Brief history
Trinidad was founded in 1686 by Father Cipriano Barace, a pioneering Jesuit missionary who introduced the first cattle herds to the region. The town prospered under the Jesuits, but fell into rapid decline after their expulsion in 1767, with many of its indigenous inhabitants – drawn from several different tribes from the surrounding area but known collectively as the Mojeños – being dragged off to work as virtual slaves on plantations near Santa Cruz. The Mojeños were still strong enough to play an important role in the Independence War, when an indigenous government led by Pedro Ignacio Muiba was briefly established in Trinidad in 1810, before being ruthlessly crushed by a royalist army, which also stripped the town of its last valuable Jesuit ornaments.
The rubber boom
With the advent of the rubber boom the town’s population fell dramatically as thousands were forcibly recruited to work as rubber collectors in the forests to the north, while many others fled rather than face the same fate. In 1887, at the height of the rubber boom, the Mojeños launched their last uprising, a non-violent religious movement led by a messianic chief called Andrés Guayocho, who was said to be a great sorcerer and excellent ventriloquist. But the rebellion was swiftly and brutally put down by the Bolivian authorities, many of the survivors fled, and the town was left in the hands of non-indigenous merchants and landowners.
The modern era
The region’s cattle economy really developed in the second half of the twentieth century, when enterprising ranchers began cross-breeding the semi-wild cattle descended from the herds brought in by the Jesuits with sleek Xebu cattle brought in from Brazil. Until the road down from Santa Cruz was built in the 1970s, Trinidad was effectively cut off from the rest of Bolivia, and it remains an isolated and somewhat inward-looking place, voluble in its right-wing opposition to the La Paz administration (the walls are plastered with anti-Evo Morales graffiti) and fiercely defensive of its camba (lowland) identity. The ranchers – known as ganaderos – see themselves as rugged, self-reliant pioneers who have tamed a wild region and created prosperity with almost no help from central government.