Bolivia

The country that lost its coastline and never accepted it, with the largest indigenous share of population in the Americas. Upper Peru held Potosi, the silver mountain that funded the Spanish empire for two centuries and consumed enormous numbers of conscripted Andean and enslaved African workers under the mita. Independence in 1825 named the country after Bolivar. It then lost territory in every direction: the Atacama coast to Chile in the War of the Pacific, leaving it landlocked - a grievance still marked by an annual Day of the Sea and a navy on Lake Titicaca - the Acre rubber region to Brazil in 1903, and the Chaco to Paraguay after a war from 1932 to 1935 that killed around ninety thousand men over territory thought to hold oil that did not. Tin replaced silver and the 1952 revolution nationalised the mines, gave universal suffrage and redistributed land. Che Guevara was killed here in 1967. Water and gas privatisations produced mass protests that brought Evo Morales to power in 2006 as the first indigenous president, and a new constitution declared a plurinational state with thirty-six official languages. La Paz is the highest seat of government in the world. Sucre is the constitutional capital. The country has about twelve million people. The Salar de Uyuni is the largest salt flat on earth and holds a very large share of the world's lithium. Lake Titicaca is the highest navigable lake. Bolivia has had more changes of government since independence than almost any country. The Yungas road down from La Paz was long called the world's most dangerous.

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