Bolivia is the only country on Earth whose constitution names two national flags. One is the red, yellow and green tricolor most people picture when they think of a Bolivian flag. The other is a checkerboard of 49 small rainbow squares called the Wiphala, and by law it flies everywhere the tricolor does. Ten years after that law passed, police in La Paz were burning the Wiphala in the street while a rival crowd burned the tricolor right back. A single sentence of constitutional text turned out to be the easy part.
Two flags, one article of law
Bolivians voted on the new constitution in a referendum on January 25, 2009, approving it with 61.43 percent of the vote on a turnout of over 90 percent. Morales signed it into force on February 7, 2009, in front of a crowd in El Alto, telling supporters he had accomplished his mission to refound the country.
Article 6 of that constitution lists the country's official symbols in a single line: the tricolor flag, the national anthem, the coat of arms, the Wiphala, the rosette, and two native flowers, the kantuta and the patujú. No ranking, no footnote explaining which one counts more. That is an unusual kind of silence for a legal document to leave standing. The Wiphala sits in that list as flatly as the anthem does.
A few months after the constitution took effect, Decreto Supremo 0241, signed by President Evo Morales on August 5, 2009, spelled out what that meant in practice. Government buildings, schools, and official ceremonies now had to fly the Wiphala alongside the tricolor, positioned to the tricolor's left. The decree even set exact production sizes, a 245 by 245 centimeter version for flagpoles and a 24.5 by 24.5 centimeter version for desks and vehicles, according to Flags of the World. A flag that most of the world had never heard of was now a matter of government procurement.
What the checkerboard is supposed to say
The Wiphala everyone recognizes today, the version written into Bolivian law, is a square grid of 49 smaller squares arranged in seven diagonal color bands: red, orange, yellow, white, green, blue and violet. Bolivia's constitution specifically names the variant where white runs along the dominant diagonal, representing Qullasuyu, the southern quarter of the old Inca empire that covered much of what is now Bolivia.
Katarista activists, the Aymara political movement that popularized the flag, assign each color a meaning: red for the earth and the Andean person, orange for society and culture, yellow for energy and strength, white for time, green for natural wealth, blue for the cosmos, and violet for self-government. It is a lot of symbolism to pack into 49 squares of cloth, and that ambition is part of what made it a target once the politics turned.
The constitution's choice of the white-diagonal Qullasuyu version was not arbitrary either. The wider Wiphala tradition includes separate versions for each of the four quarters, or suyus, that made up the old Inca empire, with the dominant diagonal color changing by region: red for Chinchaysuyu to the north, yellow for Kuntisuyu to the west, green for Antisuyu to the east. Qullasuyu, the southern quarter, covered roughly the Bolivian Altiplano, so writing the white-diagonal version specifically into Article 6 was itself a statement about which slice of a much older empire the new constitution considered Bolivia's own.
A tradition invented twice, a century apart
Here is where the story gets uncomfortable for anyone hoping for a clean creation myth. Historians disagree sharply about whether the Wiphala predates the 20th century at all. The Peruvian historian María Rostworowski put it bluntly, arguing on Wikipedia's account of the debate that "the Incas did not have that flag. That flag did not exist, no chronicler makes reference to it." Some scholars go further, describing the modern Wiphala as an invented tradition assembled during the Katarismo indigenous movement of the 1970s and 1980s rather than a survival from before the Spanish conquest.
What is not in dispute is where the modern political push behind the flag came from. In the early 1970s, Aymara students who had reached university in La Paz after the country's 1953 land reform began organizing around a set of ideas that came to be called Katarismo, named for the 18th century indigenous leader Túpac Katari. Drawing on the writer Fausto Reinaga and organized in part through the Julian Apansa University Movement, Katarista thinkers argued that Bolivia's colonial hierarchy had survived independence intact and that a country where Indigenous people made up the majority still ran on institutions built to treat them as a minority. The Wiphala's modern use traces to that same window, taking hold alongside 1970s Indigenous political organizing decades before any constitution mentioned it, which is exactly why critics call it a 20th century invention and supporters call it a 20th century recovery of something colonialism had buried. Both descriptions fit the same set of facts.
That charge stings less than it sounds, because Bolivia's other flag has the exact same problem. The tricolor gets treated as timeless, but its story is exactly as recent and exactly as engineered. Bolivia's first flags after independence in 1825 looked nothing like today's, and the horizontal red, yellow and green bands only became the standard under President Manuel Isidoro Belzu, adopted on October 31, 1851. Belzu's government flipped the stripe order to red-yellow-green five days later, reportedly to make the flag easier to tell apart from a distance. The coat of arms in the center, along with the official meanings assigned to each color, arrived even later, fixed by a decree from President Gregorio Pacheco on July 14, 1888. Even the flag's exact proportions stayed unwritten until a 2004 decree pinned them down at a 15:22 ratio with specific Pantone values. Both of Bolivia's national flags, in other words, are 19th or 20th century political decisions dressed up as ancestral heritage. The Wiphala wears its recency less comfortably, because the story people tell about it leans so hard on the word ancient.
Why Morales wanted it in writing
Evo Morales became Bolivia's first Indigenous president in 2006, elected on a platform built around Katarismo's core argument: that a country where the majority identifies as Indigenous had spent nearly two centuries governed by symbols, laws, and institutions that treated Indigenous identity as folklore rather than nationhood. Rewriting the constitution to declare Bolivia a "Plurinational State," which gave official status to 36 Indigenous languages alongside Spanish, was the centerpiece of that project. Writing the Wiphala into Article 6 alongside the tricolor was a small piece of a much larger rewrite, but it was the piece visible from across a plaza.
For Morales's government, putting the Wiphala on air force jets and outside government ministries was not decoration. It was the constitution's abstract promise of plurinationalism made physically visible, the way a coat of arms turns a plain tricolor into something more specific than three colored stripes.
What happened when the government changed
The law never changed, but the politics around it did, violently, in November 2019. Morales resigned after weeks of protests over a disputed election, and in the chaos that followed, mutinied police officers in several cities were filmed cutting Wiphala patches off their own uniforms and setting the flag on fire while crowds chanted that Bolivia belonged to Christ, according to reporting by Remezcla. National police commander Miguel Mercado told reporters at the time that Bolivians had "always believed that Bolivia is one, that the red, yellow and green is the one that shelters us all," pointedly leaving the Wiphala out of his own list of unifying symbols.
The response arrived within hours and carried its own symbolism. Morales supporters in El Alto and La Paz burned the tricolor and the separatist flag of Santa Cruz department in return, chanting support for the Wiphala they had watched burn on television only hours before. Jeanine Áñez, the opposition senator who became interim president, formed a transition cabinet with no Indigenous members and said nothing publicly about the attacks on the Wiphala for weeks. When she eventually addressed it, she called it important to preserve Bolivia's cultural practices because they enriched national identity, a considerably softer line than her own government's early silence had suggested. Opposition figure Rafael Quispe pushed back on the idea that the flag belonged to Morales's party at all, telling reporters that "the Wiphala is not from a party. The Wiphala is from the pueblo."
A law that named the argument instead of ending it
Nothing about Article 6 has been repealed. The Wiphala is still, on paper, exactly as official as the tricolor it flies beside, and Bolivian government buildings still raise both. But the events of 2019 revealed what a constitution settles and what it does not. A law puts two flags in the same sentence and requires both to fly at the same height. It does not decide whether every citizen reads that pairing as a settled fact of nationhood or as an open provocation, and Bolivia spent 2019 finding out which one it was.
Most countries settle on a single flag and let its meaning drift and blur over decades, the way Bolivia's own tricolor did after 1851. Bolivia tried something rarer: writing down, in a single clause, that the nation had two irreconcilable stories about itself and both of them counted. The tricolor and the Wiphala fly at the same height today because a decree says they must. Whether they mean the same thing to the people standing underneath them was never something a decree decides.
