Scielo RSS http://socialsciences.scielo.org/rss.php?pid=1819-054520050001&lang=es vol. 1 num. SE lang. es http://socialsciences.scielo.org/img/en/fbpelogp.gif http://socialsciences.scielo.org http://socialsciences.scielo.org/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1819-05452005000100001&lng=es&nrm=iso&tlng=es On the eve of the civil war that pitted the new elites in La Paz, representing the Liberal Party, against the conservative mining elites of the south, based in the departments of Chuquisaca, Potosí and Tarija and in power since the War of the Pacific (1880), other conflicts were also latent in the peripheral regions of Bolivia: in the Amazonian region, to the north-east, as well as in the Chaco, to the south. The indigenous inhabitants of those regions, which did not fit the model of the "productive Indian," were regarded as obstacles to progress. The exploitation of rubber, in the north, and the development of cattle-breeding in the south promoted incursions of non-indigenous peoples into those territories in which State control was virtually non-existent. During this process, criollos, traders and cattlemen ran into Franciscan missionaries who were not exempt from attacks on the part of civilians. http://socialsciences.scielo.org/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1819-05452005000100002&lng=es&nrm=iso&tlng=es SUMMARY In this paper it is argued that the Constitution of Bolivia is a set of contradictory practices and institutions that deal with federalism, unitarism, presidentialism and parliamentarianism, and that the most important aspects to be reformed have more to do with the organic part of the Constitution than with its dogmatic part. The author recommends keeping an attenuated presidentialism and eliminating the ‘parlamentarist’ part of hybrid presidentialism, eliminating the Vice-presidency of the Republic, establishing a unicameral system, adopting the two-round electoral system for presidential and parliamentary elections, modernizing the system of local government, and calling for a Constitutional Assemby in order to perfect and consolidate democracy. http://socialsciences.scielo.org/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1819-05452005000100003&lng=es&nrm=iso&tlng=es This paper studies political culture during the Liberal period of Bolivian political history, in terms of collective imagery and processes of structural formation, such as the production and reproduction of social practices. Political culture is also a process of structural formation based on the project-process interaction: the projects of the actors, and processes that obey regularities (structures). Hence, their study requires a double hermeneutic to understand how actors create the political field, and at the same time are created by it. Political culture lato sensu encompasses an epoch’s common sense, social identities and their respective practices; though this does not exclude the possibility of thinking of culture as the crystalization of a concrete thought, which may become hegemonic and articulate, institutionally or socially, a social formation. Old-style liberalism in our America adopted specific forms, such as clientelism and caudillismo. Since political transformations do not operate in a vacuum, we must study the continuity that exists between thought and discursive practices during the 19th century, in order to better understand those which correspond to our own time. http://socialsciences.scielo.org/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1819-05452005000100004&lng=es&nrm=iso&tlng=es This essay examines the theoretical framework underlying an anonymous manuscript of 1830 which contains a discussion of Bolivian economic problems during the early years of the republic, and a proposal for protectionism. The manuscript is an example of the degree of refinement that had been achieved by the intellectual elite of Charcas towards the end of the colonial period. In this essay we question the hypothesis of doctrinal unity between protectionists and free-traders during the first decades of the Republic: it is shown that the anonymous author is critical and selective vis-a-vis the principles of classical political economy, and that his protectionist prescriptions are based, for the most part, on the notion of historical relativism as expounded in Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws. We begin with a brief presentation of the contents of the manuscript, followed by an analysis of the author’s theoretical framework, and concluding with a review of the set of protectionist measures adopted by the Bolivian government between 1829 and 1832.