High commodity prices have led to the proliferation of informal gold mining in the Andes. Despite their limited financial capacity, informal gold miners have proved capable of influencing national-level policy outcomes. Why are they able to do so? This study puts forward a comparative study of Bolivia, where informal miners have been politically incorporated, and Peru, where they have been traditionally excluded. It shows how, despite the very different institutional contexts, informal miners are similarly capable of leveraging their contribution to the local economy and the fracture between the central state and its peripheral branches to form pressure groups with local authorities. Based on 120 interviews with politicians and leaders from the largest gold-mining communities in Bolivia and Peru, this study contributes to the scholarship on state-society relations, resource politics, and decentralization by outlining the conditions and mechanism through which informal groups contest exclusionary resource governance in fragmented states.

Civil society leaders develop relationships with officials and engage in contentious politics. Some resort to destructive tactics like arson and assault to target the officials they work with. Why do civil society leaders use destructive protest tactics? This article argues that leaders use destructive tactics when both they and officials need clear information and when leaders believe that officials will offer lucrative agreements to stop destructive protests. The research suggests that this dynamic is more likely in weakly institutionalized, highly politicized, and resource-strapped environments. The research supports the argument by process-tracing cases of peaceful and destructive protest by street vendor organizations and officials’ responses in El Alto, Bolivia. The argument and cases suggest that civil society leaders are more likely to target women and other minoritized people because leaders are more likely to underestimate minoritized officials, but that these officials are then more likely to punish the perpetrators.

This article explores the complexity of Indigenous citizenship in contemporary Bolivia through the analysis of a land dispute involving the Indigenous people of Coroma and a neighbouring Indigenous group. The Coromeños understand their rights as stemming from the colonial, republican and plurinational periods: their citizenship is thus described as ‘time-layered’. This study highlights the importance of the image of the state for practices of Indigenous citizenship in Bolivia, in contrast with an understanding based solely on rights of self-government. Furthermore, by comprehending these layers as social memories, the article underlines the importance of conceiving of citizenship as rooted in historical experiences and reproduced by practices of collective memory.

On 20 November 2016, residents of Gran Chaco Province in south-east Bolivia voted by popular referendum to approve a statute that established Gran Chaco as Bolivia's first autonomous region. This article examines regional autonomy in the Chaco as an example of how identities, territory and political power are being remapped at the intersection of an extractivist development model and competing visions of a plurinational state. I chart how regional autonomy, an elite-led project centred on demands for a fixed share of departmental gas royalties, has been institutionalised under the framework of plurinationalism and used to bolster central state power in this gas-rich region. The article considers the historical evolution of this regionalist project, its intersection with broader processes of state formation under the Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement towards Socialism, MAS) government and its implications for the Chaco's Indigenous peoples, who have achieved significant representation within the regional assembly while seeing their own visions of territorial autonomy sidelined by an extractivist development agenda.

International pressure to suppress cocaine trafficking sustained decades of harsh drug laws in Bolivia against cocaleros (coca producers), thus affecting coca production for traditional consumption and for manufacturing illicit cocaine. These harsh drug laws caused social unrest in cocalero communities outside traditional coca zones. President Evo Morales, leader of the Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement toward Socialism, MAS) party, implemented ‘Coca Yes, Cocaine No’ (CYCN), a harm-reduction strategy that authorised ‘non-traditional’ farmers to cultivate legal coca and self-police production. This article compares CYCN outcomes in Bolivia's traditional and non-traditional coca regions and finds that strong cocalero organisations were vital to CYCN success in non-traditional areas. In contrast, organised resistance in traditional zones restricted CYCN success and added to regime instability in the lead-up to Morales’ forced resignation in 2019. Hence, while Morales harnessed state power to change drug policy, he was constrained by the rural grassroots organisations that brought him to power.

Bolivia has disseminated several improved technologies in the rice sector, but the average rice productivity in the country is far below the average trend in Latin America in recent years. Although the economic literature has highlighted the role of agricultural technology adoption in increasing agricultural productivity, gaps remain in understanding how rice growers are deciding to adopt and benefit from available improved rice technologies. Most previous adoption studies have evaluated the uptake of individual technologies without paying attention to the complementarities that alternative improved rice technologies may offer to farmers who face multiple marketing and production needs. This study uses data from a nationally representative sample of Bolivian rice growers to analyze farmers' joint decisions in adopting complementary agricultural technologies controlling for potential correlations across these decisions, as well as the extent of adoption of these practices. Evidence suggests that the decisions on multiple technology adoption are closely related, with common factors affecting both adoption and the extent of adoption. Furthermore, there is a need to better target resource-poor farmers, improve information-diffusion channels on agricultural practices, and better use existing farmers' organizations to enhance rice technology adoption.

The attempt to classify Bolivia under Evo Morales has yielded a bewildering range of regime labels. While most scholars label it a democracy with adjectives, systematic appraisals of the regime have been scant. This article aims fill this gap by providing a more systematic evaluation, putting special emphasis on features of Bolivia’s electoral playing field. It evaluates the slope of key fields of competition (electoral, legislative, judicial, and mass media), finding abundant evidence that all four were substantively slanted in favor of the incumbent. During the MAS reign, political competition was genuine but fundamentally unfree and unfair, because the ruling party benefited from a truncated supply of electoral candidates; much greater access to finance; a partisan electoral management body; supermajorities in the legislature, used to dispense authoritarian legalism; a captured and weaponized judiciary; and a co-opted mass media ecosystem. Contrary to most extant characterizations, the regime is best categorized as competitive authoritarian.

As the Inca Empire expanded across the South American Andes during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries AD, Lake Titicaca became its mythical place of origin and the location of a pilgrimage complex on the Island of the Sun. This complex included an underwater reef where stone boxes containing miniature figurines of gold, silver and shell were submerged as ritual offerings. This article reports a newly discovered stone offering box from a reef close to the lake's north-eastern shore. The location, content and broader socio-cultural context of Inca sacrifices are examined to illuminate the religious and social meaning of underwater ritual offerings at Lake Titicaca.

This article investigates the use of coca by the Bolivian Army during the Chaco War of 1932–35. I present research that reveals the surprising extent to which the Bolivian Army provisioned coca to its soldiers as a substitute for adequate nutrition; as a morale booster; as a stimulant; and as a medicine. The article explores the social and cultural implications of mass coca consumption by Bolivian soldiers, many of whom were mestizos who had never before chewed the leaf. Ultimately, I argue that the pervasiveness of coca within the traumatic popular experience of the Chaco War sowed the seeds of a historic transformation of the politics of coca in Bolivia. The Chaco War initiated a process by which coca in Bolivia was transformed from a neo-colonial marker of the Indian caste to a material and symbolic element of an emergent interethnic working class. Through a comparative analysis of the Bolivian army's use of coca in the Chaco War with the German army's use of methamphetamine during World War II, this article concludes with a consideration of the ways in which the present case study expands our understanding of the crucial but under-studied historical relationship between drugs and warfare.

Cystic echinococcosis (CE) is a zoonotic disease caused by a complex of species known as Echinococcus granulosus sensu lato. CE is endemic in Argentina, Chile, Peru, Uruguay and the South part of Brazil. In contrast, little is known regarding the presence of CE in Bolivia. In this study, 35 cysts isolated from livestock (mostly from the Department of La Paz) and 3 from humans (La Paz, Oruro and Potosi) were genetically characterized analysing the sequence of the cox1 gene (1609 bp). In total, 30 cysts (from La Paz, Cochabamba and Beni) were characterized as E. granulosus sensu stricto (3 fertile and 4 non-fertile cysts from sheep, 8 fertile and 12 non-fertile cysts from cattle and 3 fertile cysts from humans). A detailed analysis of the cox1 haplotypes of E. granulosus s.s. is included. Echinococcus ortleppi (G5) was found in 5 fertile cysts from cattle (from La Paz and Cochabamba). Echinococcus intermedius (G7) was identified in 3 fertile cysts from pigs (from Santa Cruz). Additionally, E. granulosus s.s. was detected in 4 dog faecal samples, while E. ortleppi was present in other two dog faecal samples. The implications of these preliminary results in the future implementation of control measures are discussed.