Bolivia

From Tiwanaku on the shores of Lake Titicaca and the Inca highlands to the silver mountain of Potosi that bankrolled an empire, the revolt of Tupac Katari, independence in 1825 named for Simon Bolivar, the loss of the sea to Chile, the National Revolution of 1952, and the indigenous-majority politics of the Morales era and after.

Bolivia's history reaches back to Tiwanaku, the great pre-Hispanic civilisation that flourished near Lake Titicaca between roughly 500 and 900 CE, and to the Aymara lordships and the Inca empire that followed. After the Spanish conquest, the silver of Cerro Rico at Potosi made Upper Peru one of the richest centres of the Spanish empire, worked by mitayos, indigenous men compelled under the mita to labour in mines so deadly the mountain was called the one that eats men. On 6 August 1825 a congress at Chuquisaca proclaimed an independent republic, named Bolivia in honour of Simon Bolivar, with Antonio Jose de Sucre as its first president. The defeat of Bolivia in the War of the Pacific (1879-1883) cost it the Pacific coast and left it landlocked, while the lost Chaco War with Paraguay (1932-1935) helped trigger the National Revolution of 1952; after decades of military rule, democracy returned in 1982, and in 2006 Evo Morales became Bolivia's first indigenous president, beginning an era of indigenous-majority politics that endured through his disputed 2019 election and resignation, the return of the MAS, and the turn to the centre-right in 2025.