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
