Cochabamba Guide

Immigration Tips

For those of you interested in my experience with the immigration process I’ll try to provide you with the issues we ran into and things we could have done to avoid them. I got my temporary residence for 3 years through marriage so know that my experience may be different than yours.

Preparations

Before coming to Bolivia, you’ll want to get the following documents apostilled in your home country.

  1. Birth Certificates
  2. Marriage Certificates
  3. If you have kids, the last 2 years of report cards
  4. Translations of the Above into Spanish. These need to be done by a certified translator. You can have this done in Bolivia as well. To get it done cheaply, we did the translations ourself and then had a translator just review and sign them.
  5. Immunization records including yellow fever

Buying Flights

When you buy a flight, be sure to check how much the flights are directly from your city to Bolivia and then compare it to flying into Miami and then into Bolivia separately. For our family, it saved us thousands of dollars. B.O.A. is the most affordable airline out of the US but just be aware that they are prone to change their flight times. Ours was changed from 10pm to 10am which forced us to change our flights into Miami to be a day earlier.

Getting Your Marriage Certificate Legalized

This was a very frustrating process for us. Usually you want to get to the SERECI at least an hour before they open. Even then, you can expect to wait a few hours. The first time, my wife waited 6 hours only to be told that we were missing a requirement (one that wasn’t on the list of requirements they gave us).

Requirements:

  1. Apostilled Marriage Certificate
  2. Translation of your Marriage Certificate
  3. Copy of your Passport
  4. Copy of your Spouse’s Birth Certificate (if born in Bolivia)
  5. You both need to have your biomentrics done (Empadronados) - This is the one that wasn’t listed on their list of requirements. It takes 1 to 2 business days for this to show up in the system.
  6. Letter from a lawyer stating your purpose (You can find them almost anywhere and they are not expensive. We paid around 50Bs per letter.)

Immigration Office

Tip: The first time you go to the immigration office, you will end up waiting in line for a bit just to set up an appointment for another day. Before you can set up the appointment they will review your paperwork and make sure that you have everything. Below is a list of the requirements as they were for me.

  1. Original and copy of Passport and Visa
  2. Medical Exam by the Police Department
  3. Declaration
  4. 4x4 Photo with white background
  5. Proof of solvency. For this you can just use a bank statement showing that you have sufficient funds to support yourself or show a work contract.
  6. Background Checks:
    • Certificado de Antecedentes policiales emitido por la F.E.L.C.C. y F.E.L.C.N. addressed specifically for migration.
    • Certificado de Antecedentes Penales (REJAP). (This one was the easiest and the fastest. I was in and out in a few minutes and it only required my passport and somewhere around 50Bs.)
    • Certificado de Antecedentes Policiales Internacionales emitido por INTERPOL
      • For this one you will need your rental contract, a copy of your landlord’s ID, background checks from F.E.L.C.C. and F.E.L.C.N. but addressed specifically for INTERPOL.
  7. Birth Certificate (Original and Copy)
  8. Marriage Certificate (Original and Copy of either your Apostilled Marriage Certificate or your Bolivian Marriage Certificate you received by legalizing your US Marriage Certificate in Bolivia). Make sure that they fill in your nationality on the marriage certificate! If it isn’t there, you’ll have to set up another appointment with migration after you’ve fixed it with the SERECI.
  9. You will need to fill out a Croquis (in BLUE pen), which you can get from the immigration offices. On there it will also have a QR code you can scan that will take you to the page where you fill out a “Formulario de Declaración Jurada de solicitud de permanencia temporal”.
  10. Payment for your visa. This varies by the visa you select and how many years. You may also have to pay for fees if your visa has already expired. I think I paid around 2,000-3,000 Bs for a 3 year visa plus 10 days of penalties.

DISCLAIMER: these are personal notes from my own experience, not legal advice, and immigration rules change. For official information (very possibly out of date or incomplete), please go to https://migracion.gob.bo/.

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