An example in the Andes

LANDLOCKED, isolated by its Andean heights, savannas and tropical jungles, small (7.5m) in population, Bolivia rarely attracts much outside attention. Yet it has often led its neighbours in political creativity. Its 1952 revolution both anticipated a regional wave of nationalist statism with a state takeover of the tin mines—at the time its main source of wealth—and produced a successful agrarian reform that granted land to Amerindian farmers, so helping to spare Bolivia the kind of rural violence suffered by Peru and Colombia. Then, in 1985, Bolivia turned its back on many of these policies. After Chile, but before most of Latin America, it tamed inflation by embracing free markets and open trade.