“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.
This is one of the profound constitutional contradictions of Bolivian democracy. It cannot have majoritarian government, first because the majority of the Bolivian population is alien to the political life, and second because inside the nucleus of the minority that has political awareness, the majority is in violent divergence with the interests that have in their hands the vital responsibilities of the nation.
—Demetrio Canelas, 5 January 1952
It is true that the salaries and wages that are paid [in Bolivia] cannot furnish employees and workers a standard of living like that of the United States or Argentina because neither from England nor from the United States . . . have we been able to obtain prices that permit adequate increases in these salaries and wages.
—Gabriel Gosálvez, 3 September 1949
In the aftermath of the revolution of 21 July 1946, both the Truman administration and Bolivia’s Provisional Junta of Government optimistically looked forward to a new era of cooperation and mutual understanding. Relief, exuberance, and satisfaction characterized the mood at the State Department. Members of the new junta made the astonishing and extremely unlikely claim that, at the time of the revolution, Major Villarroel “had a mission in Buenos Aires prepared to give way to Perón’s desires, arrange elimination of customs barriers, and assure ‘Anschluss’ with Argentina.” Although more sanguine observers
