Local elites and southern import-export merchants financed most mining activity but were unable to come up with the huge sums required to reactivate on any large scale the colonial silver mines. Despite a number of economic missions by British agents, the London stock market crash of 1825 eliminated the promised large investments slated to revitalize the mining industry. Unlike the decades-long attempts to reconstitute larger political units, the social and economic reality of Bolivia quickly set limits to the liberal idealism of the patriot generals who took over the new country's government. Internal opposition forces, both Peruvian and Bolivian, and the invasion by Chile destroyed these plans and led to Santa Cruz's downfall. Under the confederation, Peru was divided into a northern and a southern section, with Bolivia remaining whole. He felt powerful enough to recreate the Bolivarian dream of a union of Spanish American republics by annexing Jujuy, the northernmost province of Argentina, and by creating the Peru-Bolivian Confederation (1836–1839). Sucre's presidency (1825–1828), though brief, brought about administrative reforms and anticlerical legislation, wresting away much of the power of the Catholic Church.Īndrés de Santa Cruz, another warrior from the independence wars, ruled Bolivia for ten years (1829–1839). It had large numbers of tribute-paying Andean peasants, access to silver (albeit on a reduced scale in comparison with that of the colonial period), and a relatively stable centralized government during the first few decades after independence. Despite the flooded silver mines, the periodic looting of the royal mint by patriot and royalist forces, and the devastated countryside, Bolivia was one of the most powerful and prosperous countries in South America. When patriot forces under Sucre's command finally liberated Upper Peru, the region had been wracked by almost sixteen years of civil war. Then, despite the early efforts of Bolivian patriot forces during the Wars of Independence, the Audiencia of Charcas remained a bastion of royalism and so became separated from independence-minded Argentina. First, the Spanish crown's decision in 1776 to split Upper Peru from the Viceroyalty of Lima and to integrate the territory into the new Viceroyalty of Buenos Aires severed ties with the rest of Peru. Indeed, the events that spawned the Bolivians' sense of separateness took place only a few decades before independence. Bolivian leaders could only point to the rather flexible jurisdiction of the colonial high court, the Audiencia of Charcas, as the basis for the new state. Antonio José de Sucre, the Venezuelan-born patriot general who favored an independent upper Peruvian state, effectively appealed to Simón Bolívar's vanity by naming the new polity after the Liberator. Three basic issues defined this struggle: first, the way in which indigenous peoples participated in the political and economic life of the country second, export-oriented trade versus internal economic development and third, the extension of the Creole-led state into the sparsely inhabited frontier areas.īolivia was in many ways an artificial creation, as were virtually all other states in Spanish America. Bolivian history after independence can be characterized as primarily a struggle to integrate the extremely diverse country into a cohesive whole.
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