When Juan Pablo Chamón walked back into the Libera Bolivia office in La Paz in 2025, he was returning to a country he had spent a decade trying to change—and which had finally, improbably, begun to change. After twenty years of socialist rule that had prosecuted dissidents, strangled entrepreneurs, and driven a generation of young Bolivians to seek futures abroad, voters delivered a historic verdict at the ballot box. The new government signaled that politically motivated charges from the previous regime would be exposed through due process, and Juan Pablo, who had been forced to choose between prison and exile, came home.

Libera Bolivia is a freedom-focused think tank—part leadership academy for Bolivia’s next generation of civic leaders, part policy research institution, an increasingly a pipeline for the people and ideas reshaping the country. It was celebrating its tenth anniversary with 150 people in the room: donors, politicians, a former president, young leaders who had never known another government. A decade earlier, it had been two people in a classroom.

THE SMUGGLER

Jorge Velarde-Rosso was a young professor when he came back from graduate studies in Buenos Aires carrying ideas of free markets and individual liberty that had no presence in Bolivian academic life or curriculum. The country had been governed by the Movement for Socialism for over a decade, and its universities reflected that reality.

“He didn’t have money, he didn’t have an office,” Juan Pablo recalled. “But what he did have were students who could join his idea to work on whatever helps to make this country better.”

One of those students was Juan Pablo, a firstyear political science major who knew he wanted to change Bolivia but not yet how. Jorge handed him papers after class from economists and philosophers he would never encounter in his degree program. Juan Pablo read them. They talked. A project took shape, nameless at first. Then it became Libera Bolivia.

From the beginning, Jorge was its intellectual architect. Juan Pablo became its public face, debating on television, challenging socialist assumptions in the press, and making Libera visible in a country where visibility carried real risk.

THE PROJECTOR

In 2016, Atlas Network approved Libera’s first grant application: $1,000 for audiovisual equipment, including a projector. With it, Libera brought workshops on entrepreneurship, self-reliance, and human dignity into schools across Bolivia’s cities and rural communities, reaching more than 5,000 students over five years.

“We were the first to identify that the Bolivian people, especially the young, needed and wanted a new narrative,” Jorge said. “Not this narrative that came from the government—that the state would take care of their lives. They wanted to be in charge of their own.”

The projector, now well-used, still sits in the Libera office. They still use it every week.

THE STREET AND THE INDEX

To understand what twenty years of socialist rule produced on the ground, it helps to learn some basic facts about doing business in Bolivia: Registering a business takes up to 50 days. In neighboring Paraguay, it takes one. Small businesses must devote more than 2,000 hours a year—the equivalent of a full-time employee—navigating government procedures. The result is that 85% of Bolivia’s economy operates informally, not through registered businesses. This is not a cultural preference. Informal workers have no access to credit, no legal protection for their property, no path to scale.

They are not outside the system by choice. The socialist state pushed them out. Libera’s Bureaucracy Index, developed by economist and program alumnus Leonardo Siles, documents all of this with hard data, giving policymakers for the first time a precise measure of what socialist-era regulation has cost ordinary Bolivians. On La Paz’s sidewalks, the human cost is visible in every vendor who wants to open a shop but cannot afford the time or the paperwork to do it legally. For a generation of entrepreneurs locked out of their own economy, the numbers prove what they already know.

THE EXILE

As Libera’s research sharpened and its public profile grew, the socialist regime took notice. Juan Pablo, as the organization’s most visible voice, became its target. In 2023, the government opened a criminal case against him, charging him with public instigation and criminal association. The criminal association was organizing young Bolivians
around ideas of freedom. Facing a justice system he had no reason to trust, Juan Pablo chose exile.

He gathered the team first and told them plainly what was happening, and that continuing carried real risk. Every person said: keep going. What followed was not a retreat. He found a position at a university in Chile and kept leading Libera across borders. By then, Atlas Network had given Jorge and Juan Pablo something that proved more durable than any single grant: a professional peer community built through years of shared training and shared struggle. Both had gone through Atlas Network Academy’s Think Tank 360 program, which forced the hard organizational questions— what is Libera’s mission, what is outside that mission, and what will it refuse—and through Executive Accelerator, a cohort-based leadership program that put them alongside think tank builders from other countries who had faced their own versions of the same obstacles.

Those relationships did not end when the programs did. They deepened at Latin America Liberty Forum and at worldwide summits where Jorge sat with peers from Africa, Canada, and across the Americas, comparing notes on what it takes to build pro-liberty institutions that outlast hostile governments. When exile came, that network was already in place. Juan Pablo kept showing up at summits, at forums, and at trainings. He was so seamlessly present in the worldwide freedom movement that colleagues who saw him regularly had no idea he had been forced from his own country, until he chose to say so himself, on stage in New York, where Jorge proudly watched Juan Pablo present the case for Libera’s mission at Atlas Network’s Smart Bets pitch competition.

“Freedom is not free,” he said. “It’s not easy to be forced to leave your country, to say goodbye to your grandmother.”

THE RETURN

Smart Bets is among the most demanding proving grounds in the worldwide freedom movement. Five of the world’s most ambitious think tanks pitch before a live audience at Liberty Forum in New York, judged by an independent panel of philanthropists and experts. Libera, recognized for its impact, was invited to represent Latin America and placed as runners-up at the worldwide finals, receiving grants that funded the next phase of their mission.

The competition was a vindication of their strategy and ambition, but the more consequential test had come years earlier. A government agency had once offered Jorge and Juan Pablo more money than Libera had ever seen to produce youth anti-drug programming. The answer, when the offer came, was not difficult. “It’s not about following the money,” Juan Pablo said. “This is about following the right ideas.”

By the time Juan Pablo came home in 2025, Libera had 205 young leaders enrolled in its leadership incubator—a rigorous year-long civic training program—and 45 lawyers in its Center for Judiciary Studies preparing to draft the legal architecture of a post-socialist Bolivia. Alejandro Hurtado had arrived at Libera as a left-leaning psychology student and built one of Bolivia’s most-watched political commentary channels, now dedicated to defending free markets and individual liberty.

Paola Peters had completed the program and was now a staffer at the Chamber of Deputies. Marcelo Gordillo, a 20-year-old law student from a city four hours away, had been taking Libera’s courses online and cared enough about the community to board an overnight bus to be at Libera’s tenth anniversary celebration. The new government that made Juan Pablo’s return possible had campaigned on ideas Libera had been teaching in schools since 2016: that the state was an obstacle, that free markets belonged to everyone, that Bolivia’s sidewalk entrepreneurs were not a problem to be managed but a potential to be unleashed. Jorge did not endorse any candidate. But he recognized the language.

“We tried socialism for 20 years,” he said. “It didn’t work. We want a change.” Juan Pablo came home to all of it. To the team. To the lawyers learning to write a new constitution. To Paola in the legislature. To Marcelo stepping off a bus. And to the projector, still on the shelf, still proving that in the right hands, a small investment in freedom can illuminate an entire country. “People told us ten years ago we were crazy,” he said. “At our celebration, they were telling us: good job, keep going. I’m not mad at them. They were right. We were crazy. But maybe the world needs some craziness in order to change.”