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
