Bolivia:
A Long Tradition of Workers’ Struggles

Oct 27, 2025

This article is translated from the October 24 issue, #2986 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.

Bolivia is without a doubt one of the Latin American countries where the working class and the poor have shown the most combativeness against the state and capitalist powers.

In the 1950s, tin miners organized in combative unions that shook the government—sometimes with dynamite—and ultimately imposed nationalization of mines owned by imperialist corporations, especially American ones. This respite was short-lived because production of tin, the country’s main resource, soon collapsed.

Bolivia experienced a long period of military dictatorship from 1964 to 1982 with the blessing of the U.S. government, Latin America’s master. But powerful and radical protest arose in the 2000s, both against the large landowners who own 87% of the land and against the bourgeois layers linked to imperialism.

This protest developed in parallel in the country’s second largest city, Cochabamba, in 2000, and in 2003, in the department of the capital La Paz, which has a population of nearly three million, compared to 12.5 million nationwide. The power and radicalization of the mobilization against American and French corporations, called “the battle for water,” forced them to withdraw from the country. Former peasant leader Evo Morales and his party, Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), were elected to lead the country on the basis of these mobilizations and this radicalization.

But capitalism and imperialism never stopped exerting their pressure. Bolivia turns out to have a lot of rare earth minerals. Today, mining of them makes major international companies salivate.

Like other countries, Bolivia is subject to the world market and its rules. The point is not to rant about what Morales could have done but didn’t. No one can defeat these forces without revolutionizing the world. The exploited masses of Bolivia must join forces in this fight with those of the rest of the world.