Bolivia, a landlocked South American country, has a navy with 173 vessels and about 5,000 personnel, despite being a landlocked country. It currently uses its navy to patrol the rivers that flow into the Amazon, as well as Lake Titicaca, which is located on Bolivia’s border with Peru. (Lake Titicaca, in addition to being the largest lake in South America, is the highest navigable lake in the world, at 12,507 feet above sea level. That’s the basis for my attempted pun in the title, since I can’t think of any puns based on the name of the lake itself.)

The country used to have a coastline, but lost it to Chile in the War of the Pacific (1879-83). Bolivia, to this day, makes no secret of the fact that it wants that land back.

The country will get its day in court sometime soon, now that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague has agreed to hear its claim for “sovereign access to the sea” (h/t Paul). The legal case involves complicated questions of international law that you can read about on your own.

In 1992, Bolivia gained the right to a three-mile strip of coastline in Peru, which also lost territory to Chile in the War of the Pacific back in the day, but without any way to reach that territory from Bolivia, it was pretty much just symbolic. Bolivia and Peru signed a new agreement in 2010 that would expand Bolivia’s “coastline,” but it’s still far short of having actual access to the sea.

Here’s a video about the Bolivian Naval Force (not really) that is at once both hilarious and probably very offensive to Bolivians:

If you got to the end of the video, you’ll see that it was a promo for the 2011 Cine Las Americas International Film Festival in Austin, because of course it was.

Anyway, it’s good to see Bolivia and Chile fighting it out in court, especially since the dispute arises from a war in which between 12,000 and 18,000 Bolivians and Peruvians were killed. Chile lost between 2,400 and 2,800, or thereabouts. We never learn anything about South American history in school in the U.S., it seems, but man, there were some doozies. I’ve been reading a book about the Paraguayan War of 1864 to 1870—which was between Paraguay on one side and Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay on the other—in which an estimated 70% of Paraguay’s adult male population was killed.

Paraguay is another landlocked country with a naval force, which it uses to patrol the Paraguay and Paraná Rivers. Numerous landlocked countries that have coastlines on large lakes or inland seas have navies: Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan (Caspian Sea); Rwanda (Lake Kivu); and Uganda (Lake Victoria). The Central African Republic has a naval force that patrols the Ubangi River, which forms its border with the Democratic Republic of Congo. I don’t know if that’s because of that country’s history over the past few decades, but it seems like a reasonable hypothesis.

My point here being this: give Bolivia some respect.