Bolivia: 20th Century Developments

In the early twentieth century, Bolivia's politics were dominated by a small elite tied to the tin-mining industry, and electoral participation remained extremely limited under a series of nominally liberal but largely undemocratic governments. Organized labor movements expanded during the 1920s but faced repeated government crackdowns, and the disastrous Chaco War against Paraguay from 1932 to 1935 cost Bolivia roughly a fifth of its territory, leaving a generation of veterans disillusioned with the traditional political order.

That disillusionment, often described as the outlook of the Chaco Generation, fed into the founding of the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario in 1941 under Víctor Paz Estenssoro, which built close ties to mineworkers' unions through the following decade. These currents culminated in the National Revolution of 1952, which introduced universal suffrage, nationalized the country's major tin mines, and launched a sweeping agrarian reform that redistributed land to indigenous and peasant farmers beginning in 1953.

The revolutionary government grew increasingly authoritarian over the following twelve years, and in 1964 the military seized power, ushering in two decades of mostly military rule marked by efforts to roll back the earlier reforms. Bolivia did not return to sustained civilian democracy until the early 1980s, with Paz Estenssoro himself returning to the presidency in 1985 to confront a severe economic crisis inherited from the military era.