This article examines the way in which politics amongst the indigenous population became nationalised between the years 1826 and 1921. The problem of land ownership is presented as the catalyst of a process of public action and apprenticeship combining rebellions, legal battles and patronage agreements. The joint analysis of these actions allows, first, the refutation of the image of the Indians as pre-political, passive, incomprehensible and alien to all that was Western; second, to emphasise the important effect the national discourse had on the response of the Indians; and, third, to show the indigenous interest in taking part in the prevailing national project.

The governmental era of the Bolivian conservative parties—Constitutional, Democrat, and Conservative—encompasses the historical period from Bolivia’s withdrawal from the Pacific War (1880), which saw a Peruvian-Bolivian alliance against Chile, to the outbreak of the Federal War of 1899 between conservatives and liberals. Within this period of infighting lies the genesis of the Bolivian political party system. With the establishment of a truce in 1880 between Chile and Bolivia, without which Bolivia would have had to definitively withdraw from the conflict and break its Peruvian alliance, two positions arose concerning a resolution of the conflict: the continuation of the war or peace. These polar solutions adhered to the first ideological substratum of the Bolivian political parties, making it possible to define the various factions of the elite in light of the new political restructuring and the role of the State.