In the middle decades of the twentieth century, Bolivian society was profoundly traumatized by the Chaco War and the loss of about thirty per cent of its national territory; before that, it had ceded Acre to Brazil and its coastal provinces to Chile. Schoolchildren learn at an early age that Bolivia lost those territories because the country failed to occupy them. Consequently, it welcomed the assistance in 1942 when a team of economists sponsored by the US Embassy outlined a strategy for focusing future development on the sparsely populated plains of its eastern lowland territories. Known as Plan Bohan, after its lead author, the document outlined a series of investments and resettlement initiatives that were referred to as the ‘Marcha hacia el Oriente’. In the 1950s and 1960s, this strategy led to the construction of all-weather roads linking the Andean highlands with the lowlands in Santa Cruz, Cochabamba and La Paz. US financial assistance via the Alliance for Progress was part of a broader strategy to combat the spread of leftist ideologies, particularly the guerilla insurgency led by Che Guevara in 1967. Multilateral agencies subsequently supported key investments, including highways linking the Chapare colonization zone with the agro-industrial landscapes of Santa Cruz, as well as export corridors to both the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. Initiatives sponsored by the World Bank to promote food security and export commodities were leveraged with private-sector investments to create an export industry and key motor of job creation. The two landscapes impacted by these investments,…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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