Bolivia

The Basque presence in Bolivia has a place and a time: Potosí, the Villa Imperial (Imperial Town) that grew up beside the silver mountain, the Cerro, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There the Basques formed a rich, close-knit group that controlled a good part of silver mining and took over the posts of the town council, until their rivalry with the other Europeans ended in open war. Afterwards no emigration carried that on: very little remains of the exile of the Spanish Civil War, and today Bolivia has no Basque centre.

In that Potosí, the silver was largely Basque. According to the Auñamendi encyclopedia, the wealth of the town’s miners was for the most part in Basque hands, because of their greater technical training and their trading habits, and that made their relations with the other Europeans and with the creoles turbulent.¹

With the money came local power. The Basques, whom the documents of the time call “vascongados” or “vizcaínos”, formed a rich, close-knit group, and an anonymous account of those struggles summed it up like this: “the Biscayans are few but a united people”. The historian Alberto Crespo explains that the ordinary mayors of Potosí were usually Vascongados and that money allowed them to win the posts of the town council. One year, when Sancho de Madariaga and Domingo de Verasátegui were elected, the viceroy, the Marquis of Montesclaros, went as far as to annul the election, which he considered an excess.²

Between 1622 and 1625 that rivalry broke out in the war between Vicuñas and Vascongados, the armed struggle between the Basques and the rest of the town’s European population (see Basques in Bolivian history).¹²

Very little remains of the exile of the Spanish Civil War. In 1940 the Consejo Nacional de Euzkadi (Basque National Council) placed the Basque representation in Bolivia under the general delegation in Buenos Aires, and in 1942 a delegation of its own was planned. No record of its creation has been found, although in 1946 Ismael Escobar is mentioned as the person who held the post.³

Today Bolivia has no Basque centre in the Basque Government’s official register.⁴