Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
twice laid siege to La Paz, though the city survived and held out until it was relieved by the
army sent from
Buenos Aires
that finally crushed the rebellion.
Independence
By the time Bolivia's independence from Spain was finally secured in 1825 (see section on
Argentina attacks
)
, La Paz was the biggest city in the country, with a population of forty
thousand. Though
Sucre
remained the capital, La Paz was increasingly the focus of the new
republic's turbulent political life. In 1899 the growing rivalry between the two cities was re-
solved in a short but bloody
civil war
that left La Paz as the seat of government, home to the
president and the congress, and the capital in all but name.
The twentieth century
The first half of the twentieth century saw La Paz's population grow to over three hundred
thousand.In1952LaPazwasthesceneofthefiercestreetfightingthatusheredinthe
revolu-
tion
led by the MNR, or
Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario
.
The sweeping changes
that followed further fuelled the city's growth as the Aymara population of the Altiplano,
released from servitude by the
Agrarian reform
, migrated en masse to the metropolis. This
migration from the countryside profoundly changed the character of La Paz, quadrupling its
population to over a million and transforming it into a predominantly Aymara city, albeit still
ruled by a wealthy European-descended minority.
The twenty-first century
While this ethnic and geographical gulf is hardly without precedent in Latin America, age-
old tensions reached a boiling point over the first half of the decade, with violent civil dis-
turbances toppling a series of neo-liberal presidents. Plans to export natural gas via a Chilean
pipeline prompted the first
"gas war"
in 2003 (see the section
A New Revolution
)
. Further
unrest over the unresolved gas issue erupted in May and June 2005 with hundreds of thou-
sandsofindigenousprotestorsmassinginLaPaz,effectivelycuttingoffthecityandeffecting
the resignation of then-president
Carlos Mesa
.
The reign of Evo Morales
With the 2005 election of Bolivia's first (and it's looking increasingly likely, most enduring)
indigenous president,
Evo Morales
, the Aymara finally achieved real political power and the
traditional campesinos vs the state ferment was superseded, to some extent, by a wider geo-
political cultural spat between the radical Altiplano and the right-wing lowland departments
of Beni, Pando, Santa Cruz and Tarija. Yet while much of the violence and unrest has taken
place far from the capital,
demonstrations
by discontented miners, pensioners, fuel protest-
ors, hunger strikers in the main Post Office and indeed anyone at all who feels hard done by,
underlines the fact that La Paz, in its strategic relation to El Alto and the Highland Aymara
communities, remains a vital crucible for popular protest.
