Why Bolivia has no coast

A desert coast

When Bolivia became independent on 6 August 1825 it took the lands of its colonial administration, which reached west from the Andes to the Pacific between the Río Salado and the Río Loa, across part of the Atacama Desert.^[1] The desert turned out to hold guano and nitrates, and from the 1840s British and Chilean money poured into mining them on the Bolivian coast.^[4] Chile made claims to the area from 1842; a treaty of 1866 split the desert at the 24th parallel, and Bolivia agreed not to raise taxes on the industry without Chile’s approval.^[1]

The War of the Pacific

In 1878 Bolivia put a minimum tax on a nitrate company that had passed into Chilean hands. Chile called it a breach of the 1866 treaty, and although Bolivia offered arbitration, Chilean forces occupied part of the Bolivian coast in February 1879. On 5 April Chile declared war on both Bolivia and Peru, which had signed a defensive alliance with Bolivia in 1873.^[1]

Chile seized Antofagasta and the surrounding Bolivian land, then left Bolivia alone and invaded Peru.^[4] A truce signed at Valparaíso on 4 April 1884 put the coast from the 23rd parallel north to the Río Loa under Chilean administration, leaving Bolivia without a Pacific coastline.^[1]

Transit instead of a coast

In 1895 the two countries signed treaties confirming the loss and promising Bolivia a port farther north, but the treaty that settled the matter, on 20 October 1904, gave Bolivia no coast. Bolivia recognised Chile’s sovereignty over the land down to the sea, and Chile recognised Bolivia’s perpetual right to commercial transit through its territory and ports. A railway from Antofagasta had reached Uyuni in 1889, and one between Arica and La Paz was completed in 1913.^[1]

Over the 20th century the two countries exchanged notes and issued joint declarations about Bolivia’s access to the sea, one of them at Charaña in 1975. Bolivia took Chile to the International Court of Justice, arguing that these had created a duty to negotiate a sovereign outlet. On 1 October 2018 the court found, by twelve votes to three, that Chile had no such legal obligation.^[3]

“the Republic of Chile did not undertake a legal obligation to negotiate a sovereign access to the Pacific Ocean for the Plurinational State of Bolivia”^[3]