Fallowing land reform and the abolition of serfdom in Bolivia in the 1950s, peasants migrated in streams to the sparsely populated Alto Beni region on the eastern edge of the Department of La Paz. The prospect of rich and unlimited farmland waiting to be carved out of virgin tropical rainforest lured thousands of settlers from Bolivia's highlands, where Aymara and Quechua Indian families were being economically squeezed by overcrowding, land fragmentation, and low prices for cash crops.