Ultimate Consequences
A comprehensive database of deaths in Bolivian political conflict during the democratic era, 1982–present
Welcome
Mass grassroots politics in Bolivia has found highly contentious forms of action that were nonetheless distinct from a conventional military conflict. Its longer history, marked by indigenous uprisings, labor militancy, and frequent military rule has been described in terms of blood, fire, dynamite, and massacres. The social movement traditions that have resulted include proclamations of fearlessness (even protesting high schoolers shout, “Rifle, machine gun, we will not be silenced!”) and vows to carry struggles “until the final consequences.”
Ultimate Consequences is a quantitative and qualitative database, unique in its depth and completeness of coverage, of all conflict deaths in Bolivia since October 1982, a period of largely elected governments and political dynamism. The database enables comparative analysis across thirteen presidential administrations, four episodes where protesters successfully sought the end of a presidential term, and 225 protest events in 20` domains of conflict. As of mid-2026, the project has identified 681 to 701 deaths. The database includes 665 named individuals.
Of the 701 deaths recorded in the database, 20 are “unconfirmed” deaths corresponding to cases where an uncertain number of people were killed (e.g., if “three to five” people were reported killed, two unnamed individuals are included in the database as unconfirmed deaths). There are 12 recorded instances of non-conflict-related accidents and 3 non-conflict-related natural death associated with protest events; and 9 recorded instances of deaths from medical causes, where protest or repression may have impeded medical care (“collateral”). For the remainder of this summary, we refer to the 657 deaths not excluded for any of these reasons as “confirmed deaths.”
Due to the number of lethal events in the study period, the dataset is both large enough for quantitative research that analyzes patterns and small enough for qualitative, journalistic, and historical examination of the individual deaths involved. To serve these multiple purposes, we code information such as individuals’ relation to a specific social movement, protest campaign, cause of death, responsible parties, and location, and writing detailed narrative descriptions about major events. The project has supported multiple publications and this website hosts supplemental data and reproducible workflows for those publications.
Another element of this project is narrative summaries of each event, 47 of which are included on the website under Narratives. You can see them listed chronologically in the sidebar to the left, or see them in context in the event directory, where all available narratives are linked.
The project draws on journalistic, advocacy, and scholarly sources to comprehensively document all deaths in political conflict, including those not readily categorizable as human rights violations. The project also seeks to ask more intimate, and cultural, questions about the role of risk, violence, sacrifice, and loss in transformative social change. As the database reveals, Bolivian protest can involve intense risk, privation, self-sacrifice, and either enduring or inflicting violence. Bolivian social movement traditions include proclamations of fearlessness and vows to carry on their struggles “until the ultimate consequences,” that is, to persist in collective measures and to refuse to be deterred by deadly state violence.
We are hard at work on creating simple tools to allow social scientists, oral historians, and human rights advocates to generate and access summary data and individual entries in the database to answer their own questions. In 2026, we will publicly release a R package that will allow researchers to search, query, and visualize the dataset.
This website is here to provide access to:
- Background and documentation on the project such as descriptions of the project
- Tools for visualizing the dataset on the web
- Cited narrative descriptions of lethal conflict events
- Archived copies of data pages produced using RMarkdown that with automatically generated statements and visualizations that document claims made our research articles.
- (coming soon) Documentation on our R package for the project