park, connecting to the towns of Tumupasa and Ixiamas.

This area is outside the park, a difference underscored every time a truck laden with tree trunks trundles past. The largest part of the TCO Tacana lies on this side of the El Bala and Mamuque mountain ranges, bordering the road and in the lowlands along the Beni River.

Here the TCO itself acts as a protected area, reflecting a growing number of studies that have found deforestation rates lower in indigenous territories than on surrounding land, and sometimes even lower than in government-managed parks.

A recent study by CIPTA and the Wildlife Conservation Society calculated an annual deforestation rate of 0.5 percent in the TCO Tacana between 2005 and 2010, compared to 3.7 percent along the road on non-TCO land and 2.3 percent on farms or other property outside the TCO. The study predicted that the TCO's land management will avoid the deforestation of 230,842 hectares (570,423 acres) by 2021, an area that would cover more than half of Rhode Island.

That is true even though timber remains the largest income-producing resource on community lands, Cartagena says. But internal regulations and zoning for activities such as farming and logging, along with timber management plans, keep deforestation in check. Nine communities have community forestry organizations, each with a management plan.

Income could triple if the communities sold sawn wood, he says, but they lack the necessary infrastructure and equipment.

Other projects to generate income from natural resources have met with mixed success. A honey project didn't fly, he said. Cacao looks more promising, with a Bolivian chocolate manufacturer agreeing to buy the raw material and market the finished product as being from the indigenous territory.

Sale of Yacare caiman hides is a growing business for several dozen people from various communities, with the possibility of sales to international manufacturers, Cartagena says. The Yacare caiman (Caiman yacare), a relative of the crocodile, has the southernmost range of all crocodilians. Overhunting and poaching for its hide led to sharp drops in the population in various parts of South America, although it is rebounding as a result of conservation efforts .

In the 1990s, outsiders hired locals to hunt caimans around the Tacana communities. Because of that uncontrolled hunting, the WCS began working with the TCO in 1999 to see if there were places where sustainable hunting would be possible.

As a result, communities took stronger control of their territories, which benefited not just caiman populations but other resources, says Guido Miranda, WCS wildlife management coordinator.

A management plan drafted in 2006 and 2007 set quotas for about 35 lakes where locals could take 25 percent of the animals that were at least 1.8 meters long, estimated to be one percent of the total population of about 500,000 caimans in that area, Miranda says.

With a two- to three-week caiman season in September and October, community members have found it more profitable and efficient to manage the population and sell the hides in bulk rather than sell individually, as they did in the past.

At first, they salted the hides and sold them to middlemen. Then they began selling directly to a tannery. In 2010, they hired a tanning service so they could sell the processed hides themselves. Revenues were $13,000 that year, up from about $11,000 in 2008, Miranda says.

The market is cyclical, however, and income dropped last year. This year, the communities salted the hides and negotiated with a foreign buyer. They also began marketing the meat to restaurants in La Paz and Cochabamba under a government-run program that certifies that the caiman meat comes from sustainable sources, Miranda says.

The caiman management system has caught the eye of indigenous communities that would like to try it around the Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve in northeastern Peru, where they already manage turtles and some fish species.

More recent head counts show the population of caiman in the TCO Tacana is healthy, Miranda says. The most recent management plan increased the minimum size to two meters to avoid inadvertent capture of females.

One hazard is the accidental killing of black caimans, which are protected, but Miranda says experienced hunters generally do not confuse the two.

Despite the overall conservation efforts in the TCO Tacana, Neide Cartagena worries that changes could be on the horizon for the indigenous communities and the forests around them. Plans to pave the road to Ixiamas could result in more deforestation, as it has in other parts of the Amazon, although she says there will be a fund to mitigate the impacts.

There is also talk of a dam on the Tuichi River and drilling for oil in leases that overlap Madidi, but there are no details, according to Miranda.

Now that the Tacanas' land rights are mostly secure, Neide Cartagena is working to bolster her people's pride in their identity through a program to teach the Tacana language. Cartagena is a former vice president of CIPTA who now directs the TCO's Language and Culture Institute in Tumupasa.

Her daughters, playing in a mango tree outside her house, teach a visitor to count to 10 in Tacana. The children are the most enthusiastic, but teenagers are catching on, she says. Early this year, the institute started a course for government officials and schoolteachers.

"The idea is not to teach the language, but to teach in the language," she says. "We know it will be a process."

Language is tied to identity and to conservation, because as people have stopped using the language, they have lost the stories that shaped their parents' and grandparents' lives and their relationship with their environment, Cartagena says.

"The park conserves animals and plants," she says, glancing toward the cloud-shrouded hills that rise above the Amazonian plain. "Being close to Madidi is mostly an advantage. We indigenous people have always lived with nature."

Barbara Fraser, is an ICTMN correspondent and Mongabay.org Special Reporting Initiative Fellow. This article was produced under the Special Reporting Initiatives program.