José Ballivián was born in La Paz in 1805, and came from an upper-class family, his uncle being Sebastián de Segurola, the royal official who led the suppression of the Tupac Amaru rebellion. But he himself was relatively uneducated, having entered into a military career at the age of twelve. An important leader in the independence armies, he was to rise to the highest ranks in the armies of Santa Cruz. Although much involved in the complex political intrigues before coming to power, the Ballivián era from 1841 to the end of 1847 was a calm period of rule for Bolivia and is considered the last stable regime of the early caudillo period. Under Ballivián, Congress was active, and many able civilians came into the central government. Slowly, population and government income began to rise as the nation no longer was involved in major international conflicts.

The forced resignation of the last military junta in September 1982, and the decision to recall the Congress that was elected in 1980, finally brought an end to the era of military authoritarian regimes in Bolivia. This reconstituted Congress immediately elected Hernán Siles Zuazo to the presidency in August 1982. In one stroke, the democratic political system was revived. On the left was Siles Zuazo, the leader of the reconstituted progressive wing of the MNR, who was allied with traditional labor leaders of the COB, newer peasant leaders, various parties of the left, and the important MIR group of radical intellectuals led by Jaime Paz Zamora, who became his vice president. To the right and center were the parties that had run in the original 1979 and 1980 elections, all now well-developed political forces that would dominate the national political scene for the next decade. In the center was the historic MNR – led by Víctor Paz Estenssoro – which incorporated both the existing center and right of the party, and a group of older Indian leaders who, although they had become independent of the MNR, still gave strong support to Paz Estenssoro. Finally there was the ADN (Acción Democrática Nacionalista), the party founded by Banzer at the end of his military rule, which he expanded in April 1979 to include elements of the old Falange as well as the reconstituted PIR. To the surprise of many, this party proved more forceful than expected and not only legitimated Hugo Banzer as a powerful civilian leader but also gained the support of the new economic elites, such as the private mining entrepreneurs and large-scale farmers of Santa Cruz, as well as many of the highly trained technocrats who had emerged in the twenty-five years since the National Revolution. Banzer managed to distance himself from the military juntas of the 1979–82 period and consistently supported democratic processes, thus becoming a pillar of the civilian political system. The military interregnum had delayed the emergence of a younger civilian political leadership and thus provided one last chance for the old leaders of the National Revolution to rule. While the leadership in the first part of the 1980s was from the 1950s, by the second part of the decade a new circle of younger politicians had begun to take over the national political scene. It also led to a third generation of political leaders who would emerge in the next century with much higher participation from indigenous and mestizo leadership and ever more popular movements. Thus, 1982 marked the beginning of one of the longest periods of political stability and democratic participation in the history of the nation.

With the peaking of silver production by the middle decades of the seventeenth century, both at Oruro and Potosí, and its subsequent secular decline, a fundamental shift in the economic space and social organization began to occur within Upper Peru, the American region most profoundly affected by the so-called seventeenth-century crisis. The most immediate impact of the precipitous decline in silver output over the next hundred years was a steady fall in the population of most of the region’s urban centers. This in turn would lead to a major retrenchment in the regional economy and affect institutions such as the hacienda and the free community. In imperial terms, the importance of Upper Peru now began to fade. By the end of the century, Mexico surpassed total Andean mining production and became as well the major source of American tax income for Spain. By the last quarter of the seventeenth century, Peru and the Charcas region had ceased exporting surplus revenues to the metropolis and were no longer to be the center of Spain’s New World empire.

The year 1880 marked a major turning point in Bolivian history. To contemporaries, the most dramatic event of this year was the utter defeat of Bolivian arms at the hands of the Chilean invaders and the loss of its entire coastal territory in the War of the Pacific. Less dramatic but equally important was the establishment of a new government to replace the previous caudillo regime. Although the replacement of governments by military coups was a common feature of political life in the republic since its creation fifty-five years previously, the new regime did in fact mark a fundamental change in national political development. It represented the first viable republican government of a civilian oligarchic nature, which would become the norm of political life until 1934. Although the loss of its direct access to the sea would remain the most intransigent of Bolivia’s international problems from 1880 to the present day, the establishment of a modern political party system and a civilian-dominated government would cause long-term political, economic, and eventually even social and cultural changes within Bolivian society, changes that were profoundly to shape its historical evolution.

Bolivian society evolved in a highly complex and unusual environment. Although situated in tropical latitudes, it was in fact an unusual high altitude society only comparable to those few similar societies found in the Himalayas. From the earliest human settlement to the present day, a good part of its people have lived at altitudes over five thousand feet above sea level, with the majority of the population and its most advanced cultures being found at twelve thousand feet or above. While not a totally prohibitive environment, the highlands have poorer soils and much colder and drier climates, and face constraints that do not hinder the lowlands. This ecology required the domestication of plants and animals unique to the highlands and even had a dramatic impact on human physiology, as highland populations were forced to adapt to the limited supply of oxygen and quite different degrees of air pressure.

The Iberian Peninsula in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was the leader of European expansion on a global scale. The Portuguese initiated European world domination through the conquest of the oceanic trade routes of Africa and Asia. And Spain – and more specifically the Castillian kingdom within the Spanish state – undertook the conquest and settlement of vast territories of the Western hemisphere. America, unlike Africa and Asia, was unknown and unintegrated into the Eurasian world prior to the fifteenth century. By its American conquest, Spain provided a whole new arena for exclusive European settlement and development that in turn gave Europe a decided advantage in its race for world influence. Thus, the Castillian conquest of the lands of America, along with the Portuguese conquest of the international sea lanes, finally tipped the balance of world economic power to Europe and helped prepare the way for its ultimate industrial domination as well. The conquest of America in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century was thus crucial in changing the relative importance of Europe in the world, and in defining a new world historical era.

The shock of the election of 2002 followed by the massive, violent, and ever more effective blockades by mestizos and indigenous groups created the backdrop for the emergence of the first coherent and powerful mass political party led by mestizo and indigenous leaders. By the time of the presidential election of December 2005, most of the traditional parties had been replaced by a new non-indigenous party known as Podemos, while Morales and his MAS party emerged as the single most important party in the country. In December 2005, the MAS and the MIP, the other indigenous party, received 1.6 million votes of the 2.9 million cast, or 56 percent of the total. Thus in just three short years all the traditional parties lost their importance. Of the new groups to emerge in this period, the most important was the MAS, led by Evo Morales, which finally came to power in the presidential election of 2005 and would remain the nation’s most powerful party for the next fifteen years. Moreover, although mestizos had been presidents of Bolivia, the most famous being Andrés de Santa Cruz y Calahumana, this was the first time in republican history that a president was elected who defined himself as an indigenous person.

The nineteenth century in Upper Peru began with a severe long-term depression that had a profound effect on its literate urban populations and its mining export economy. This decline and the serious agricultural crises that erupted in the countryside formed a crucial background to the region’s response to the collapse of the imperial government in Madrid. In late 1806 and all of 1807, Napoleon’s armies slowly invaded Spain and eventually forced the abdication of the Bourbon monarchy. In May 1808, the Madrid populace rose up in revolt against the new French-controlled Spanish government, and the rebels eventually established a formal resistance structure that proclaimed itself to be the legitimate government of the Bourbons. Known as the Junta Central, and controlling part of southern Spain, the rebel regime claimed legitimacy, despite the abdication of Ferdinand VII, and demanded loyalty from the colonial viceroyalties. Such a situation of divided government had occurred once before in imperial history at the very beginning of the eighteenth century, when the Bourbons and Habsburgs had contended for control over Spain and fought a long and bitter conflict for the monarchy on Spanish soil. But at that time the colonies were passive and allowed all basic decisions about the fate of Spain and the empire to be made in Europe.

Bolivia in 1950 was still a predominantly rural society, the majority of whose population was only marginally integrated into the national economy. Of all economically active persons registered in the census of 1950, fully 72 percent were engaged in agriculture and allied industries. Yet this workforce only produced some 33 percent of the gross national product, a discrepancy that clearly indicates the serious economic retardation of this sector. But since 1900, Bolivian society had experienced marked changes in its social composition. The urban population (those living in cities or towns of five thousand or more) had risen from 14 percent to 23 percent of the national population, and in each of the departments of the country, the major urban centers had grown faster than the department as a whole. The level of literacy and the number of children attending school also increased in the same period, especially after the major investments in education carried out by the post-Chaco regimes. Between 1900 and 1950 literates rose from 17 percent of the population to 31 percent, and the pre-university student population went from some 23,000 to 139,000, or from 1 to 5 percent of the total population. At the top, however, much less change had occurred, and while the number of university students by 1951 had reached twelve thousand, only 132 persons in the entire country had graduated with postsecondary degrees in that year.

The Chaco War began on 18 July 1932, when Salamanca announced to the startled nation that the Paraguayan forces had seized a Bolivian fort in the Chaco. That this fort was in reality a Paraguayan one that had been seized by the Bolivians at the end of May was ignored. Salamanca ordered a major offensive that night and carried out a state of siege. At this point, the Bolivian General Staff refused to endorse Salamanca’s war plans. It claimed that the army was unprepared for a major assault, and considered the escalation of the conflict to be out of all proportion to the incident. So intense was the debate between the general staff and the president that Salamanca was finally forced to acknowledge full responsibility for all his decisions relating to the initiation of the conflict in a formal written document. Having thus absolved itself from any responsibility for the assault and subsequent actions, the general staff declared these actions were against the national interests, but agreed to carry out Salamanca’s decisions.