Bolivia

Bolivia's history is a sequence of attempts to close that distance: the liberal revolution of 1899, which moved power from Sucre to La Paz but broke its promises to the Aymara villages that had fought for it; the national revolution of 1952, which gave the vote to everyone, nationalised the tin mines and handed out land; the military cycle of 1964 to 1982, which used the peasants against the miners and then ran out of money; the stabilisation of 1985, which ended hyperinflation and dismantled the state that 1952 had built; and the cycle of water, gas and constitutional politics that brought Evo Morales to power in 2005 and ended, twenty years later, with a centrist president elected in a run-off.

Bolivia matters out of proportion to its size because it kept testing the same questions. It is the clearest case in Latin America of a republic founded on a colonial economy and forced to invent another when the commodity ran out — silver, then tin, then gas, then, it is hoped, lithium. It is the clearest case of a state rebuilt from below by the majority it had excluded. And it is the only country in the Americas that lost its entire coastline in a war and never accepted the loss.

At a glance

What was Upper Peru, and why did Potosí matter?

The territory the Spanish called Upper Peru, and the Audiencia of Charcas after its high court, was the southern half of the old Inca realm and the northern half of the viceroyalty of Lima. Its importance was a single mountain. In April 1545 a Quechua herder, or a party of prospectors, depending on which account you accept, found silver ore on the Cerro Rico above the settlement that became Potosí. Within twenty-five years the mountain was the largest source of silver in the world, the town had a mint, and a Spanish proverb — valer un Potosí, to be worth a Potosí — had entered the language.

The labour system was designed by Viceroy Francisco de Toledo in the 1570s. His ordinance of 1573 drafted men from sixteen provinces of the highlands, from Cusco to Tarija, in a rotating corvée called the mita: some 13,500 conscripts a year on paper, of whom Peter Bakewell's reconstruction puts only about 4,500 underground at any one time, since the draft was worked in three shifts. The rest of the labour force was free, or nominally free: mingas who contracted themselves, and yanaconas who had left their communities. The figures are contested, and the mortality estimates more so. What is not contested is that the mita pulled apart the farming communities of the altiplano for two and a half centuries, and that the silver it produced paid for the Spanish crown's wars in Europe.

Popular writing and the tax records diverge on the mountain's output. Registered production from the Potosí district between the 1550s and the 1780s comes to some 26,000 to 30,000 tonnes of silver; estimates for the colonial period as a whole add a large allowance for contraband and reach about 40,000 tonnes, and the mountain has yielded perhaps 60,000 tonnes in four and a half centuries, counting the tin that followed. In the second half of the sixteenth century Potosí probably supplied 60 per cent of the world's mined silver. That share did not last: by the 1650s the oxidised ores near the surface were worked out, the galleries were flooding and the mercury from Huancavelica was unreliable, and the city that had held 120,000 to 160,000 people — comparable to the largest cities of Spain — shrank through the eighteenth century.

The political economy outlasted the boom. Upper Peru was governed from Lima until 1776, when the crown attached it to the new viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata at Buenos Aires, to keep the silver out of Lima's hands and guard the frontier against the Portuguese — an odd arrangement for a region whose trade ran west over the Andes. The late Bourbon reforms — the intendancies of 1782, the sale of office, the repartimiento de mercancías that forced Indian communities to buy goods at fixed prices — raised revenue and resentment together. In 1781 it broke. While Túpac Amaru II besieged Cusco, the Aymara leader Julián Apasa, who took the name Túpac Katari, encircled La Paz from March to October with an army contemporaries numbered at 20,000 and more. The city held, barely; Katari was captured in November and torn apart by horses, and his wife Bartolina Sisa was killed the following year. The rising failed, but it taught the Creole elite what its own majority could do, and left the militia officers of Chuquisaca and La Paz with a taste for commanding men.

How did the juntas of 1809 turn into sixteen years of war?

The news that Napoleon had put his brother on the throne of Spain reached Upper Peru in 1808 by way of Rio de Janeiro as much as by way of Madrid. The president of the Audiencia of Charcas, Ramón García de León y Pizarro, leaned towards the Infanta Carlota, who governed in Brazil and had designs on her brother's American kingdoms; the oidores, the judges, preferred the Supreme Junta at Seville. On 25 May 1809 the judges deposed the president and set up a governing junta in the name of Ferdinand VII. It was a conservative act by men who wanted no revolution, and Bolivian tradition calls it the first cry of independence anyway.

La Paz went further, and faster. On 16 July 1809 Pedro Domingo Murillo and a coalition of Creoles, mestizos and militia officers seized the barracks, forced the governor and bishop to resign, and installed a Junta Tuitiva — a "junta protecting the rights of the people" — which on 27 July issued a proclamation that spoke of the "ignominious slavery" of three centuries and of a people resuming its sovereignty. That was too much for everyone else. The viceroy of Peru sent troops from Cusco under José Manuel de Goyeneche, the viceroy of the Río de la Plata sent others from Buenos Aires, and La Paz was retaken in the last week of October. Murillo was hanged in the plaza on 29 January 1810 with a group of others, and the heads of the condemned were displayed on pikes for years.

What followed was not a war of armies but a war of columns. Buenos Aires sent three expeditions across the altiplano — under Juan José Castelli in 1810–11, Manuel Belgrano in 1813 and José Rondeau in 1815 — and each was destroyed by a royalist army drawing on the resources of Upper Peru itself. Castelli won at Suipacha on 7 November 1810 and lost at Huaqui on 20 June 1811, a defeat that cost Buenos Aires the whole of the highlands and nearly cost it the revolution. Belgrano was beaten at Vilcapugio on 1 October and Ayohuma on 14 November 1813. Rondeau was destroyed at Sipe Sipe on 29 November 1815. After that Buenos Aires stopped trying, and the strategic problem passed to the Andes: Upper Peru was the royalist citadel, and the road to Lima ran through it.

The royalists held the cities for the next decade, and the countryside held itself. The insurrection withdrew into the valleys and the yungas, into the country between the altiplano and the Amazon, where the terrain favoured small units and the population had reasons of its own to fight. This is the war the historiography calls the republiquetas: petty republics, a term coined by Bartolomé Mitre with a sneer in it. There were eight of them, from Ayopaya above Cochabamba to Santa Cruz de la Sierra in the east, and they were less republics than guerrilla fiefdoms held by caudillos with a few hundred men, financed by requisition, cattle and contraband tobacco.

The names matter because the official story of independence gives them no room. In Ayopaya, José Miguel Lanza held a mountain district for fourteen years and would enter La Paz in January 1825 at the head of its guerrilla bands. In Larecaja, north of Lake Titicaca, the priest Ildefonso de las Muñecas combined a parish with a small army and a printing press. Round Santa Cruz de la Sierra, José Manuel Mercado, known as el Colorado, took the town in February 1825. In Cinti, Vicente Camargo raided the silver road until a royalist column caught and killed him. None commanded more than a few hundred regulars and none could hold a city for long, but together they made the altiplano ungovernable except by an army, and kept the crown from ever treating Upper Peru as a settled province.

Their war was economic as much as military: the guerrillas taxed the mule trains and cut the roads to the mines, and the royalist answer — terror and forced recruitment — drove more villages into the insurgency. By 1817 the viceroy could report the province pacified. It was merely quiet, and the quiet cost him two regiments he could not spare for Chile or Peru.

The end came from outside and from a quarrel inside the royalist camp. In 1824 the absolutist general Pedro Antonio de Olañeta, a Charcas-born landowner, revolted against the liberal viceroy José de la Serna, who had just restored the constitution of 1812. Olañeta's rising split the royalist army in the highlands at the moment Gran Colombia's legions were marching on it. Bolívar destroyed the main royalist field army at Junín on 6 August 1824; Sucre finished it at Ayacucho on 9 December, taking the viceroy prisoner. Olañeta refused to accept the capitulation, held Potosí, and was killed in April 1825 at Tumusla — Bolivian accounts differ on whether there was a battle at all or only the single discharge of a mutinous sergeant. The last royalist commander in South America died at the hands of his own men.

How did Sucre win, and why is the country called Bolivia?

Antonio José de Sucre crossed the Desaguadero on 6 February 1825 and entered La Paz the next day. He had been ordered by Bolívar not to prejudge the province's future: Upper Peru had belonged to the Río de la Plata before the revolution and had been annexed to Peru after it, and Bolívar wanted it either attached to Peru or kept under Colombian influence. Sucre, prodded by the Chuquisaca lawyer Casimiro Olañeta — the dead general's nephew, and a man who would shape Bolivian politics for thirty years — called a constituent assembly anyway, in a decree of 9 February, and left the decision to the deputies.

The assembly met in the university city of Chuquisaca on 10 July 1825, with deputies from five provinces, and had three options before it: union with Buenos Aires, incorporation into Peru, or independence. Independence won, though not unanimously, and the act was signed on 6 August. The date was chosen for a reason: it was the first anniversary of Junín, Bolívar's victory. The declaration named the new state the República de Bolívar, made Bolívar its "father" and supreme chief, and named its capital Sucre. Bolívar thanked the assembly, declined the presidency, and privately complained that Sucre had created a nation he had not wanted.

The name changed within the year. A Potosí deputy, Manuel Martín Cruz, is supposed to have argued that as Rome came from Romulus, so Bolivia would come from Bolívar, and the assembly adopted the shorter form. The story is repeated everywhere and rests on no contemporary record, so it is best treated as a good etymology rather than a documented debate; what is certain is that by the time Sucre promulgated the constitution in November 1826 the country was the República de Bolivia. Bolívar visited in the second half of 1825, was received with processions at La Paz, Oruro, Potosí and Chuquisaca, and called the country his hija predilecta, his favourite daughter, having spent the previous months trying to talk the assembly out of independence.

The new state's territory was not yet what it later became. It included the Atacama coast and the port of Cobija, a seaboard it barely used; it did not yet include Tarija, whose incorporation was contested with Argentina; and it had no settled frontier with Brazil in the east, where the rubber country of the Acre would be lost in 1903. Its real inheritance was the fiscal structure of the colony: a poll tax on Indians, a monopoly on silver exports, and a state whose revenue came from mines it did not own and people it did not represent.

What did the 1826 constitution build, and why did Sucre fall?

The constitution of 1826 is the strangest document in Bolivian constitutional history and one of the strangest in the world. Bolívar drafted it in Lima and sent it to Chuquisaca in May 1826; the constituent assembly sanctioned it on 6 November and Sucre promulgated it on 19 November, thirteen days later. It ran to 157 articles and four powers rather than three. The legislature had three chambers — tribunes, senators and censors, twenty each — with the censors as guardians of the constitution against unconstitutional acts. The executive was a president with a four-year term and a vice-president. The judiciary was conventional. The fourth power, the electoral, was a college of electors who nominated candidates for office, on the theory that the people should choose men of merit rather than men of faction.

It was an enlightened document and an impossible one. It made Catholicism the religion of the state, restricted citizenship to men of property and letters, and provided for a president who could be re-elected once — a detail Bolívar had designed for himself and Sucre inherited. The tricameral legislature never worked; the electoral college never functioned as intended; and the constitution lasted, in any real sense, less than five years, until Santa Cruz replaced it in August 1831. Its afterlife has been long, because it fixed the vocabulary of Bolivian politics: the departmental structure, the notion of a state above parties, and the habit of writing a constitution for a country that did not yet exist.

Sucre governed from 1 January 1826 with ability and no political base. He was a Venezuelan, a soldier, and a reformer in a country where the landowning families of Chuquisaca expected to run things. He tried to abolish the Indian poll tax, discovered that the treasury could not survive without it, and settled for a modest reduction; he founded schools and a college of medicine; he attempted to put the customs houses on a cash basis; and he did all of it with the manners of a man giving orders. The Chuquisaca elite, led by Casimiro Olañeta, turned against him. The immediate pretext was the presence of Colombian troops, unpaid and predatory, and the constitution's Colombian flavour.

The end was squalid. On 18 April 1828 a group of conspirators broke into the presidential palace in Chuquisaca; Sucre was wounded and escaped over the roof, and a mob ran through the streets. He hid in a hacienda, then left the country disguised as a peasant and later as a priest. A Peruvian army under Agustín Gamarra invaded on 1 May, ostensibly to expel Colombian influence; the Treaty of Piquiza on 6 July 1828 arranged the withdrawal of both the Peruvians and the Colombians, and Sucre resigned on 1 August. He was murdered on the road to Quito on 4 June 1830, at Berruecos, in circumstances that have never been cleared up and that his admirers have always blamed on his political enemies.

Was Andrés de Santa Cruz Bolivia's greatest president?

Andrés de Santa Cruz was born in La Paz in 1792, the son of a Spanish official and an Aymara mother, and had fought first for the royalists and then for San Martín. He was president of Peru briefly in 1827, president of Bolivia from 1829 to 1839, and the only Bolivian head of state who ever tried to reunite the two countries. His reputation in Bolivia is higher than that of any nineteenth-century president, and with reason: he reorganised the treasury, commissioned a commercial and civil code, promoted Cobija as a Pacific port, and gave the country a constitution in 1831 that lasted longer than its predecessor.

His method was personal and expensive. He governed through a network of relatives and clients, kept a large army for a state of Bolivia's size, and financed it with tariffs and loans. The army was the point. Santa Cruz had concluded that a small Andean republic surrounded by larger neighbours could survive only by making itself the centre of a larger union, and from 1835 he had the opportunity. Peru had split into two rival states, and after defeating the Peruvian caudillo Felipe Santiago Salaverry he had himself proclaimed Supreme Protector of a Peru–Bolivian Confederation on 28 October 1836: three states — North Peru, South Peru and Bolivia — under one protector, one tariff, one army and one foreign policy.

The Confederation lasted three years and frightened everybody. Chile saw a rival at Callao that could undercut Valparaíso and a protector who could fund Chilean exiles; its congress declared war in December 1836. Argentina declared war in May 1837 over Tarija and over Santa Cruz's support for its unitarian exiles. Santa Cruz beat the first Chilean expedition, which signed a treaty at Paucarpata in November 1837 that the Chilean government refused to ratify, and then lost to the second, under Manuel Bulnes, at Yungay on 20 January 1839. The battle was decided by Chilean steadiness and a counter-attack late in the day; Santa Cruz's army broke, and so did the Confederation. He fled to Ecuador, then Chile, then Europe, and died in France in 1865, still planning returns.

The verdict of history has been unkind in a way that says more about Bolivia than about him. Yungay is remembered as the disaster that opened decades of coups, and there were coups. But the Confederation was the first and last serious attempt to make a viable state out of the Andean core, and its failure left a small republic with a regional economy. The map draws Bolivia in two periods, 1825–35 and 1840 to the present, because between 1836 and 1839 the territory is carried by the separate entry for the Confederation; that gap is not a gap in the country's history but a change in which state the map is drawing.

What did Yungay cost, and how did Bolivia lose the sea?

The two decades after Yungay were the worst in Bolivian political history. There were several presidents between 1839 and 1841, three rival governments at once, and a Peruvian invasion under Gamarra in 1841 that was meant to end the republic. It ended Gamarra instead. On 18 November 1841, at Ingavi near Viacha, the Bolivian army under José Ballivián destroyed the Peruvian force and killed its president; the news caused a revolution in Lima. Ingavi is the one battle in Bolivian history that everyone knows: it saved the country, and it was won by an army raised in a state that had spent two years tearing itself apart.

Ballivián's reward was the presidency, and his problem was the coast. Bolivia's littoral was a desert 154,000 km² in extent, running from the Loa river to the 24th parallel, with a population of some 15,000 in 1879, most of them Chilean. Its value changed with the chemistry of European agriculture: first guano, then, from the 1860s, sodium nitrate, which the world wanted as fertiliser and which the desert held in seams a metre thick. Chilean and British capital built the railways and the water works at Antofagasta; Chilean labour worked the offices; and the boundary between Bolivian Atacama and Chilean Copiapó had never been surveyed, because nobody had thought it worth surveying.

The treaties that followed were attempts to settle a question that had become expensive. In 1866 Bolivia and Chile agreed a boundary at 24° south with a shared exploitation zone between 23° and 25°, and a joint customs arrangement at Mejillones. In 1874 they confirmed the line and, in return for Bolivia's acceptance, Chile undertook not to raise taxes on Chilean companies operating north of it for twenty-five years. The treaty was ratified, the companies multiplied, and the Bolivian treasury — chronically short of revenue, and watching Antofagasta's customs receipts go to Santiago under the shared arrangement — began to look for ways round the clause.

That search destroyed the country's access to the sea. In 1878 the government of Hilarión Daza imposed a ten-centavo tax on the Chilean-owned Antofagasta Nitrate and Railway Company, arguing that the 1874 clause covered new taxes on capital, not on exports. Chile protested and demanded arbitration; Bolivia insisted the matter was internal and put the company's concession up for auction. On 14 February 1879, the day of the auction, Chilean troops occupied Antofagasta without a shot. Bolivia declared war on 1 March. Peru, bound by a secret treaty of 1873, tried to mediate and was drawn in; Chile declared war on both on 5 April.

The war was decided at sea and then in the desert. Bolivia had no navy and a small, badly equipped army; its contribution was the alliance with Peru and the campaign in Tarapacá, where the allies lost the sea and then the ports. After Pisagua in November 1879 and Tacna on 26 May 1880, where Narciso Campero's Bolivian divisions were broken, Bolivia withdrew. Peru fought on for three more years. Bolivia signed no peace: a truce at Valparaíso on 4 April 1884 left the whole coast under Chilean occupation, and the Treaty of Peace and Friendship of 20 October 1904 ceded the Litoral outright for a railway from Arica to La Paz, free transit through Chilean ports and £300,000 in cash.

The loss has never been accepted as final in Bolivian politics. The 1904 treaty became the target of a national campaign — the cuestión del Pacífico, taught in schools and commemorated every 23 March as Día del Mar — and every government from the 1920s onwards tried to reopen it. In 1975 Hugo Banzer and Augusto Pinochet negotiated an agreement at Charaña that would have given Bolivia a corridor to the sea north of Arica; Peru's consent, required by the 1929 treaty, was never obtained, and the two countries broke off relations in March 1978. In 2013 Bolivia took Chile to the International Court of Justice, asking it to declare that Chile was obliged to negotiate sovereign access. The court ruled on 1 October 2018, by twelve votes to three, that no such obligation existed. That judgment closed the legal road, not the political one.

How did the federal war and tin remake the country?

Silver had made the southern departments rich and the liberal-conservative divide regional. Potosí and Sucre lived off the mines and the mint; La Paz lived off trade with Peru and the altiplano; Cochabamba off wheat and maize. When silver prices fell in the 1890s and tin rose, the balance shifted decisively: tin came out of the departments around Oruro and Potosí but was exported through the Pacific, and the commercial and financial houses that controlled it sat in La Paz. The 1898 attempt by the Sucre congress to pass a ley radicatoria fixing the executive permanently in Sucre was the trigger. La Paz rose, formed a Federal Junta in December 1898, and found allies among the Aymara communities of the altiplano, who had their own grievances against the landowning expansion sanctioned by the agrarian law of 1874.

The Federal War of 1899 was short. The battle that decided it was fought at Segundo Crucero de Paria on 10 April 1899, where Colonel José Manuel Pando's liberals beat President Severo Fernández Alonso in four hours. But the war's most important army was not Pando's. The Aymara leader Pablo Zárate Willka raised tens of thousands of villagers in La Paz, Oruro and Cochabamba, cut the roads, and for a few weeks in early 1899 controlled the countryside between the cities. The liberals had promised the return of communal lands; once the conservatives were beaten they discovered how much they had promised. Zárate Willka was arrested, escaped in 1903, was retaken, and was killed in custody in 1905. The federal state was never created either: Bolivia remained unitary, Sucre remained the constitutional capital, and La Paz took the government.

The tin republic that emerged was the most stable and the most unequal regime in Bolivian history. Three men — Simón I. Patiño, who made his fortune at the La Salvadora mine from 1900; Mauricio Hochschild, a German-Jewish engineer who built a smelting and marketing network; and Carlos Víctor Aramayo, heir to the Compañía Aramayo de Minas — came to control most of the country's output, and with it the banks, the railways, the press and, through the Liberal and then the Republican parties, the government. Bolivia was by the 1920s the second or third largest tin producer in the world, and its presidents were, in the phrase of the time, the rosca: a rotating oligarchy of mineowners and their lawyers.

The crash of 1929 ended that arrangement's economic basis, and the Chaco War ended its moral one. The war with Paraguay was fought over the northern Chaco, a scrub desert of some 250,000 km² that both countries claimed and neither had settled, and that oil companies had convinced both governments might sit on petroleum. Standard Oil backed Bolivia and Shell backed Paraguay, though Matthew Hughes has argued that the company archives do not show the oil firms causing the war, whatever they did to finance the Bolivian build-up.

What did the Chaco War break?

Fighting began in 1932 and lasted three years. Bolivia mobilised perhaps 250,000 men, a quarter of its adult male population, and lost between 50,000 and 65,000 dead; Paraguayan deaths are usually put at 30,000 to 40,000. The outcome was decided less by numbers than by logistics. Bolivia's army was larger and better equipped, but its supply line ran from the altiplano down to the Chaco through a country with almost no roads, and its highland conscripts died of thirst and disease in a terrain they had never seen. Paraguayan troops, fighting close to home and in Guarani, outmanoeuvred them, and by 1935 the Bolivian army had been pushed back to the Andes foothills.

The armistice of June 1935 and the peace treaty signed at Buenos Aires in July 1938 gave Paraguay three-quarters of the disputed Chaco. Bolivia's net loss was smaller than the map suggests — the treaty confirmed Bolivian sovereignty over the oil-bearing foothills — but the political effect was enormous. A generation of young officers and writers concluded that the old order had sent the country's peasants to die in a war for foreign companies and had lost. Germán Busch, a Chaco veteran, and David Toro, his predecessor, turned that conclusion into policy: in 1937 the government expropriated Standard Oil's Bolivian subsidiary and created YPFB, the state oil company; in 1938 a new constitution wrote labour rights and the social function of property into law; and in 1939 Busch, by then ruling by decree, shot himself.

The fifteen years between Busch's death and the revolution were a crisis of legitimacy. The mineowners recovered control under Enrique Peñaranda; the massacre of striking miners at Catavi in 1942 radicalised the labour movement; the government of Gualberto Villarroel, which included MNR ministers, was overthrown and its president thrown from a balcony in July 1946. The MNR, founded in 1941, lost the 1949 civil war it started, won the 1951 election, and was stopped from taking office by a military junta — the decision that, more than any ideology, produced the revolution.

What did the revolution of 1952 change?

On 9 April 1952 the MNR, with the police and the miners of Milluni, rose in La Paz. The fighting lasted three days and killed some 490 people; the army, whose commander had wavered, mostly stayed in its barracks and then dissolved. By 11 April the mines were in the hands of their workers, the peasants of the Cochabamba valley were seizing estates, and Víctor Paz Estenssoro was flying home from Buenos Aires. Universal suffrage came in June 1952: the electorate went from 205,000 registered voters, 6.6 per cent of the population, to 1,125,000 by 1956, a third of it. The mines were nationalised on 31 October 1952 and folded into COMIBOL, created by decree on 2 October, with worker participation in management written into its statutes. The agrarian reform was signed at Ucureña on 2 August 1953, in front of the peasant unions that had already occupied the land. The army was cut from 20,000 men to 5,000 and replaced, for a while, by armed militias.

The results were real and limited. Literacy campaigns, rural schools and the extension of citizenship to the Aymara and Quechua majority changed the country's self-image permanently. But the MNR incorporated the peasants as a corporate constituency, not as nations; it kept the state's centralism; and it used the same instruments of political control — a Control Político that ran detention camps, censorship, and the jailing of communist and Falangist opponents — that it had denounced. The economy, meanwhile, was mismanaged on a heroic scale: the exchange rate went from 190 pesos to the dollar in 1952 to 15,000 four years later, and only an IMF stabilisation in 1956–57, with American wheat and tin purchases behind it, kept the government solvent.

The revolution's paradox is that it made the state the centre of Bolivian life and then failed to make the state work. COMIBOL took fifteen years to restore pre-revolutionary tin output, subsidised the rest of the public sector, and employed more administrators than miners by 1986. The land reform broke up the haciendas of the altiplano but left the commercial estates of the eastern lowlands untouched, which is why Santa Cruz became the centre of agrarian capitalism and later of opposition to La Paz. Above all, the revolution tied the peasants to the army that had been defeated in 1952: René Barrientos built his power on the Military-Peasant Pact of 1964, using rural unions against the miners' unions.

Why did military rule last from 1964 to 1982?

Paz Estenssoro was overthrown on 4 November 1964 by a junta led by his own vice-president, René Barrientos, a Quechua-speaking general who campaigned in the countryside in a poncho and addressed his rallies in Quechua. Barrientos was elected in 1966, presided over five years of growth and rising tin prices, and used the army to break the miners: in June 1967 troops killed miners and their families at the Catavi–Siglo XX complex, and in October of the same year the army, with American advisers, ran down Ernesto Che Guevara's guerrilla in the southeast. Guevara had chosen Bolivia because it was the continent's weakest state and because he believed its peasants would rise; they did not, and the Communist Party disowned him. He was captured in the Quebrada del Yuro on 8 October 1967 and shot the next day at La Higuera.

Barrientos died in a helicopter crash in April 1969, and the army split. Alfredo Ovando Candía took power in September 1969 and nationalised Gulf Oil's Bolivian holdings; Juan José Torres, a populist general, took it from him in October 1970 and convened a Popular Assembly of unions and left parties that could not agree on anything. On 21 August 1971 Colonel Hugo Banzer Suárez, with Brazilian and American support and the acquiescence of the MNR, took La Paz in a coup that cost hundreds of lives. Banzer ruled seven years — the longest continuous term of the century — first with civilian parties, then, after 1974, alone.

His regime was the classic Latin American authoritarianism of the period: unions banned, universities closed, some 2,000 political prisoners held and tortured in the interior ministry, and Bolivia integrated into Operation Condor, the cross-border programme that hunted exiled opponents in Buenos Aires, Santiago and elsewhere. It was also, for a while, an economic success, on the strength of oil, gas, cotton and foreign borrowing; the debt that financed the "miracle" helped destroy the economy after 1978.

The end of the Banzer years was chaotic even by Bolivian standards. Elections in 1978 were annulled; the 1979 and 1980 elections were inconclusive; between 1978 and 1982 Bolivia had nine presidents, several of them in office for weeks. In July 1980 General Luis García Meza seized power with the help of Argentine intelligence officers and a paramilitary squad that murdered the socialist leader Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz, and ran a government so openly tied to cocaine trafficking that the United States refused to recognise it. The army withdrew in 1982, handing power to the congress elected in 1980, which chose Hernán Siles Zuazo as president. Twenty-two years after his first term, he inherited an economy in free fall.

How did hyperinflation, water and gas produce the MAS?

Siles Zuazo governed for three years and could not govern. His coalition faced a debt crisis, a collapse in tin prices and a Congress that would not pass a budget; inflation went from 24 per cent in 1982 to something between 11,000 and 25,000 per cent in 1985, depending on the measure and the month, and the country ran on printed money and dollar notes. In August 1985 the government of Paz Estenssoro, who had come second in the vote but was chosen by Congress, adopted Decree 21060: prices freed, the exchange rate unified and floated, the state companies rationalised, tariffs slashed, the budget brought near balance. Inflation fell within weeks. The social cost was immediate: when the tin price collapsed in October 1985, COMIBOL shed more than 20,000 miners, and the camps of Potosí and Oruro — the heart of the labour movement since 1952 — emptied.

The settlement that followed was a market democracy with a weak state. Successive governments handed the flag carrier, the railways, the telephone company and the oil fields to private managers under a "capitalisation" programme that gave half of each enterprise to a strategic investor and half to every adult Bolivian as a pension. Growth returned and poverty fell slowly; politics became a negotiation between three parties — MNR, ADN and MIR — that took turns at the presidency through congressional deal-making. What it did not do was create work outside the informal economy or convince the majority that the state belonged to them.

The break came from water. In 2000 Cochabamba, a city of half a million with a chronic water shortage, had been handed to Aguas del Tunari, a consortium led by Bechtel, under Law 2029 of October 1999, which appeared to give the company rights over communal irrigation systems and even rainwater. Bills rose by as much as 200 per cent in January; the Coordinadora de Defensa del Agua y de la Vida, a coalition of irrigators, factory workers, students and neighbourhood committees, shut the city down in February and again in April. The government declared a state of siege on 8 April; a 17-year-old, Víctor Hugo Daza, was shot in the face and killed by an army captain; and on 10 April the concession was cancelled. Bechtel's arbitration claim for $25 million was settled in 2006 for a nominal sum.

Three years later the same coalition, wider and angrier, broke a second government. The Gas War of September–October 2003 began over a plan to export natural gas through Chile — the country that had taken Bolivia's coast — and turned into a demand for a constituent assembly and the nationalisation of hydrocarbons. At least 60 people were killed, most of them in El Alto, the Aymara city above La Paz; on 17 October Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada resigned and left for the United States. Carlos Mesa, his successor, held a referendum on gas policy in 2004, raised royalties in 2005, and was himself forced out that June by the same blockades. The election of December 2005 gave Evo Morales 53.7 per cent, an absolute majority for a former coca growers' leader who had come second in 2002 with 20.9 per cent.

What did the MAS build, and what replaced it?

Morales took office on 22 January 2006 and moved on the two promises that had made him. On 1 May soldiers occupied the gas fields and the government decreed state control of hydrocarbons, forcing foreign companies to renegotiate as minority partners of YPFB. A constituent assembly elected in July 2006 sat for eighteen months in conditions close to civil conflict: four eastern departments held autonomy referendums in 2008, opposition crowds attacked MAS supporters in Sucre, and government supporters besieged opposition prefectures. The constitution that emerged was approved by 61.43 per cent on 25 January 2009. It refounded Bolivia as a plurinational state, recognised 36 indigenous languages and their legal systems, created departmental and indigenous autonomies, declared natural resources the property of the people, and left Sucre the capital and La Paz the government.

The MAS's economic record was the best in Bolivian history for a decade. Gas revenues, remittances and high commodity prices paid for pensions, cash transfers and public investment; growth averaged around 5 per cent; extreme poverty fell from 38 per cent to 18 per cent between 2006 and 2014, and the Gini coefficient from 0.60 to 0.47. Morales won re-election in 2009 and 2014, and by 2015 had served longer than any president since Santa Cruz.

The end of the boom exposed the model. A referendum on 21 February 2016 asked whether the constitution should be amended to allow a fourth term; 51.3 per cent said no. In 2017 the Plurinational Constitutional Tribunal ruled that term limits violated the right to stand for office, which allowed Morales to run again. When the count in the election of 20 October 2019 was halted for a day and then produced a narrow first-round win — 47.08 per cent to Carlos Mesa's 36.51 — the opposition called fraud, the OAS audit reported irregularities and recommended annulment, and the police and then the army declined to defend the government. Morales resigned on 10 November and left for Mexico.

The crisis that followed is the most contested event in recent Bolivian history. The OAS's statistical case was attacked by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, which argued that a coding error in the audit's own data explained the supposed jump in the count; the OAS maintained that its findings rested on more than the trend. What is not disputed is that the transition was violent. The forensic institute counted 30 people killed between 20 October and mid-November, at least 19 of them protesters shot by security forces at Senkata and Sacaba; human-rights organisations and the Inter-American Commission put the total at 36. Jeanine Áñez, a second vice-president of the Senate, took the presidency on 12 November with a quorum that the MAS boycott had made doubtful; her government prosecuted Morales in absentia, and in 2022 she was sentenced to ten years for breach of duty.

The MAS returned through the ballot. Luis Arce, Morales's economy minister, won 55.1 per cent on 18 October 2020 and took office on 8 November; Áñez was arrested in March 2021 and freed in November 2025. Arce inherited a drained treasury, a gas industry whose output was falling, and a party split between himself and Morales, who had returned from exile. The split paralysed the state as the dollar shortage bit: fuel queues, a black market in foreign exchange, and inflation that reached 9.97 per cent in 2024 and 20.40 per cent in 2025, the highest since the 1980s. On 26 June 2024 troops under General Juan José Zúñiga occupied the Plaza Murillo and rammed a vehicle into the door of the old palace; Arce confronted him in the street, the air force commander refused to join, and the coup collapsed within hours. Zúñiga then claimed the whole thing had been staged by the president, an accusation Arce denies and that has never been substantiated.

The 2025 election ended twenty years of MAS government. Morales was barred from running and called for a boycott; the first round on 17 August gave Rodrigo Paz of the Christian Democrats 32.06 per cent and the former president Jorge Quiroga 26.70. Paz won the run-off on 19 October with 54.96 per cent — the first presidential run-off in Bolivian history — and was sworn in on 8 November promising to cut fuel subsidies, attract foreign investment in lithium and gas, and keep the social transfers. Inflation had fallen to 3.88 per cent on the year by September 2026, from 20.40 in 2025, at the cost of a severe fiscal squeeze. The country that lost its silver, its tin and its coast is now betting on lithium, in a world that may not need as much of it as the salt flats of Uyuni suggest.

Common myths about Bolivia

Timeline of Bolivia

What the map shows next

At 1879 on the map the map shows Bolivia at the moment of the War of the Pacific, with the Litoral still attached and Antofagasta still a Bolivian port; a year later the same territory is drawn under Chilean occupation, and the shape of the country changes for good.

At 1952 on the map the republic is at the height of the revolution, with the mines in state hands and the peasants enfranchised, and the map's Bolivia is still the one that lost the Chaco but kept the oil foothills. By 2009 on the map the country has a new constitution, a plurinational name, and a president who has been in office for three years; the borders have not moved since 1938, but almost everything inside them has.