Juanson World

I lived for six months in Chile and I heard nary a word about Bolivia. Yet from the moment I stepped off the plane in Santa Cruz until my flight out of La Paz a week later, I was continually bombarded by the collective national bitterness towards Chile. As my taxi driver welcomed me to his country, I asked him what Bolivians thought of foreigners. His reply: "We are welcoming to everyone: even to the Chileans, who stole our access to the sea."

Indeed, Bolivia was the big loser of the 1879 War of the Pacific against Chile and Peru, having lost access to the Pacific Ocean to Chile, which expanded its coastline by one-third through its conquest. Chile's coastline now stands at over 2,800 miles, making it the longest country N-S in the world.

The renown economist Jeffrey Sachs (who incidentally was a consultant to the team that stabilized Bolivia during their 1985 hyperinflation) has published several papers on the link between geography and development. His findings can be summarized into two main conclusions:

1) Countries along the equator are more underdeveloped than those in colder climates.
2) Landlocked countries (with the exception of European countries with access to the integrated market of the EU) are underdeveloped due to their having been restricted from markets.

Regardless of the validity of Sachs' research, being landlocked can certainly be considered to be a factor in Bolivia's underdevelopment. Yet over a hundred years later, the lack of access to the sea continues to be used both as a crutch and a national rallying cry.

From the moment Bolivians enter school, they are taught that the shifty Chileans stole their access to the ocean. Every morning at 7:30am on the national radio station, the throaty voice of an announcer urges Bolivians to "strive forward in progress, to a day when we will finally reclaim the sea." Not to be outdone, Bolivian politicians never fail to drop the "access to the Pacific" card when they need to sway public opinion. In the recent OAS Secretary General election, Bolivia was the only member state to vote against the Chilean Miguel Insulza. Meanwhile, the Bolivian ambassador to the OAS delivered a long-winded speech about the difficulty to negotiate the reclaiming of territory with a Chilean at the helm of the regional body.

It kind of reminds me of those one-sided rivalries, where one team hates the other and the dominant team simply doesn't care. Like Princeton-Penn. Like the Yankees and the Red Sox, until last year. For all of its 2,880 miles of coastline, Chile could definitely be a good friend and share. But they won that battle years ago.