The most poetic rendition of this I have seen is "high Andean moor." But more usefully, you could keep the term in Spanish and define it, as this article did: "paramo, a special ecosystem in the Andes where vast amounts of water are produced." It is the pollution of that water that is at issue in the gold mine protests described in the article, so this seems like a useful version - though I would have called it a fragile alpine tundra ecosystem. You could also just use fragile Andean tundra if time is short. If doing simultaneous interpreting I would probably define it like this once and then go on to use the term in Spanish.
update: Emily Hart, on her fabulous weekly briefing which I highly recommend, used "high altitude wetlands known as paramos" and from them on used paramos. Great.
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