The history of Bolivia

Bolivia joins the high plateau of the Andes, the Altiplano, to the valleys of the eastern slopes and the vast lowlands of the Amazon and the Chaco. On the Altiplano the city of Tiwanaku led one of the great early states of the Americas, followed by Aymara kingdoms and then by the Inca. After the Spanish conquest the silver of Potosí, mined largely through the forced labour of Indigenous people, helped finance the Spanish Empire for two centuries. Independent since 1825, Bolivia lost its coast to Chile and much of its other territory to its neighbours, lived through some of the most frequent changes of government in Latin America, and in 1952 underwent one of the region's great social revolutions. Since the 2000s its Indigenous majority has moved to the centre of national politics.

People lived in the Bolivian highlands by the end of the last Ice Age, hunting vicuña and guanaco on the cold plateau around Lake Titicaca. Over thousands of years they domesticated the llama and alpaca and learned to grow potatoes, quinoa and other crops able to survive at almost 4,000 metres, preserving them by freeze-drying in the cold nights. Farming villages appeared from about 1500 BCE, and on the southern shore of the lake the Chiripa culture built sunken temple courts that foreshadowed later Andean religious architecture.

The lowlands, once imagined as empty forest, had their own complex societies. In the seasonally flooded savannas of the Llanos de Moxos, in what is now the Beni, people raised fields above the floodwaters, dug fish weirs and canals, and built earthen causeways and mounds. Laser surveys published in 2022 revealed large planned settlements of the Casarabe culture, which flourished there between roughly 500 and 1400 CE. Further south and east, the Chiquitano, Guaraní and many other peoples farmed and hunted in the forests and the dry Chaco.

Around 500 CE the city of Tiwanaku, just south of Lake Titicaca, grew into the capital of the most influential state of the southern Andes. Its builders raised the stepped platform of the Akapana, the walled court of the Kalasasaya with its carved Gateway of the Sun, and the precisely cut stone blocks of Pumapunku. Tiwanaku's power rested on herding, trade and raised-field farming beside the lake, where crops grew on platforms separated by water channels that protected them from frost. Caravans of llamas linked the city with colonies and allies in the warm valleys to the east and the coast of what are now Peru and Chile, carrying maize, coca, obsidian and fine pottery decorated with the figure of a staff-bearing god.

Archaeologists still debate whether Tiwanaku was an empire built by conquest or a religious and trading centre whose influence spread largely through colonisation and prestige. It coexisted with the Wari culture to the north, which shared much of its iconography. Tiwanaku declined after about 1000 CE and was largely abandoned by the twelfth century, probably in part because of a long drought that ruined the raised fields.

After Tiwanaku's fall the highlands were divided among Aymara-speaking kingdoms such as the Colla and Lupaca around the lake, and the Pacajes, Charcas and others further south. They lived in fortified hilltop settlements and buried their nobles in tall stone or adobe towers called chullpas. Their basic unit was the ayllu, a kin group that held land in common and shared out labour. Like Tiwanaku before them, the kingdoms kept colonies in different ecological zones, from the high puna to the warm valleys, so that each community could obtain both highland and lowland products.

In the fifteenth century the Quechua-speaking Inca of Cusco conquered the Aymara kingdoms, a process usually dated to the reigns of Pachacuti and his son Topa Inca Yupanqui. The highlands became Kollasuyo, the southern quarter of the Inca Empire. The Inca left local lords in place under their own governors, resettled loyal colonists among conquered peoples, and spread the Quechua language, which still dominates the valleys around Cochabamba and Potosí, while Aymara remained the language of the Altiplano. Subjects owed the state labour in rotation, called the mit'a, on farms, roads, in the army and in mines. The Inca never subdued the peoples of the eastern lowlands, and the Guaraní of the south-eastern foothills, known to their enemies as Chiriguanos, raided Inca frontier forts.

Soon after the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire by Francisco Pizarro, his brothers led expeditions south. In 1538 the Spanish founded La Plata, also called Chuquisaca and today Sucre, in the region they called Charcas or Upper Peru, and in 1548 Alonso de Mendoza founded La Paz on the route between Potosí and Cusco. In 1559 an audiencia, a high court with governing powers, was set up at La Plata, under the Viceroyalty of Peru in Lima. In the east, Santa Cruz de la Sierra was founded in 1561.

In 1545 silver was found in the Cerro Rico, the Rich Hill, of Potosí. A mining town grew at more than 4,000 metres, and by the early seventeenth century Potosí had perhaps 160,000 inhabitants, as many as any city in Europe of the time. Its silver flowed to Seville and on to the rest of the world, financing the wars of Philip II of Spain and his successors and feeding the trade with China through Manila. Potosí's wealth became proverbial in Spanish.

That wealth rested on Indigenous labour. As epidemics of smallpox and other diseases brought by the Columbian exchange reduced the population, and the rich surface ores ran out, the viceroy Francisco de Toledo in the 1570s transformed the Inca labour draft into the colonial mita. Communities in some sixteen highland provinces had to send a share of their adult men each year to work in the mines and refineries of Potosí, around 13,000 at a time in the system's early decades, in return for wages far below what free workers earned. Toledo also introduced the refining of silver with mercury, which came from Huancavelica in Peru and poisoned many of those who handled it. Workers carried ore up hundreds of metres of shafts by ladder, and accidents, lung disease and exhaustion killed many. Rather than serve, many families fled their home communities, and others paid to buy their men out of the draft. The mita lasted until the end of Spanish rule, and economists have traced lower living standards in the former mita districts into the present day. Toledo also forced scattered highland communities into planned towns, the reducciones, to make the collection of tribute and labour easier.

Upper Peru's society was steeply unequal. A small Spanish and creole elite controlled mines, haciendas and offices, while the Indigenous majority paid tribute and supplied labour, and a growing mestizo population filled the towns. La Plata became a centre of the church and law, with a university founded in 1624, and Catholic Christianity mixed in highland villages with older devotions to the earth and the mountains. In the eastern lowlands Jesuit missionaries founded mission towns among the Moxos and Chiquitos peoples, whose churches still stand. In 1776 Upper Peru was transferred to the new Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, governed from Buenos Aires.

Abuses such as the forced sale of goods to Indigenous communities by local officials provoked a series of revolts that culminated in 1780 and 1781. Tomás Katari led a rising in Chayanta, north of Potosí, while in Peru Túpac Amaru II launched the great rebellion that bears his name. On the Altiplano the Aymara leader Julián Apaza, who took the name Túpac Katari, and his wife Bartolina Sisa besieged La Paz for months in 1781. Thousands died in the city from hunger. Túpac Katari was betrayed and executed in November 1781 by being torn apart by horses, and Bartolina Sisa was executed the following year. Both are now national heroes, and Bolivian Indigenous movements have taken Katari's name.

When the Napoleonic Wars toppled the Spanish king, Upper Peru produced some of the first challenges to Spanish rule in South America. On 25 May 1809 a revolt in Chuquisaca deposed the president of the audiencia, and on 16 July a junta in La Paz under Pedro Domingo Murillo proclaimed self-government. Both were crushed by troops from Peru, and Murillo was hanged in 1810. Over the next fifteen years Upper Peru was a battlefield of the Spanish American wars of independence. Armies from Buenos Aires were defeated there in 1811, 1813 and 1815, while local guerrilla bands, the republiquetas, kept up the fight in the countryside. Among their leaders was Juana Azurduy, who commanded troops alongside her husband.

The end came from the north. After Simón Bolívar and Antonio José de Sucre destroyed the royalist army in Peru at Ayacucho in December 1824, Sucre marched into Upper Peru, and the last royalist force was defeated at Tumusla in April 1825. An assembly at Chuquisaca declared independence on 6 August 1825 rather than joining Peru or Argentina, and named the new republic after Bolívar. Bolívar governed briefly and wrote its first constitution, and Sucre became its first elected president.

The new state was poor. The mines were flooded and abandoned, and for decades the government depended on the tribute still paid by Indigenous communities. Andrés de Santa Cruz, president from 1829 to 1839, built a strong administration and in 1836 united Bolivia with Peru in the Peru-Bolivian Confederation. Chile and Argentina went to war against it, and Chilean troops defeated it at Yungay in 1839. There followed decades of rule by military caudillos, among them Mariano Melgarejo, who in the 1860s seized communal lands from Indigenous communities and sold territory to Brazil.

Silver mining revived from the 1860s, and nitrate and guano deposits in the Atacama Desert on Bolivia's Pacific coast attracted Chilean and British companies. When Bolivia raised a tax on a Chilean nitrate company in 1878, Chile occupied the port of Antofagasta in February 1879, starting the War of the Pacific. Bolivia and its ally Peru were defeated, and Bolivia lost its entire coastline, confirmed by treaty in 1904. The loss of the sea remains a national grievance, and in 2018 the International Court of Justice ruled that Chile was not obliged to negotiate a sovereign outlet. In 1903 Bolivia also ceded the rubber-rich Acre region to Brazil after a revolt by Brazilian settlers.

In the 1899 Federal War, liberals based in La Paz defeated the conservatives of Sucre with the help of Aymara forces under Pablo Zárate Willka, who then pursued his own aims of land and autonomy and was crushed by his former allies. The seat of government moved to La Paz, while Sucre remained the constitutional capital. In the south-east the last independent Guaraní were defeated at Kuruyuki in 1892.

In the early twentieth century tin replaced silver as Bolivia's main export, and a handful of mining magnates, above all Simón Patiño, became some of the richest men in the world while miners worked in harsh conditions. Haciendas continued to swallow Indigenous communal lands, and most rural people worked for landowners under labour obligations, unable to vote because of literacy requirements.

In 1932 a border dispute over the Chaco Boreal, a dry lowland believed to hold oil, led to war with Paraguay. Bolivian soldiers, many of them highland Indigenous conscripts sent to an unfamiliar, waterless land, suffered heavy defeats, and when the fighting ended in 1935 Paraguay held most of the disputed territory. Around 100,000 soldiers died on both sides, many from thirst and disease. The disaster discredited the old order. Military reformers nationalised Standard Oil's holdings in 1937, and a new generation of officers, intellectuals and union leaders, among them the founders of the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR), demanded change. In 1942 troops killed striking miners at Catavi, and in 1945 the government of Gualberto Villarroel held the first national Indigenous congress before he was lynched by a crowd in La Paz in 1946.

The MNR won the 1951 election, but the army prevented it from taking office. On 9 April 1952 an uprising of MNR militants, armed miners and the police defeated the army after three days of fighting in La Paz, and Víctor Paz Estenssoro returned from exile as president. The National Revolution abolished literacy requirements for voting, giving the vote to the Indigenous majority and to women, and in October 1952 it nationalised the mines of the three great tin companies under a state corporation, COMIBOL. In the countryside peasants seized haciendas, and the agrarian reform of 1953 abolished servile labour and distributed land to rural communities. The army was purged and reduced, and armed militias of miners and peasants became a power in their own right.

The revolution's governments, led by Paz Estenssoro and Hernán Siles Zuazo, came to depend on aid from the United States, and inflation and conflicts with the miners' unions divided the MNR. In 1964 the air force general René Barrientos overthrew Paz Estenssoro, and military rule lasted, with brief interruptions, until 1982. In 1967 Che Guevara tried to start a guerrilla war in the south-east, but found little support among local peasants, and he was captured and executed by the Bolivian army, with American advisers involved, in October. During the Cold War the dictatorship of Hugo Banzer from 1971 to 1978 jailed and exiled opponents, and in 1980 General Luis García Meza seized power in a coup backed by cocaine traffickers, which became known as the cocaine coup.

Civilian rule returned in 1982 with Siles Zuazo as president, but debt and the collapse of state finances produced hyperinflation that reached an annual rate above 20,000 per cent in 1985. Paz Estenssoro, elected again that year, imposed a drastic stabilisation programme. When world tin prices crashed in 1985, COMIBOL closed most of its mines, and tens of thousands of miners lost their jobs, many moving to the coca-growing Chapare region or to El Alto above La Paz. The coca growers' unions, resisting US-backed eradication campaigns, became a new political force. In 1993 Víctor Hugo Cárdenas, an Aymara, became the first Indigenous vice-president, under President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, whose government decentralised power to municipalities and privatised state companies.

Opposition to privatisation exploded in 2000 in the Cochabamba Water War, when protests forced the cancellation of a contract that had handed the city's water supply to a consortium led by the American firm Bechtel. In 2003 the Gas War over plans to export natural gas through Chile ended with security forces killing dozens of protesters in El Alto and the resignation of Sánchez de Lozada. His successor Carlos Mesa also resigned in 2005.

In December 2005 Evo Morales, an Aymara former coca grower and leader of the Movement for Socialism (MAS), won the presidency with an outright majority, the first Indigenous head of state in the country's history. His government took control of the gas industry in 2006 and used the revenues from high commodity prices to fund social programmes. Poverty fell steeply and the economy grew strongly for more than a decade. A new constitution, approved by referendum in 2009, renamed the country the Plurinational State of Bolivia, recognised 36 Indigenous languages alongside Spanish, and gave Indigenous peoples rights to self-government. The changes were bitterly resisted in the eastern lowland departments around Santa Cruz.

Morales was re-elected in 2009 and 2014. In 2016 voters narrowly rejected a referendum to allow him another term, but the Constitutional Court later ruled that he could run regardless. In the October 2019 election the interruption of the preliminary count, followed by official results giving Morales just enough of a lead to avoid a run-off, set off nationwide protests. An Organisation of American States audit reported serious irregularities, findings that some independent researchers later challenged. After the police mutinied and the army commander suggested he step down, Morales resigned on 10 November 2019 and left for Mexico. His supporters and several foreign governments called his removal a coup, while his opponents saw it as a popular uprising against electoral fraud. The senator Jeanine Áñez became interim president, and security forces killed around twenty protesters at Sacaba and Senkata that November.

Fresh elections in October 2020 were won decisively by the MAS candidate Luis Arce, Morales's former economy minister, with 55 per cent of the vote. In 2021 Áñez was arrested and later sentenced to prison for her role in the events of 2019; in November 2025 the Supreme Court overturned her sentence and she was released. Arce's presidency was marked by a deepening economic crisis, as gas output fell, foreign currency reserves ran low and fuel shortages spread, and by a bitter split between his supporters and those of Morales within the MAS. On 26 June 2024 the army commander Juan José Zúñiga led troops and armoured vehicles to the presidential palace in La Paz in a failed coup attempt that lasted a few hours before he was arrested. In 2024 and 2025 the courts and electoral authorities barred Morales from running again.

In the general election of August 2025 the MAS collapsed. The senator Rodrigo Paz of the Christian Democratic Party, son of the former president Jaime Paz Zamora, defeated the former president Jorge Quiroga in a run-off in October with 55 per cent of the vote and took office on 8 November 2025, facing the country's worst economic crisis in four decades. Arce was arrested on corruption charges in December 2025. In 2026 Paz's alliance won only two of nine governorships in regional elections, and protests and road blockades against fuel subsidy cuts and inflation paralysed much of the country, leading him to declare a 90-day state of emergency in June.