Читать книгу The Truman Administration and Bolivia - Glenn J. Dorn - Страница 10
ОглавлениеWe have, of course, certain practices of party discipline and order, but the difference between them and the goosestep is as great as from La Paz to New Orleans. This is a government of essentially nationalist tendencies—let us say clearly, an eminently democratic government.
—Víctor Paz Estenssoro, 24 December 1943
One is led to suspect that though the MNR may have absorbed Fascist argot and Fascist ideology during its formative years, faced with the actual task of governing it will not be prepared to apply Fascist methods as thoroughly as they have been applied in Europe, if for no other reason than that the social climate of Bolivia and that continent are so different that first, the MNR could not effectively absorb European Fascism and second, Fascism as known in Europe is not fully applicable to Bolivian society, especially not at the present stage of its economic development.
—Walter Thurston, 13 February 1945
When Harry S. Truman assumed the presidency at the close of World War II, the final defeat of the Axis in Europe and Asia obviously preoccupied every branch of the U.S. government. For the heirs of Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy, however, that valiant struggle extended deep into the heart of South America as well. Since 20 December 1943, when Major Gualberto Villarroel López had risen from the barracks to seize control of Bolivia, U.S. policy makers had viewed issues on the Altiplano almost entirely through the prism of the war against Hitler’s Germany. That fateful perspective paved the way for seven years of misconception, misunderstanding, and deeply flawed policy making because it impeded U.S. efforts to formulate an effective response or even to fully understand events in the region. Nonetheless, by the end of the war, the State Department had discovered a far more realistic rationale for its opposition to both the Villarroel government and its MNR backers.
Simply put, Villarroel’s government was the harbinger and Paz Estenssoro’s Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) the driving force behind an urgently needed populist transformation of Bolivia that postwar Washington could not endorse. U.S. statesmen spent much of their time attempting to discern obscure links between the Bolivian regime and Juan Perón’s Argentina, not just because both shared some imagined link with now-defunct Nazism, but also because the nationalistic underpinnings of both Peronism and the MNR threatened U.S. conceptions of liberal capitalism in South America. Villarroel and Paz Estenssoro were working assiduously, if somewhat haphazardly, to break the back of “the old and ruthless exploitation” practiced by the rosca, to “fight for economic liberation against the tin oligarchy” and its “history of abuse, violence, and corruption,” to end the virtual enslavement of indigenous Bolivians, and to lay the foundations of a wider democracy in which most, if not all, Bolivians would have at least some voice in government.1 Although the Truman administration professed its support for most of these objectives, it simply could not countenance a mass movement based on the primacy of labor, statist intervention in the national economy, and the eventual nationalization of the tin mines.
The Villarroel Government
Despite their initial opposition to the Villarroel regime, by 1945, U.S. diplomats had, for the most part, arrived at a more realistic assessment of events on the Altiplano. The Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario had once been “very much in accord with the principles of the Nazi Party,” U.S. chargé Hector Adam stated, “but the character of the party had changed considerably” over the previous year. Functionaries at all levels of the State Department could find little fault in Villarroel’s wartime record of cooperation with Washington. Indeed, as the department’s Division of North and West Coast Affairs concluded, Villarroel’s “cooperation with the United States,” though not “all we could wish it to be” and “forthcoming for reasons other than those of affection,” was far superior to General Peñaranda’s. U.S. Embassy personnel agreed that the members of the revolutionary government were “much more accessible, receptive, and much less obstructionist than their predecessors.”2 Secretary of State Edward Stettinius bluntly proclaimed that Villarroel’s government “is cooperating in the war effort to a very full extent, as its predecessor was not” and had shown no sign of “collaboration or particular affinity” with “either the Nazis or the Colonels’ Clique in Argentina.” Even if the Villarroel government did share with other “primitive and unstable American republics” a tendency toward “arbitrary action,” and was “inept, demagogic, dishonest,” and corrupt, at least it was not “terroristic and totalitarian.” As Ambassador Walter Thurston, no friend of the regime, grudgingly acknowledged, “regardless of its insincerity and venality,” its “war record is not bad.”3
By the end of the war, the State Department had abandoned its claim that Villarroel was emulating European Fascists by running a brutal police state. Although the regime had “at certain times been bloody and tyrannical,” the “devil must be given his due.” In 1945, there had been, the U.S. Embassy claimed, “only one death as a result of a political measure,” no “political murders or kidnappings,” and fewer than a dozen political prisoners incarcerated without justification. Although the documented killing of several opponents by “hot-headed elements of the Government” in Oruro in November 1944 and rumors of arbitrary arrests continued to taint Villarroel’s government, most U.S. leaders had to concede that these paled before the actions of virtually any previous Bolivian government. Ambassador Thurston himself acknowledged a “tendency toward moderation” and conceded that the “abuses” of 1945 were “mere pranks by comparison with earlier outrages” and far from atypical of South American politics. But, even though Villarroel had managed to partially rehabilitate himself in the eyes of most U.S. diplomats, the State Department still remained quite uncomfortable with Paz Estenssoro’s MNR—a nationalistic party possessed of an “irrational anti-capitalistic and anti-upper-class bias.”4
Indeed, it was most likely at the urging of the MNR that Villarroel had enacted a wide range of explicitly prolabor, antibusiness policies. “National unity,” the movimientistas had insisted, “cannot be achieved under the regime of free competition since those who are strong, the owners, always vanquish the workers and Indians in the economic struggle to the death between the two classes.”5 Villarroel decreed that workers could not be fired without cause and that the heirs of workers killed on the job be paid two years of the decedents’ wages; he implemented severance bonuses, pay increases, and a minimum wage and mandated improved sanitation and health facilities in mining camps. The Ministry of Labor appointed legal advisors to counsel workers and report violations of the new decrees. The MNR even contemplated a bill barring foreigners from holding managerial positions in some industries. When the Banco Minero mandated that the tin barons nearly double the price they paid ckacchas, self-employed “private contractors,” for the ore they mined on company land, it paved the way for the eventual elimination of this exploitative practice. The tin barons faced not only a barrage of decrees that radically increased their labor costs, but others mandating tax hikes and the seizure of their precious foreign exchange. Moreover, Villarroel’s backers amended the Constitution to permit the national government to monopolize all tin exports and decreed that the government had the right to seize and operate any mine closed by its owners. In short, according to one U.S. diplomat, Villarroel and the MNR had “severely punished the mining industry”—a “stronghold of malefactors, perhaps, but the country’s principal source of income” to “uphold [the MNR’s] demagogic slogans.”6
The most critical development, however, was the emergence of the Federación Sindical de Trabajadores Mineros de Bolivia (FSTMB), the country’s first national mining union. Created with the support of the MNR and at least the acquiescence of Villarroel and the radepistas of the Razón de Patria, the FSTMB, under Juan Lechín Oquendo’s leadership, eventually supplanted weak company unions and the PIR-dominated Confederación Sindical de Trabajadores Bolivianos with an invigorated, politicized organization. For the MNR, perhaps driven by the understanding that it was doomed to remain a junior partner to the officer corps in the government and recognizing the need for mass support, the emergence of the FSTMB, in which the middle-class intellectuals formally pledged their allegiance to the working class, was nothing less than a milestone. Although the MNR’s vision of a multiclass alliance ran contrary to the call for class conflict by the Partido Obrero Revolucionario (POR), Lechín was able to paper over this serious difference for the time being. Allying with the FSTMB was, for the movimientistas, a critical first step because they began to assemble a loose coalition of groups and factions from different regions and classes under its banner. Their efforts to this end, as Christopher Mitchell has noted, were exceptionally well suited to the physically and socially fragmented nation and even extended to the forgotten countryside.7
The MNR’s agenda outside the cities and mining camps was more ambiguous and less revolutionary. The MNR platform supported suffrage and basic rights for indigenous Bolivians but stopped short of calling for full-fledged revolution and land reform. Instead, it hoped to gradually modernize agriculture to increase production and, most important, to draw indigenous subsistence farmers into the cash economy. The white and mestizo members of the MNR, like their counterparts in the old political parties, feared they might be overwhelmed by the indigenous masses and determined to move slowly. The labor system would be reformed, but the large fincas and haciendas would remain in the hands of the rosca. In May 1945, the MNR convened an “Indian Congress” as a cautious first step toward fundamental change in rural Bolivia. The Congress proposed an end to the traditional agrarian system of debt servitude, pongueaje, the establishment of schools in indigenous communities, the creation of a rural police force to stop hacendado depredations, and the formation of modernized rural cooperatives. Even if implemented fully, however, the proposals of the Congress would not have eliminated the rent-in-labor system or threatened the dominance of the landlord classes in the countryside. Still, as Laura Gotkowitz has shown, it was a vital step in the addressing, if not redressing, centuries-old race- and class-based grievances.8
Ambassador Thurston found some aspects of the MNR program laudable but was quick to point out that, “for all the talk of the importance of the Indian,” even MNR leaders could not overcome their “ingrained feeling of superiority” and conducted their policies with a paternalism that only reinforced a “sense of inferiority” among indigenous Bolivians. Moreover, Thurston shared the rosca’s fear that the MNR was taking a senseless “gamble” by lifting indigenous aspirations, one that could easily unleash lawlessness and violence across the Altiplano. “As the Department knows,” he wrote, “the Bolivian Indian is still very much a savage” quite capable of “overwhelm[ing] the white population and their half-breed farm managers.”9 For U.S. policy makers, even a pro-fascist regime might have been preferable to the unpredictable social upheaval that Thurston believed the MNR was courting.
In short, Villarroel and the MNR promised nothing less than the fundamental reshaping of Bolivian labor relations and society. Their ultimate goal was to eliminate the nation’s dependence on tin through economic diversification and self-sufficiency. Recognizing that the country could not continue to subsist off the tin mines forever, they aimed for a statist solution similar to Roosevelt’s New Deal and Truman’s reconversion plans. Paz Estenssoro called for the eventual nationalization of the tin mines but understood that the lack of Bolivian technical expertise made such a step unfeasible in the short term. Instead, to spur economic growth and sustain the nation in the longer term, the Bolivian government would purchase agricultural equipment and build a modern transportation network by increasing taxes on tin exports and by limiting the foreign exchange the tin barons could funnel offshore. Time was of the essence, for if this was not done before Malay Straits tin became available and depressed the value of Bolivian exports, the country would soon “become a nation of ghosts haunting abandoned pits” across the Altiplano. Paz Estenssoro’s diversification and industrialization program even extended to a plan to “destroy” the “taboo” against the domestic smelting of Bolivian tin by constructing a Bolivian smelter. If all went according to plan, the foundations for a new, modern, economically independent Bolivia would be entirely laid by 1948.10
Washington found these developments anything but innocuous. Although finally convinced that MNR leaders were not Nazi puppets (or that, with Hitler’s defeat, it mattered little whether they were), the State Department lamented that they could neither “keep their hands off large enterprises,” which they incessantly “soaked” for tax revenue, nor stop “conceding to mine labor practical immunity from legal action for illegal violence.” Regardless of their party’s antecedents or international position, that the MNR leaders relied on working-class support and were dedicated to breaking the rosca stranglehold on power guaranteed that their program was antithetical to the U.S. goal of promoting capitalism through liberalized trade, despite Villarroel’s oft-stated pledge to be “more a friend to the poor, without being the enemy of the rich,”11
More important, MNR nationalism was explicitly antiforeign and implicitly anti–United States. In Mitchell’s words, the MNR critique “pictured the entire nation as subject to international capitalist exploitation, which made it possible and necessary to postpone any class conflicts until after the winning of full national autonomy.” As a later MNR handbill put it, “the criminal rosca must be considered and combated as a foreign invader, because it is foreign!” But, for the short term, Carmenza Gallo suggests, the MNR exempted the landed aristocracy from its antiforeign critique of those responsible for Bolivian underdevelopment so that it could direct its efforts and outrage almost exclusively against the rapacious tin barons.12 Moreover, Paz Estenssoro publicly acknowledged that, because any government in Bolivia was effectively at Washington’s mercy, prudence dictated a pro-U.S. policy, unless, he joked, that government could somehow find a way to ship Bolivian tin to “Germany by submarine from Lake Titicaca.” Although he claimed to have no quarrel with the U.S. government and even stated that the United States was the only nation that could assist in his endeavors for Bolivian self-sufficiency, MNR propaganda did regularly feature anti-U.S. messages.13
Most Bolivians’ only direct experience and contact with the United States was through their dealings with white-collar employees of the tin companies. The tin barons regularly hired Europeans or U.S. citizens as engineers, overseers, technicians, and managers. In the drive to radicalize the mining camps, it was all too easy for pro-MNR labor leaders to infuse demands for wages with a racially charged antiyanquismo that already existed among the indigenous and mestizo miners. One MNR newspaper serving the miners of Potosí depicted North American managers as “ignorant, gluttonous” despoilers, while another, Revolución (whose credo was “Bolivia for the Bolivians”), described a U.S. engineer as a “dirty exploiting Gringo” who goes “to the doors of the mine to abuse the workers who really work without daring to enter the concavities of the earth” himself.14
By permitting, if not actually encouraging, anti-U.S. propaganda, the U.S. Embassy argued, the MNR was creating an environment in which “Americans coming to work in Bolivian mines [were] gambling with their lives.” Living in small enclaves in and around the isolated mining camps, U.S. personnel and their families were easy and natural targets for intimidation, harassment, and even assault during periods of labor unrest. When Thurston toured the mining camps, he found among the workers a pervasive “anti-foreign” resentment against the “white bosses” either “inspired” or “tolerated” by the MNR that had been “not heretofore witnessed by the American personnel.” In short, with inadequate police protection and labor representatives “inciting the unlettered laborers against the ‘gringos,’ ” the “labor situation is shaping up for an explosion in which United States nationals are going to be hurt.”15
Ambassador Thurston regularly took Villarroel to task over the danger posed by MNR propaganda and warned that “should an American be killed,” it would resurrect the perception that the Bolivian government was a “camouflaged Nazi regime.” Indeed, Thurston considered the threat to U.S. citizens to be so serious that he urged his superiors to make the “discontinuance of incitement of the Bolivian mine workers against Americans by members of the Ministry of Labor” a sine qua non for any new tin contract.16 Because of the need for Bolivian tin, however, his superiors refused; instead, they ordered him to prevail on U.S. employees to remain in Bolivia even though, “as the Department knows, their lives are daily in very real danger.”17 To prevent an exodus that might cripple the tin mines and thereby hinder the war effort, U.S. civilians were to be left in harm’s way.
MNR leaders understood the danger posed by shop floor anti-Americanism and sought to reassure U.S. Embassy officials on several occasions. Continued incidents in the mines, however, only served to illustrate how little control the MNR leadership actually had over the unions or the PIR and POR elements within the rank and file. When MNR leaders Hernán Siles Zuazo and Rafael Otazo argued that the United States did not understand their efforts on behalf of the poor, U.S. chargé Adam vehemently asserted that “no government in the world was more anxious to see the welfare of the proletariat improved than mine”; he discounted the leaders’ claims that the MNR desired amity with Washington. Indeed, when Adam had urged them to purge a militant anti-U.S. agitator from the party’s ranks, they had refused because doing so would “indicate that the MNR was knuckling under to the ‘interests.’ ” Even worse, FSTMB leader Lechín had sent a provocative open letter to Ambassador Thurston.18
In it, Lechín had denounced Thurston, the United States, the rosca, and the capitalists’ “conquering and enslaving” imperialism in the strongest terms. Ambassador Thurston, who had criticized Lechín and the FSTMB on several occasions, came under particular fire as a “trafficker in public opinion” serving U.S. and rosca “imperialism” in the “unequal battle between the exploiters and the exploited.” Thurston’s criticism of Villarroel and the MNR only gave them “strength to fight against oppressors” and illustrated that “American ‘democracy’ each day advance[d] more resolutely on the road to Fascism.” If the MNR sought to become “more popular abroad,” gestures like these were, Chargé Adam retorted, “a hell of a way to do it.”19 Clearly, Paz Estenssoro was harnessing the power of working-class radicalism and nationalism by linking the MNR to the mine workers and did not dare to alienate those constituencies in the name of better relations with the yanqui colossus. No amount of diplomacy or amicable reassurances could reconcile MNR aspirations with the U.S. commitment to liberal capitalism.
Villarroel, the MNR, and the Blue Book
Despite misgivings about the MNR and the social upheaval it was threatening to provoke, U.S. policy makers soon realized that the villarroelista government “would not permit itself to be overthrown without plunging the country into [another revolution],” which might bring on worse instead of better conditions. Even ousting the MNR was dangerous, U.S. officials noted, because “MNR leaders have stated . . . publicly that they will not relinquish power without a fight and will bathe the country in blood if an attempt is made to oust them.”20 Therefore, the best hope rested with Villarroel himself and the more conservative elements of RADEPA, who might eventually cast out the MNR and govern as a more conventional military regime dedicated to stability, rather than reform. This was no idle hope. Indeed, the U.S. Embassy reported in late 1945 that, since the overwhelming MNR victory in the 1944 congressional elections, “a cleavage has existed in the cabinet” between the “too aggressively radical” MNR and the military. Paz Estenssoro considered himself to be a member of the “slightly crazy” (“poco loco”) faction within Villarroel’s cabinet, whose task it was to rein in the “crazy” and “half-crazy” military factions who were “all out for taking the wild point of view on almost any topic,” but U.S. policy makers saw a more ominous split.21
On at least two occasions, Villarroel’s military backers had demanded that the president eliminate the MNR from his cabinet. On the first, when the MNR’s Rafael Otazo placed the entire blame for the 1944 Oruro killings on the army, Villarroel had barely been able to turn back their demands. The second occasion involved Foreign Minister Gustavo Chacón. In October 1945, MNR deputies launched censure proceedings against Chacón in the hopes that Villarroel would replace him with one of their own. The ploy succeeded to the extent that the foreign minister stepped down, but the president temporarily replaced him with Lieutenant Colonel José Celestino Pinto, an officer “linked by family to the rosca,” rather than a movimientista. Villarroel never did name a permanent replacement: doing so would have either infuriated or emboldened the MNR. The officer corps understood all too well that the MNR was “strategically placing” its members in office across the nation and strengthening the FSTMB to secure an independent base.22
When Villarroel proposed a cabinet shuffle to bring in other civilian elements, presumably as a counterweight to the MNR, outraged movimientistas threatened to abandon the government and move into opposition. They called for a massive rally in the Plaza Murillo, one that Villarroel apparently told Pinto was “against you and against me.” Unimpressed, Pinto responded that he could fill the plaza with fourteen thousand troops the next day if the president so desired and asked which group’s support he would rather enjoy. Whereas Paz Estenssoro had once proclaimed that the army and the MNR must “hang together or they would hang separately” because “they would all be shot” if the “traditional parties should return to power,” Villarroel, like the State Department, understood that differences between the two groups were becoming “practically irreconcilable.” In Chacón’s words, “it is either them or us.”23
Thurston did nothing to discourage Villarroel’s disenchantment. When Villarroel asked Thurston for his assessment of the MNR, the ambassador reminded him of the old “pro-Nazi” accusations and cited more recent “disparaging references to democracy, pan-Americanism, etc.” by movimientistas. He was pleased to report that Villarroel “was not particularly interested in defending” the MNR. For Thurston, an open rupture with the MNR (generally cast as the “elimination of totalitarian influences”) would erase “stigmata that have blemished the regime and which might eventually draw to it unwelcome attention of the kind to which Argentina has recently been subjected.”24 Thurston regularly lectured Villarroel about protecting U.S. citizens and warned him that if he did not “use his influence to stop the abuse of political and civil liberties,” he risked “falling into the bad graces of the United States.” Whereas Thurston employed some subtlety in his efforts to convince Villarroel to abandon the MNR’s “brass-voiced casuists,” other U.S. diplomats were more blunt. Adam, for example, simply explained to Foreign Minister Pinto that “relations between the U.S. and Bolivia would be facilitated by the elimination from the government of the MNR” and its “Nazi nucleus.”25
Although Villarroel had clearly soured on his alliance with the MNR, he dared not purge the movimientistas from his cabinet. Whether he feared retribution from the MNR, approved of its agenda, was using the party as a counterweight to military factions, or was simply vacillating, as some critics claimed, Villarroel made no overt move against Paz Estenssoro’s organization. One cabinet member openly informed U.S. officials that RADEPA members were afraid the MNR would accuse them of being allied with the rosca and “unleash disorders and bloodshed” if they made any move to oust Paz Estenssoro.26 If the State Department had any realistic hope of engineering a break between the MNR and RADEPA, however, the traditional political parties of Bolivia soon made that unlikely. At the end of December, leaders of the Liberal, Republican Socialist, Socialist, and Genuine Republican Parties joined with the Unión Civica Femenina and the Partido de la Izquierda Revolucionaria to forge the Frente Democrático Antifascista (FDA) against the Villarroel government.
Denounced by the MNR as a “rosca-pirista,” Communist-plutocrat alliance, the FDA united almost all of the nation’s significant political parties, PIR’s mass base, and the wealth of the tin barons and landed elite into one organization comprising as much as 80 percent of the “politically conscious populace.” Committed to the restoration of democratic government, it explicitly demanded that the military return to the barracks and, much to the chagrin of U.S. diplomats, rejected any compromise with Villarroel. Even more important, however, the FDA announced that, once it took power, it would convene special “People’s Courts” to put on trial and punish those who had served in or collaborated with the Villarroel government. José Arze even spoke about emulating the war crimes tribunals of Nuremburg. With these pronouncements, the FDA discouraged any civilians that Villarroel might invite into the government as a counterbalance to the MNR and, indeed, ensured that no such invitations could be made. Although Pinto considered the military-MNR alliance to be a “marriage that turned out badly,” he and fellow officers were not inclined to give the opposition an “entering wedge” that might lead to their death sentences.27
Nonetheless, if efforts by the United States to drive Villarroel and the MNR apart had at first been ineffectual, in February 1946, they became actually counterproductive, when the Frente Democrático Antifascista took an aggressive turn just as Assistant Secretary of State Spruille Braden mounted a new offensive. Having served as ambassador to Argentina during the formative stages of peronismo, Braden—whom Bolivian ambassador Victor Andrade called “the embodiment of the conscience of the American people as a champion of principles and ideals against authoritarian regimes”—had waged an embarrassingly activist campaign to derail Perón and his followers. From Braden’s new post, he opted to continue a crusade that had repercussions across South America.28 Embassy personnel like Adam and State Department officials like Joseph Flack and James Espy from the Division of North and West Coast Affairs were Braden appointees who wholeheartedly endorsed his belief that Villarroel was little more than an Argentine proxy. If the destruction of Nazi Germany seemed to eliminate the threat posed by a “pro-fascist” regime in Bolivia, the MNR and, to a lesser extent, Villarroel were now deemed to be, at best, symptomatic of the spread of Perón’s brand of “totalitarian” populism across South America and, at worst, pawns in an Argentine drive to forge a “southern bloc.” Laurence Whitehead has suggested that it is easy (if “depressing”) to trace the U.S. “reclassification” of the MNR from “Nazis” to “Communists” during the Truman presidency, but an important, if largely overlooked, stage in that reclassification was “Peronists.”29
Assistant Secretary Braden and his staff had spent six months sorting and compiling German archival records into the infamous “Blue Book” to use against Perón in his bid for the presidency. Braden released the Blue Book, formally but deceptively entitled Consultation Among the American Republics with Respect to the Argentine Situation, weeks before the election in an effort to paint the Peronists in Argentina as Nazi sympathizers and totalitarian puppets. He included sections that purported to show links between the Nazis, the MNR, and RADEPA in an effort to resurrect the old accusations and, for the first time, to directly and formally “implicate” Paz Estenssoro in “collusion with the Argentines and Nazis.”30 Although the MNR was able to shake off the flimsy U.S. accusations of pro-Nazi behavior rather easily, allegations of collaboration with Peronist Argentina were more persistent and haunted the party throughout the Truman presidency.
In fact, there is little if anything to suggest any meaningful Argentine role in the coup that brought Villarroel to power beyond the usual accusations
of interference by neighboring states that accompanied almost every South American revolution. The best evidence anyone could procure was that Paz Estenssoro had visited Buenos Aires in June 1943 as part of an academic exchange. Still, U.S. secretaries of state from Cordell Hull to Dean Acheson remained convinced that the MNR leaders, if not Villarroel himself, owed their position, at least in part, to an alliance with Argentine nationalists. Indeed, the “Revolution of the Majors,” coming as it did just months after the Argentine “Colonels’ Revolt” ousted a moderately pro-Allied government in 1943, invited comparisons. Both revolutions had been led by secret military lodges and officers somewhat sympathetic to, if not actually trained by, Germany. Both embarked on nationalistic campaigns to industrialize the nation, demonize a vendepatria elite that had dominated the nation for decades, and achieve economic self-sufficiency. Both forged alliances with the working class to carry out what the State Department considered to be a “totalitarian” agenda. Moreover, at the height of the 1944 nonrecognition crisis, Bolivian Foreign Minister José Tamayo had proposed the formation of an “austral bloc” of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile. Although Tamayo’s memorandum was denounced by all sides and he was immediately dropped from the cabinet, it added fuel to the fire.31
The State Department was not alone in its suspicions: even Villarroel’s first ambassador to Argentina apparently warned his president that “if I find any evidence of Peronist involvement in your coup, I’ll resign.”32 Evidently, he did not. The State Department never really found much, either. “So far as the Embassy is aware, it has never been proved that the Revolution of December 20, 1943, received any financial assistance from Argentina,” one foreign service officer observed, but “of course the charge was made by the Department of State” nonetheless. The U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires could find no evidence, either, except for a highly suspect report from Mauricio Hochschild, whose “penchant for stirring up trouble is well known,” as was his desire to see a government in La Paz more responsive to his interests.33 None of this, of course, deterred Braden from his course.
For their part, the Peronists did, to some extent, see the MNR as a potential ally. Both movements were, the Argentines believed, the targets of an unholy “Communist-oligarch” alliance that had been hammered together in Braden’s office in 1944 between José Arze and Mauricio Hochschild. Braden had supposedly told the tin baron and the PIR leader that “we shall kill the dog and then the fleas will die,” suggesting that his campaign against Perón would eventually lead to Villarroel’s demise. Whether the story was true or not, Peronists viewed the U.S. campaign against Villarroel as an effort to diplomatically “isolate the Argentine Republic.” In the view of the Argentine Embassy in La Paz, if Argentina could acquire “substantial quantities of tin” from Bolivia, “the economy of [that] country [would] change its center of influence” from Washington to Buenos Aires. Villarroel had entered discussions with Peronists to have the iron fields of Mutún opened up to Argentine capital, and in a matter of “greatest importance” to Bolivia, the Argentine Banco Central was offering him loans that Washington and Wall Street refused to consider.34
Despite, however, the Argentine courting of a prolabor government “unprecedented in the institutional history of [Bolivia],” U.S. diplomats reported that “the Bolivian Government has appeared to give the Argentine considerable reason for annoyance.” Bolivian diplomats concurred and even admitted privately that the Argentines had legitimate reasons for a certain mistrust of Villarroel. Disputes arose from Bolivia’s “misuse” of Argentine rolling stock and “its inefficiency in railway matters in general”; they had escalated to the extent that the Argentines had, at one point, recalled their ambassador from La Paz.35
Far more serious, however, was Villarroel’s willing participation in Assistant Secretary Braden’s embargo against Argentina. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation had purchased the entire Bolivian rubber production throughout the war and allocated it to the Allies. As a neutral, Argentina had received no rubber quota and, despite widespread smuggling, was suffering from serious shortages in late 1945. With the end of the war in Europe and the reopening of their traditional markets, the Argentines claimed that the Bolivians were charging exorbitant prices for rubber and then compounding their crime by not delivering it. Argentina retaliated by simply cutting off food shipments to Bolivia. In fact, almost all Bolivian rubber was still committed to be sold to the United States, and Braden refused to permit any sales to Argentina that would lead to a resumption of grain shipments. To avert disaster, the State Department arranged an emergency shipment of ten thousand tons of Australian wheat to Bolivia. Even when the Argentines resumed grain shipments, they had raised the price of their wheat by more than 50 percent, and the absence of Argentine-Bolivian amity should have been obvious.36
In light of episodes such as this, in March 1946, after insisting “for the dozenth time” that “he was no special friend of Argentina,” Villarroel explained to U.S. chargé Adam that he had to give his “avaricious and more powerful” neighbor “every courtesy because of Bolivia’s dependence on it for food.” Although the peronistas may have shared some ideological sympathies with Villarroel and the MNR, there was little hope for long-term cooperation. Paz Estenssoro tried to explain that, because his program for economic diversification was directly aimed at reducing Bolivian dependence on Argentine food imports, Argentina was “not disposed to assist” in his quest for “self-sufficiency.” Indeed, should the MNR achieve its goals of radically increasing the agricultural production of Bolivia, it would be directly at the expense of Argentine exporters.37 In the end, peronistas certainly hoped for some sort of anti-U.S. solidarity with their Bolivian counterparts, but there was little basis for it, despite Braden’s fervent belief that there was.
The Bolivian ambassador in Washington, Victor Andrade, showed a remarkable understanding of Assistant Secretary Braden, the Blue Book, and the strange persistence of the myth of Argentine complicity in Bolivia’s 1943 revolution. Because President Truman and Secretary of State James Byrnes were preoccupied with reconversion and the European Cold War, Andrade argued that Braden had an “unprecedented” free hand in assailing Perón’s Argentina. Bolivia had been drawn into Braden’s campaign by faulty evidence (which could, of course, never be refuted) and his need to “convince the American people of the danger” posed by the Argentine government. “It was not sufficient to tell of [Argentina’s] supposed totalitarian ideology or speak of its failure to take action against subjects of Axis nations,” Ambassador Andrade explained, so Braden needed to find or fabricate an example of Argentine “imperialism” that would “constitute an immediate international threat.” Accusing the Argentines of fomenting the Bolivian revolution accomplished that goal, but, the ambassador was quick to point out, the Blue Book had never really been intended to influence events in Bolivia. Indeed, Andrade believed that Braden had been extremely supportive of Bolivian arguments regarding the tin contract, and he noted that State Department officers had barely mentioned the Blue Book to him. Although silence was part of the State Department’s calculated strategy to let the Bolivians “stew” over the accusations, Andrade was essentially correct in his analysis.38
Still, State Department officials did initially hold out some small hope that, when the Blue Book fell “like a bombshell on Bolivian politics,” it might inspire a revolution against Villarroel. It would give both the FDA and anti-MNR officers “powerful ammunition” to use against Paz Estenssoro and possibly bring about a formal split. Even if this did not occur, U.S. diplomats hoped it might also provide an impetus or a pretext for Villarroel to remove the MNR from his government and to invite the FDA in, providing for an “orderly transition” of power back to the traditional parties and the “moneyed class.” Foreign Minister Pinto was rumored to support that option, and at least one other cabinet member told U.S. chargé Adam that he very much wanted to do just that but could not yet act on his desires. The third and most undesirable possibility was that Villarroel and Paz Estenssoro would retrench, mend their differences, and “hang together” in the face of Braden’s and the FDA’s uncompromising assaults.39
Within days after the release of the Blue Book in February 1946, that third possibility had come to pass. “By strengthening and solidifying the opposition,” Adam explained, “the Blue [Book] has postponed the possibility of the military members of the Government throwing out the MNR and substituting some other civilian group.” Prior to the release, Villarroel and Pinto had shown clear signs that they were “ready to throw all those accused to the wolves,” with the exception of Paz Estenssoro, who, Villarroel assured embassy personnel, was innocent of the charges against him. However, the Blue Book spawned “resentment that [sprang] from patriotic motives,” apparently across the political spectrum as Bolivians believed that their “honor and dignity [had] been impugned” by foreign intervention. It did not help that the MNR and RADEPA were able to preemptively refute much of the evidence against them even before the Blue Book had been made public.40 Rather than weakening Villarroel and the MNR, Braden’s assault had apparently bolstered their nationalist appeal.
The Argentines agreed with U.S. diplomats that the Blue Book had shifted Bolivian public opinion in favor of Perón and “against foreign interference.” Indeed, Argentine diplomats now believed that Bolivian “men of Government and general opinion look upon Argentina with special sympathy” as fellow victims of U.S. aggression. That reaction seemed to be fairly pervasive across Latin America: the Blue Book generated more complaints about U.S. interventionism than alleged Argentine or Bolivian fascism. Because Braden’s efforts lacked international support, Ambassador Andrade argued, they were no longer of any “importance or danger” to either the Bolivian government or the MNR, although Braden’s “state of mind and position” remained a cause for concern.41 There was, in short, “no likelihood at all of any governmental change being effected in Bolivia” as a result of the Blue Book revelations. Although the Blue Book did not fail as miserably in Bolivia as it did in Argentina, like the FDA’s assaults, it only furthered the “fortress” mentality that now pervaded the Villarroel regime.42
Duly chastised, the State Department declined to take further opportunities to influence events, in part out of fear that more overt U.S. opposition might drive Villarroel completely into the “camp of Argentina.” Evidently speaking for the Frente Democrático Antifascista and anticipating that the Blue Book augured a more aggressive U.S. position, a Liberal leader approached the U.S. Embassy in May, requesting a pledge of U.S. aid should his party succeed in toppling Villarroel from power. The Liberals sought to guarantee wheat and meat supplies should Perón cut off shipments in retaliation for the removal of his supposed ally. Despite the U.S. Embassy’s support for a measure that would “counteract Perón’s victory in Argentina,” Secretary Acheson bluntly warned Adam that, to preserve the policy of nonintervention, “you should refrain from any discussion whatever of the matter.” Wanting to pursue a policy of “discreet and patient pressure,” some State Department officials hoped to use the tin contract to obtain a quid pro quo should Villarroel “go ahead with his undemocratic Nazi-Fascist totalitarian program in league with the Perón Government and against all the principles and tenets of the Inter-American System.” But this was not to be.43
The 1946 Tin Contract
Had Assistant Secretary Braden truly sought the fall of the Villarroel government, the tin contract would have been his best means to bring it about. In late 1945, Ambassador Andrade, Mauricio Hochschild, State Department officers, and representatives of the Foreign Economic Administration (FEA) assembled in Washington to negotiate the first postwar contract. Although the intrigue that permeated these negotiations gave Braden the perfect opportunity to deal a significant blow to the Villarroel government, to the surprise of many, he remained largely neutral and, at times, even supported Ambassador Andrade. The Bolivian government needed all the support it could get as it faced off with the technocrats of the FEA and found itself under assault by Hochschild as well.
The Bolivians had initially hoped that the end of the war would lead to a relaxation of the wartime controls and a three-year tin contract that started at 63½¢ per pound. Instead, the FEA opted to deploy a “revolver to the head” policy, as Hochschild called it. Arguing that, with the end of hostilities in the Pacific, Malay Straits tin would soon become available and depress the market price, the FEA’s “sharks of Wall Street” demanded a price decrease over six months from 63½ to 55¢ per pound. This phased reduction, they claimed, would allow the Bolivian economy time to adjust to the lower prices they believed would prevail in the postwar period. That said, the FEA announced that there were to be no negotiations: Villarroel and the tin barons could simply “take it or leave it.” In short, the “honeymoon [was] over.” Because the FEA had already stockpiled one hundred and twenty thousand tons of tin metal and thirty-three thousand tons of concentrates, this was no bluff, and in Ambassador Andrade’s words, “we Bolivians couldn’t eat our tin.”44
For its part, the State Department viewed the FEA position with alarm, believing it threatened to “seriously jeopardize the economic and social stability of Bolivia.” According to Ambassador Thurston, although Patiño could continue to produce tin for Great Britain profitably at FEA prices, it was “likely” that all “Aramayo production would be suspended” and Hochschild would be forced to follow suit. In effect, “our principal current production sources of supply would be terminated” if FEA’s “untenable” proposal was implemented. There was little chance, if any, that Villarroel might roll back wage increases or taxes to allow the mines to remain profitable and even less chance that he might “relinquish his power to more conservative civilian groups.”45
Assistant Secretary Braden’s diplomats argued that the FEA should not even suggest “slashing wages or depriving the workmen of the benefits of recent social legislation.” Doing so would only “increase the rift between the Government and the miners and involve us in a very messy domestic situation.” Indeed, the most likely consequence of the FEA’s approach seemed to
be nationalization of the mines. If Aramayo and Hochschild ceased or even reduced their operations, Villarroel would be compelled to seize and reopen the mines, if only to ensure the flow of foreign exchange. It did not help that elements of the RADEPA and the MNR were already ideologically disposed to do so. Any or all of these steps would at best only “delay a return of sound, democratic government.” Instead, Undersecretary of State Will Clayton suggested his own price schedule, which would keep the tin price at 60¢ per pound for a year.46
Ambassador Andrade and the tin barons naturally found the FEA proposal unthinkable and Undersecretary Clayton’s alternative only marginally less so. Outraged by the FEA’s uncompromising stand, Andrade argued that the U.S. position was “unjust,” “unwise,” and based on unrealistic assumptions. It was unjust because it punished the Bolivian producers who had dramatically increased their production during the war to support the U.S. war effort and unwise because it would almost certainly force Villarroel to nationalize the mines to sustain the national economy. The ambassador had no illusions that the government could operate the mines for more than two years before tapping out the best veins; moreover, he knew that nationalization would scare off desperately needed foreign investment and eliminate any possibility of his nation receiving foreign loans for the foreseeable future. On the other hand, he saw little reason why the price of tin should be reduced at all before Asian production facilities were in Allied hands, and he doubted FEA claims that significant quantities of Malay Straits tin would be available within three years. It made little sense to assert, as the FEA did, that it was to the benefit of Bolivians to deny them a fair price for a year to prepare them for an even lower one the next. Indeed, if his country did not receive 70¢ per pound, “Bolivia [might] have to be written off as a casualty of war.” If, however, the United States would maintain the tin price for several years, Paz Estenssoro could realize his program and Bolivia would “emerge as a diversified and largely self-sufficient economy.”47
Although Mauricio Hochschild derided this “dream” of self-sufficiency, he agreed entirely with Ambassador Andrade that U.S. policies were “unfair
and unjust” and that the Bolivian government would “exhaust and ruin” any nationalized mines. Not surprisingly, he believed that the tin price should be “at least” 80¢ per pound and “very probably” $1.00. He also claimed that he and Carlos Aramayo were already “losing money” at the current price and “had not made any money” during the war because his labor costs had, thanks to the 1943 revolution, increased from eighty-five to five hundred dollars per ton. If the United States government would not pay him what he believed his tin was worth, it should at least pressure the Villarroel government to “cut out labor agitation” and “revise the tax system.” When told that this would violate Good Neighbor nonintervention pledges, Hochschild cited Braden’s campaign against Perón, claiming that “although [the United States] talked the doctrine of nonintervention, [it] did not follow it.” He was quick to point out, however, that this was “exactly the right thing” to do. Indeed, because the U.S. tin contracts explicitly stipulated that the Bolivian government not impose taxes or other charges that might impede production, he argued that the State Department was obligated to intervene on his behalf. Sidestepping his argument, the Truman administration countered that, because the Bolivian tin industry had been more productive under Villarroel than ever before, there was no basis for a U.S. protest.48
Ignoring Hochschild’s appeals, the State Department initially left negotiations to the Foreign Economic Administration. According to Ambassador Andrade, FEA representative Alan Bateman told the Bolivians that he had set up three chairs outside for those who “wished to dispute” his terms. He then assured them that “I will not occupy one of those chairs.” When Hochschild claimed that Bolivia could obtain a higher price in an open market, Bateman made three counterarguments. The third and most compelling was simply that the U.S. and British governments had no intention of easing their controls over tin purchases, so further discussion was pointless. The Bolivians still did not understand the lengths that the Truman administration was willing to go to guarantee tin imports to the United States and its stockpile. At the same time the FEA’s Bateman was browbeating Ambassador Andrade, State Department officers were using a proposed loan to quietly blackmail the Dutch government into giving the Reconstruction Finance Corporation a ten-year option to purchase East Indian production despite its negative impact on Dutch interests.49
Bateman did, however, take up and support Hochschild’s complaints regarding Villarroel’s tax and labor policies. Dismayed State Department officers were stunned by the FEA’s willingness to place “our Government, before the public both at home and abroad, in the position of protesting wage increases to Bolivia’s impoverished workers.” When Ambassador Andrade and the State Department lodged protests against Bateman’s “brusque” approach, Bateman had, according to Andrade, “disappeared suddenly from the Washington scene.” The FEA then reversed course and agreed on a schedule that would reduce the price of Bolivian tin concentrates to only 58½¢ per pound. Although the State Department was “very happy” with how the matter had been resolved and Andrade later boasted that his efforts had held the price steady against heavy odds, U.S. diplomats warned that Bolivia had nine months to prepare “to meet the situation whereby the best price she could hope to get for tin would be 52 cents.”50
The signing of the tin contract, however, was only the prelude to further developments. In January 1946, Foreign Minister Pinto, believing rumors that the British were paying the Malaysians 72¢ per pound, informed U.S. chargé Adam that he desired a revision of the contract. Adam responded, without consulting his superiors, that his government was hesitant to pay more because the profits from “increased prices would be frittered away in further salary increases and social benefits.” Though crassly put, this was a real concern in Washington and one that the State Department had shared for years. The Bolivian export taxes on tin were the highest in the world and further impeded tin firms already handicapped by unfavorable geography. Moreover, it fell hardest on small and medium-sized companies, which would have much preferred a tax on profits that would have targeted the Big Three. Because the tin contracts imposed a flat price on all producers in the nation, owners with particularly rich veins (like Patiño) could reap exceptional profits at prices that would bankrupt smaller or less efficient ones. Finally, the government’s reliance on the export tax permitted the agricultural elite to pay almost no taxes whatsoever because tin quite literally sustained the Bolivian economy.51
The solution was for the Bolivian government to join with U.S. officials and private experts in a “technical commission” to examine and rewrite the tax codes in a way that would more equitably distribute the tax burden, encourage tin production, and permit Bolivian tin to compete with Malay Straits tin in the long term. This, Undersecretary Clayton and Ambassador Andrade agreed, would result in replacing the production tax with one on profits that would, at the very least, shift the burden onto the shoulders of the tin barons and assist the small and medium producers.52 Although Hochschild also agreed, at least in the abstract, he and the tin barons were, in fact, the major impediment to what could have been a productive and effective cooperation. Indeed, the export tax system existed primarily because the Big Three refused to grant government officials access to financial records that would permit them to even guess at the tin barons’ profits. “If the government is able to obtain actual cost figures from the producers,” Thurston argued, “a valuable advance will have been made.” Paz Estenssoro and Villarroel could push the rosca only so far, however, and they never requested the technical commission that Ambassador Andrade sought and the State Department very much hoped to send.53
Nonetheless, before the Bolivians could renegotiate the tin contract, they had to first present evidence that a price adjustment was necessary. Having smoothed the way with numerous U.S. officials, Andrade asked the tin producers to draft a memorandum that emphasized “the injustice of the present contract” and its “effects . . . on Bolivian mining,” as well as those of postwar inflation and rumored British offers of 64 to 66¢ per pound to Malaya.54 Whereas Hochschild had, up to this point, quietly complained to the State Department about Bolivian tax policies, he now took this opportunity to openly assail the Villarroel regime. The memorandum he and his fellow “political enemies of the Government” sent to Washington focused almost exclusively on the Bolivian tax structure and clearly aimed to draw the Truman administration into their struggle against Villarroel. Although the Bolivians did, with State Department support, receive permission to renegotiate, internal Bolivian policies would be on the table, and Andrade would stand almost alone against the combined might of Hochschild, his government’s “mortal enemy,” and the U.S. technocrats.55
When negotiations began in earnest in March 1946, the RFC’s George Jewett and Jesse Johnson, standing in for the Foreign Economic Administration, immediately asserted that their agency would be willing to hold the price at 60½¢ per pound, but only if the Bolivians would “make concessions” of their own through a reduction of export taxes. Still claiming to be operating at a loss, Hochschild demanded a price of 68¢ from the RFC and a tax cut from Andrade, retroactive to 1945. Although the State Department, using data that Hochschild had provided earlier, was able to expose this claim as a lie, his complaints about significantly higher labor costs may have had some merit.56 The tin barons asserted that their labor costs had increased by more than 20¢ per pound during the war, and even Patiño had been forced to close a mine that could not produce a profit at less than 72¢ per pound. Doing so had, under Villarroel’s revised labor codes, cost the “Rey del Estaño” more than four hundred thousand dollars in indemnification payments to the workers he had laid off. Moreover, the tin barons were unable to understand why tin was apparently the only product on the planet whose price had declined in the previous year.57
By April, the RFC’s Jewett had increased his offer twice, but now it was
“up to the Bolivian Government” to also “lend a hand” by reducing taxes and exchange restrictions. Paz Estenssoro’s representative in Washington claimed that this would amount to “political suicide for his government,” which would be “immediately accused of selling out to the rosca.” When Jewett, following State Department recommendations, did present an offer of 63½¢ per pound, Hochschild refused to budge from 67¢. Bolivian chargé German Rovira then suggested an adjournment for the producers to prepare a counterproposal; Hochschild replied that he “had just finished making one” and Jewett should consider his offer rejected.58
The State Department apparently did at one point briefly take up the tin barons’ cause. At one of the sessions, Braden’s assistant, James Wright, took the floor and proposed that the RFC pay 63½¢ per pound and that the Bolivians “modify their tax schedules and exchange rates” to essentially grant the tin producers another 4¢ per pound of pure profit. Although Ambassador Andrade’s superiors were apparently “ready to make some concessions in taxation” and to “express the sacrifices that we are willing to make,” Andrade was not. Stunned that the State Department was now openly endorsing Hochschild’s position, Andrade immediately sought out Senators Arthur Vandenberg and Tom Connally, leaders of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who had long been critical of Braden’s penchant for intervention. With the senators’ support, he approached Braden and politely but firmly threatened to publicize this most recent “intervention.” Because Andrade had not yet told Senators Vandenburg and Connally the substance of his complaint or sent word of Special Assistant Wright’s “suggestion” to La Paz, he offered Assistant Secretary Braden the opportunity to retract it quietly. To Hochschild’s amazement and displeasure, the assistant secretary reconvened the meeting, and Wright disavowed his statement.59 The next time Hochschild claimed that “the Government of Bolivia should do something” about its tax policy, State Department officer Sam Lipkowitz bluntly replied, “That is your problem, I am not working there.” The RFC quickly confirmed that Bolivian fiscal policy was “not involved in our present negotiations.”60
During a conversation with Ambassador Andrade in May, Assistant Secretary Braden apparently said that “others here had asked him to insist that the Bolivian Government for its part help to reduce the high costs of production in Bolivia by decreasing taxes, the exchange rates, etc.,” but he had replied that “he could not do so.” He explained to Andrade that “he had been strongly criticized for the very staunch support he had given the Bolivian side” at various meetings. He was certainly remembered for years as a man “known to feel the RFC treated Bolivia rather shabbily.” On several occasions, Braden had argued for an increase in price on behalf of a regime he despised against a branch of his own government and even seems to have taken a personal liking to Andrade.61 Moreover, if Special Assistant Wright had suggested internal policy changes, he had done so with the blessing of Undersecretary Clayton, who believed that, since the Bolivians were using production costs as the basis for their arguments, “all cost factors became a matter of interest.” Though Braden personally believed Villarroel could easily reduce export taxes without harming social welfare measures by trimming his nation’s exorbitant military budget, he appears never to have made this suggestion. Remarkably, even at the peak of the Blue Book hysteria he had unleashed, Braden remained at least neutral toward and at most supportive of Villarroel’s government during the tin negotiations, if only to ensure that tin continued to flow.62
Meanwhile, Ambassador Andrade continued his tireless efforts to secure 67¢ per pound by stonewalling and by darkening the door of every remotely influential U.S. senator, congressman, cabinet member, or journalist he could find. In mid-July, he finally made headway by demanding that, unless the RFC met his price or lifted all restrictions blocking Bolivian sales to European nations, he planned to bring this “discriminatory practice” before the United Nations. Even though Assistant Secretary Braden supported the Bolivian desire to sell its tin on an open market, because of quotas set by the Combined Tin Committee, no nation would permitted to purchase it.63 Still, Andrade’s threat appears to have been effective. A day after his ultimatum, the RFC gave its approval to a formula that essentially granted the Bolivians their coveted 67¢ per pound. Villarroel and Andrade had reluctantly agreed, “more or less as an indirect result” of U.S. protests, not to tax the tin producers on more than 62½¢ per pound, but this bittersweet concession was soon dwarfed by political catastrophe. Villarroel’s government was toppled just three days later, and in Andrade’s words, “as a result of a painful paradox, the fruit of all of our efforts served, in the end, to benefit our enemies.”64
The Blue Book may not have inspired a revolution against Villarroel, but it seems that opponents of the regime were not lacking for inspiration of their own. Fearing that the Machiavellian tin baron was plotting and financing a new counterrevolution, overzealous radepistas had kidnapped Hochschild in 1944. Only Villarroel’s personal intercession had brought about his release. When a revolutionary plot was discovered and foiled, however, the government violently repressed the PIR and very likely sanctioned an attempt to assassinate pirista leader José Arze. And when an insurrection broke out in Cochabamba and Oruro, government officials executed ten conspirators. This escalating repression by the government provoked outrage from both large sectors of the country and the State Department and, according to historian Carlos Mesa Gisbert, marked the “beginning of the end” for Villarroel, as the Catavi Massacre had for Peñaranda.65
Responding to an upsurge in FDA agitation within the middle and upper classes, Villarroel declared a state of siege at the end of May 1946. FDA leaders, teachers, professors, anti-MNR labor leaders, and other “Democrats and decent people” were arrested en masse, torture was reported, and the major La Paz newspapers were seized as “organs of sedition.” Because, however, the United Press and Associated Press employed representatives of these papers as their primary correspondents in Bolivia, this did not put a stop to criticism of Villarroel. When army and air force units (possibly funded by Carlos Aramayo) rebelled in June, they were met, not by military units, but by armed MNR militias. Although the stage was set for a revolution, the FDA, “poorly organized and united only in hate of the present regime,” was ill equipped to start one, much less carry it off.66
Instead, the revolution began in mid-July with a student strike at the universities of La Paz, backed by PIR labor agitators.67 When Villarroel ordered its suppression, fighting broke out in the heart of the city, and several students were killed. As marches and protests led by casket-bearing students sprang up across La Paz, PIR unionists called a general strike, paralyzing the city. Students and piristas armed themselves to battle for La Paz and the nation. Within days, both the military and the MNR had abandoned Villarroel, who now faced an insurgent mob almost alone. On 23 July 1946, the president was dragged into the Plaza Murillo, beaten, mutilated, and hanged from a lamppost “a la Mussolini.”68 Newly appointed U.S. ambassador Joseph Flack, who had arrived just in time to witness the lynching and the fall of what he called “one of the most noxious governments the country had ever experienced,” was awestruck by the spectacle. The opposition had, according to Flack and other State Department officers, “with their bare hands alone” triggered a “volcano of popular discontent” to oust a “Nazi-tainted dictatorship” “a la French Revolution.”69
As movimientistas scattered into exile and sought refuge in the embassies of La Paz, the MNR’s tentative experiment in populist reform came to an abrupt halt. Contrary to movimientista and peronista propaganda, Braden’s State Department seems to have done nothing to provoke or support the revolution, although it rejoiced when the old order and liberal constitutional oligarchy were restored. For the next six years, the MNR plotted its return in union halls, mining camps, clandestine party meetings, and the streets of Buenos Aires, while the tin barons worked to reestablish their control over Bolivian society. Whereas the MNR considered the sexenio to be nothing more than the naked restoration of the rosca to full power, conservative reformers, ever wary of counterrevolution, tried their best to steer a middle course between the radicalism of the MNR and the revanchism of the old elite. Their efforts, despite the full support of the U.S. State Department, were doomed to failure.
