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
