Bolivia's history: a silver mountain and three lost frontiers

What Tiwanaku built south of Lake Titicaca

People farmed the high plateau long before any state stood on it. Wikipedia's history of the country dates the domestication of the potato near Lake Titicaca to between 8000 and 5000 BC, the use of quinoa to some three or four thousand years ago and copper working to about 2000 BC. Llamas, alpacas and vicuñas carried loads and supplied food and wool on ground where most crops fail.

The first power whose ruins still stand is Tiwanaku. The UNESCO inscription of 2000 places the city near the southern shore of the lake at 3,850 metres, in the Ingavi province of La Paz department, and dates its apogee to between 500 and 900 AD. Its monuments include the Akapana, originally a pyramid of seven stone-faced platforms rising more than 18 metres, the semi-subterranean Templete with walls of 48 red sandstone pillars, and the Kalasasaya enclosure holding the Gate of the Sun, a doorway cut from a single slab of andesite with a frieze that UNESCO's description says has been read as an agricultural calendar.

How many people lived there is a question of method. Early estimates summarised by Wikipedia gave the city about 6.5 square kilometres and between 15,000 and 30,000 inhabitants. Satellite mapping of the raised fields, the suka qullu, in the three main valleys around it produced carrying-capacity estimates anywhere from 285,000 to 1,482,000 people. The same article records a fall in rainfall over the Titicaca basin after about 950 and the disappearance of the city around 1150. Present-day Aymara speakers associate themselves with Tiwanaku.

Between 1438 and 1527 the Inca state took the Titicaca region and much of what is now western Bolivia, which it governed as part of Qullasuyu, its southern quarter.

Why Spain wanted Upper Peru

Francisco Pizarro's conquest of the Inca empire in 1532 and 1533 brought the highlands under Spain, and the territory became Upper Peru, Alto Perú, inside the Viceroyalty of Peru. The town that is now Sucre was founded as La Plata in 1538 according to UNESCO's description of the historic city, and in 1539 by Pedro de Anzures according to the Worldmark encyclopedia. Santa Cruz de la Sierra followed in 1561, while the Gran Chaco to the south-east stayed outside effective Spanish control for the whole colonial period.

What changed the region's value was the silver of Cerro Rico, the mountain above Potosí. Britannica dates the discovery to 1545 and records that the town's population passed 150,000 within three decades. La Paz was founded in 1548 on the route that carried silver from Potosí towards the coast, and an audiencia, a royal court with administrative powers, was set up at Chuquisaca in the late 1550s to govern a district Lima found too distant to run.

UNESCO's inscription of Potosí, made in 1987, describes the whole production chain. Output reached full capacity after 1580, when the patio process of mercury amalgamation was introduced. Twenty-two reservoirs drove 140 water mills that ground the ore, and the silver was cast into bars stamped at the Royal Mint, the Casa de la Moneda, before being shipped to Seville. Labour came through the mita, a draft of Indigenous workers: UNESCO counts 13,500 of them working in the mines in the seventeenth century, housed in quarters separated from the Spanish town by an artificial river.

The town shrank with the silver. Britannica puts its peak at 160,000 people around 1650, records a typhus epidemic in 1719 that killed some 22,000 residents and gives fewer than 20,000 inhabitants by the early nineteenth century. UNESCO added the City of Potosí to its List of World Heritage in Danger in June 2014.

How the highlands rose against the colonial order

Higher tribute and heavier mita quotas in the eighteenth century produced the rising of Túpac Amaru II, which spread from Peru into Upper Peru. Tomás Catari led an uprising around Potosí in 1780. Julián Apaza, who took the name Túpac Katari, besieged La Paz for more than 100 days in 1781, a siege in which Wikipedia records 20,000 deaths, and the Aymara leader Bartolina Sisa was executed in 1782. Spain had put down the last of the revolts by 1783. In 1776 the territory had been moved from Lima's authority to the new Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, governed from Buenos Aires.

How Upper Peru became the Republic of Bolivia

Independence was proclaimed early and won late. On 25 May 1809 the judges of the audiencia at Chuquisaca deposed its president, and on 16 July 1809 Pedro Domingo Murillo led a revolt in La Paz that set up a governing junta. Both were suppressed by troops sent from Lima and Buenos Aires. For the next seven years Upper Peru was fought over by armies from the River Plate and royalist forces from Peru, while guerrilla zones known as republiquetas held parts of the countryside.

The decision came from outside. After Simón Bolívar's victory at Ayacucho in December 1824, his general Antonio José de Sucre entered Upper Peru, and on 6 August 1825 a congress at Chuquisaca declared independence. Britannica and the Worldmark encyclopedia both record that the new state was named after Bolívar; the Worldmark account adds that it was first called the Republic of Bolívar. Sucre became the first president in 1826. When Chuquisaca took his name is recorded differently: the Worldmark encyclopedia places it on his election in 1826, UNESCO's description of the city in 1839.

Andrés de Santa Cruz joined Peru to Bolivia in a confederation in 1836. Chilean and Peruvian forces defeated it in 1839, and for nearly 40 years afterwards Wikipedia's history of the country records government by coup and short-lived constitution.

How Bolivia lost its coast and two frontiers

The republic of 1825 reached the Pacific through the Atacama Desert, where Chilean companies mined nitrate. An 1874 treaty, Britannica records, freed Chilean enterprises from new Bolivian taxes for 25 years. In 1878 Bolivia raised the tax on the Chilean Antofagasta Nitrate Company over Chile's protests, and on 14 February 1879 Chilean forces occupied the port of Antofagasta. Bolivia declared war, Peru joined under a secret alliance of 1873, and Chile declared war on both.

Britannica's article on the war dates it 1879 to 1883; its article on Bolivia dates the loss of the coast to the war of 1879 to 1884, because the Bolivian truce came a year after Peru's peace. That 1884 truce gave Chile the whole Bolivian coast, and a treaty of 1904 made it permanent in exchange for a railway from La Paz to the port of Arica and free transit for Bolivian trade through Chilean ports. Bolivia wrote its claim to sovereign access to the sea into the 2009 constitution, and in 2018 the International Court of Justice rejected its case that Chile was obliged to negotiate.

The east went next. The Worldmark encyclopedia records the cession of the rubber-producing Acre region to Brazil in 1903 in return for an indemnity. Then the Chaco: Bolivia, cut off from the Pacific, looked for an outlet to the Atlantic through the Paraguay River and believed the Chaco Boreal held oil. Fighting with Paraguay that began in 1932 ended in a truce on 12 June 1935. Britannica gives about 100,000 deaths on both sides. A treaty signed in Buenos Aires on 21 July 1938 gave Paraguay most of the disputed region and Bolivia a corridor to the Paraguay River, and the two states settled the border in April 2009.

In the interval silver revived and then gave way to tin, which by the early twentieth century was the main source of wealth. After a civil war in 1898, Britannica records, Sucre kept the title of capital in law while the executive and legislature moved to La Paz, the arrangement that still holds.

What the revolution of April changed

The Chaco defeat discredited the governing class that had led it. Military governments in 1936 and 1937 took over Standard Oil's Bolivian properties, in 1936 by Wikipedia's dating and in 1937 by the Worldmark encyclopedia's, and created the state oil company YPFB. A constitution of 1938 guaranteed the right of labour to organise. In 1942 troops fired on striking tin workers at Catavi. The Nationalist Revolutionary Movement, the MNR, founded in 1941, appeared to win the presidential election of 1951, but the outgoing president handed power to a military junta instead.

On 9 April 1952 the MNR took power by force, with police units mobilised by the interior minister. On 24 June 1952 it gave the vote to the illiterate, to Indigenous people and to women, and the electorate grew from 205,000 people, 6.6% of the population, in 1951 to 1,125,000, or 33.8%, in 1956. The mines of the three tin companies of Patiño, Aramayo and Hochschild were nationalised, an agrarian reform followed in 1953, and between April 1952 and January 1953 the army was cut from about 20,000 men to 5,000 and replaced in part by worker and peasant militias.

Why the army came back

The MNR split over its own succession. In November 1964 the vice-president, General René Barrientos, overthrew Víctor Paz Estenssoro at the start of his third term, and the military governed for most of the following eighteen years. In 1967 the army captured and killed Ernesto "Che" Guevara, who had led a guerrilla band in the south-east. Colonel Hugo Banzer took power in a three-day coup in August 1971 and in November 1974 abolished the political parties. Elections in 1978, 1979 and 1980 produced no clear result, and in July 1980 General Luis García Meza seized power; the Worldmark encyclopedia records arbitrary arrests and torture under his government and suspicions of involvement in the cocaine trade. He was removed in August 1981.

How hyperinflation and gas reshaped politics

Congress chose Hernán Siles Zuazo as president in October 1982, and the economy came apart under him. The annual rate of inflation is given as 24,000% in Wikipedia's history of the country and as 14,000% in August 1985 in the Worldmark encyclopedia. Paz Estenssoro, returned to office in 1985, abandoned controlled exchange rates, abolished price controls and tightened monetary and wage policy. The tin price collapsed in October 1985, and more than 20,000 miners were laid off from the state mining company.

Power then changed hands by election. Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada's government from 1993 sold 50% stakes and management control of state companies, YPFB among them, to private investors. Protests against the privatisation of Cochabamba's water supply in the first months of 2000 ended with its reversal on 10 April 2000. A dispute over how natural gas should be exported, and through which country, brought strikes and blockades from September 2003. Sánchez de Lozada resigned that October, and his successor Carlos Mesa resigned on 9 June 2005.

Evo Morales, a leader of the coca growers' unions in the Chapare and founder of the Movement for Socialism, the MAS, won the election of December 2005 with 53.7% of the vote by the Worldmark count and 54% by Britannica's. He was the first president of Indigenous descent. On 1 May 2006 troops occupied the gas fields as the government took majority control of them. Four eastern departments approved autonomy statutes by referendum in May 2008, and a new constitution was approved by referendum in January 2009, renaming the state the Plurinational State of Bolivia.

Why the end of the Morales years is disputed

The 2009 constitution limited a president to two consecutive terms. A constitutional court ruling of April 2013 allowed Morales a third because his first term predated the charter, and in February 2016 voters rejected a change permitting a fourth, by about 51% to 49% according to Britannica. In November 2017 the constitutional court removed term limits altogether.

At the election of 20 October 2019, Britannica records, about 80% of votes counted on election night gave Morales about 45% and Carlos Mesa about 38%, which pointed to a run-off. A roughly 24-hour pause in the quick count followed, and the final official result was 47.08% against 36.51%, just over the ten-point margin that wins in the first round. Protests and strikes followed. On 10 November the Organization of American States, which had observed the election, reported irregularities; the commander of the armed forces asked Morales to resign, and he resigned that day.

Two accounts of what happened have been held since, and this catalogue records both. Morales, his supporters and the governments of Mexico and Nicaragua called it a coup, a reading Britannica records Morales making as he left office. The Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington argued that Morales had very probably reached the required margin and that the OAS analysis contained a coding error; the OAS stood by its findings, and European Union observers reported similar irregularities. Others, Wikipedia records, pointed out that the MAS kept its majority in both chambers throughout the interim government, which they argued is not the outcome of a coup. Security forces killed at least 19 pro-Morales protesters at Senkata and Sacaba in November 2019.

The senator Jeanine Áñez became interim president and new elections in October 2020 returned the MAS candidate, Luis Arce. Áñez was arrested in March 2021 and sentenced to ten years; the supreme court overturned the sentence and she was freed on 6 November 2025. The run-off of October 2025 was won by a candidate from outside the MAS, ending its period in government.