Bolivia’s President Rodrigo Paz announced on Monday that he was eliminating the need for entry visas for eight countries, including the United States, Israel and the United Arab Emirates, in order to “recover lost visitors and revitalize the economy through tourism.”
“We have decided to cancel visas for a number of countries, a measure that will allow us to recover lost visitors and revitalize the economy through tourism,” Paz announced in a post on the social networking site.
The President explained that in 1994, Bolivia and Peru had similar numbers of tourists, with 340,000 and 390,000 respectively, while in 2024, the number of tourists received by Bolivia reached 650,000, compared to 3.5 in Peru, according to data provided by Paz himself.
For her part, Tourism Minister Cynthia Yanez noted, “Since 2007, when the visa was imposed on the United States, and in 2014 on Israeli citizens, we have lost nearly $900 million (775 million euros) in tourism spending.” Now, Bolivia will not require entry visas from citizens of these two countries, nor from citizens of South Korea, South Africa, Bulgaria, Malta, Romania and the United Arab Emirates, Al-Dabar newspaper reported in a joint press conference.
Likewise, Foreign Minister Fernando Aramayo defended that these measures seek to correct the “ideological” decisions of previous legislatures. Furthermore, he stressed that the government will continue to expand the withdrawal of visa requirements, also seeking to improve the country’s international image: “We must restore confidence to the world; Bolivia must show that it is a safe place to visit.”