Andean silver and Tiwanaku ghosts still shape plurinational Bolivia
Bolivia, officially the Plurinational State, is South America's fifth-largest country at 1,098,581 square kilometres and one of only two landlocked nations in the Americas. Andean highlands fill the west and tropical lowlands the east, and Potosí's silver once helped bankroll the Spanish Empire.
Its landscapes range from the Amazonian plain and Gran Chaco to temperate valleys, the Altiplano and snow-capped peaks, and it shares part of the Pantanal, the world's largest tropical wetland. About a third of the country lies in the Andes, and the split between highlands and lowlands shows up in cultural and economic contrasts captured by the terms colla and camba. The unitary state has nine departments and remains the second-poorest country in South America, though it has cut poverty sharply.
Tiwanaku, in western Bolivia, began as a farming village around 1500 BC and grew into an urban power between AD 600 and 800, expanding through colonies, trade deals and state cults rather than conquest. Satellite mapping of its raised fields in 1996 suggested they could have fed hundreds of thousands of people. As rainfall declined its elites lost power, and it vanished around AD 1000. The Inca pushed into the Bolivian Andes between 1438 and 1527, while Amazonian and Guaraní peoples held the lowlands.
Spain governed the region as Charcas from Chuquisaca, today's Sucre. Potosí, founded as a mining town in 1545, became the largest city in the New World with over 150,000 people, its silver dug by native labourers under the brutal mita draft. Túpac Katari besieged La Paz in 1781. Uprisings in Sucre and La Paz in 1809 opened sixteen years of war, and on 6 August 1825 the republic was proclaimed and named for Simón Bolívar; if Rome came from Romulus, one congressman argued, Bolivia should come from Bolívar.
Bolivia later lost outlying territory to its neighbours, including Acre to Brazil after 1899–1903. Land and mine owners ruled until the 1952 National Revolution brought universal suffrage, nationalised tin mining and began a limited land reform. Military and civilian governments alternated until the last unelected military ruler left in 1982, and a 2009 constitution adopted the name Plurinational State to reflect indigenous peoples' strengthened rights.
Source: Bolivia
