Peru deal opens sea route to landlocked Bolivia
Bolivia and its neighbor Peru signed a deal this week allowing landlocked Bolivia access to four square kilometers of Peruvian shoreline, in essence making Bolivia a maritime nation again, according to international media reports.
Bolivia President Evo Morales and his Peruvian counterpart, Alan Garcia, signed a deal at the end of October giving Bolivia a 99-year lease on the strip of shoreline near Peru’s southern port of Ilo.
Bolivia was last a maritime nation in 1884, when Chile captured and kept the country’s mineral-rich coastline in the 1879-1884 War of the Pacific.
“This opens the door for Bolivians to have an international port, to the use of the ocean for global trade and for Bolivian products to have better access to global markets,” Morales said during the ceremony, according to a report in the Vancouver Sun.
According to Viviana Caro, the Bolivian minister for planning and development, direct access to the ocean will cut the distance goods have to travel to Asian markets by 40 percent.
Most of those products are natural resources such as zinc, tin and silver, according to the report.