Bolivia

Bolivia, officially the Plurinational State of Bolivia, is a landlocked country in central South America bordered by Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina, Chile and Peru, spanning an Andean west and tropical lowland east and north across 1,098,581 square kilometers, the fifth-largest country in South America, with a population of 11.4 million as of the 2024 census; La Paz serves as the seat of government while Sucre is the constitutional capital and seat of the judiciary, and Santa Cruz de la Sierra, in the eastern lowlands, is the largest city. Centuries before Spanish colonization the region formed part of the Tiwanaku polity, which collapsed around 1000 AD, and Inca rule began in the western highlands after the Colla-Inca War of the 1440s; Spanish conquistadores took control in the sixteenth century, and Spain built much of its imperial wealth on silver extracted from Cerro Rico in Potosi during the colonial period administered by the Real Audiencia of Charcas. Following an unsuccessful 1809 rebellion in Sucre, sixteen years of fighting led to the establishment of the Republic, named for Simon Bolivar, though Bolivia later lost peripheral territories including the Acre territory to Brazil and its Pacific coastal region to Chile in 1879. An oligarchy of landowning and mining interests ruled Bolivia until the 1952 Bolivian National Revolution established universal suffrage, nationalized tin mining and enacted limited land reform, and the twentieth century saw a succession of military and civilian governments until the last non-elected military ruler left office in 1982; Bolivia remains the second-poorest country in South America, with an economy built on agriculture, mining of tin, silver, lithium and copper, and coca cultivation.