The national population is made up of three main groups: the indigenous and original, the mestizos and the whites (direct descendants of the colonizers).

The indigenous and original constitute 43% of the population; Those who self-identify as mestizos make up 32% of the country’s inhabitants and are made up of descendants of the union of Spaniards and indigenous/original people. The miscegenation process began with the arrival of the Spanish who introduced slaves from Africa into the region. The result of the unions between these groups gives rise to mulattoes and mestizos.

In colonial times, around 30,000 slaves arrived from Africa, who were forced to work in the mines of Potosí and, later, in La Paz and in the Yungas. Due to its climatic conditions, the slaves who managed to flee and, later, those who obtained their freedom settled in the Yungas region and today make up the Afro-descendant population, representing 3% of the national population.

Despite the great diversity and heterogeneity of indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation and/or initial contact, some general characteristics common to all of them can be identified:

• They are highly integrated peoples in the ecosystems in which they live and of which they are a part, maintaining a close relationship of interdependence with the environment in which they develop their lives and their culture. They have a deep knowledge of their environment, which allows them to live self-sufficiently generation after generation, which is why maintaining their territories is vital for all of them.
• They are peoples who do not know how the majority society works, and who therefore find themselves in a situation of defenselessness and extreme vulnerability before the various actors who try to get closer to them, or who try to accompany their relationship process with the rest. of society, as in the case of peoples in initial contact.
• They are highly vulnerable peoples, who in most cases are in serious danger of extinction. Their extreme vulnerability is aggravated by the threats and attacks suffered by their territories that directly endanger the maintenance of their cultures and their ways of life, since generally, contact processes are accompanied by drastic impacts on their territories that alter their relations with their environment are irremediably modified and often radically modify the ways of life and cultural practices of these peoples. Vulnerability is further aggravated by the human rights violations that are habitually suffered by actors who seek to exploit the natural resources present in their territories and by the impunity that generally surrounds the attacks suffered by these peoples and their ecosystems.”