mobs in La Paz were chanting, “Perón, to the lamppost!”22
In the end, both U.S. and Argentine diplomats had applied pressure, albeit of a much different character, to protect Paz Estenssoro and the MNR refugees. When Paz Estenssoro finally arrived in Argentina in November, he admitted that “he owed his life” to the leaders of Argentina, Paraguay, and Mexico, who had insisted on Bolivia’s “firm” adherence to the principles of political asylum. He did not include Ambassador Flack or the Truman administration among his saviors, for swift U.S. recognition of the junta had, if anything, endangered him and his colleagues. Thoroughly unrepentant, Paz Estenssoro reaffirmed his support for Villarroel, whose work had been “so barbarously interrupted by the Bradenist plutocracy,” denounced Monje as a figurehead for “vampires who suck the blood of the Bolivian people,” and lamented that his homeland was now “completely asphyxiated by the overwhelming pressure of the oligarchic and plutocratic tentacles.”23 As MNR members dispersed, some fleeing to Argentina and others going underground in Bolivia, to plot their response and to reorganize in the mines, Monje and the junta had passed their first test and survived their first challenges.
With Bolivia’s international relations reestablished and normalized, the junta’s primary task was to pave the way for a restoration of constitutional rule by holding elections for the presidency, the Senate, and the Chamber of Deputies. The MNR was naturally prohibited from participating, which ensured that the competition would be among the various parties making up the Frente Democrático Antifascista. Although the election of March 1947 was, on one level, notable for the civility and relative harmony that accompanied it, on another, it was a harbinger of the factional infighting that would cripple the governments of the sexenio. Unified only by hatred and fear of the movimientistas, the FDA had brought together the Marxist Partido de la Izquierda Revolucionaria, the rightist Liberal Party, bastion of the landed aristocracy, and the more moderate Socialist Republican, Genuine Republican, and Socialist Parties into a united front against Villarroel. Dropping “Antifascista” from its name, the Frente Democrático hoped to present a single slate of candidates who would restore unity to Bolivia. This hope would be dashed, however, by the ambitions of José Antonio Arze and his PIR.
The piristas seem to have believed, with some merit, that the moment had finally arrived for them to ascend to power. Theirs was the one remaining party that, through its influence in the mining, industrial, and railway unions, had anything resembling a mass constituency. Indeed, what organized support the 21 July revolution had enjoyed had come almost exclusively from PIR cells in the student federations and unions in La Paz. With the MNR being driven out of the mining camps, the piristas had every reason to believe they would be able to fill the void and finally achieve a dominant position among the working class. Explicitly Marxist in orientation since its founding in 1940, the PIR advocated a reasonably thorough reform of Bolivian society through a “12 Point” agenda that called for a centralized economy, women’s suffrage, education reform, the elimination of illiteracy, and “action against imperialism, feudalism, and Nazi-Fascism.” Notably, it was able to coexist with the landed elite because it did not call for immediate land reform or liberation of the indigenous masses and with the tin barons because it did not call for immediate nationalization of their properties.24 Confident in its own strength, however, the PIR was unwilling to sacrifice its agenda to the more conservative parties of the Frente Democrático: its defection destroyed whatever consensus may have existed in the postwar period.
Pan-American Union official Ernesto Galarza offered a different version of the breakup of the Frente. According to Galarza, the PIR was effectively purged from the FDA when the “political marriage of the Rosca and the PIR proved to be a shot-gun wedding with a hangman’s honeymoon.” Although the piristas had great strength in the Tripartite Committee, the junta quickly supplanted and then disbanded the committee. Further, Monje’s success in disarming the newly armed paceños dealt a direct blow to the PIR’s ability to threaten the regime or launch a “second workers’ revolution.” José Arze and his followers were gradually eliminated from their positions in the junta and denied the representation they believed they deserved on councils and electoral slates; they came under increasing fire from the tin barons’ newspapers.25 Even though the other parties blamed the dissolution of the Frente Democrático on the PIR, Galarza’s version of events has considerable merit.
The PIR was not the only party to defect from the Frente Democrático: other defections quickly followed. When the Republicans and Socialists forged a coalition, the Partido de la Unión Republicana Socialista (PURS), to fill the void left by the PIR’s departure, the Liberals made a bold move to block their old rivals, suggesting that Monje be named president by acclamation. And when Monje turned down the nomination, the Liberal Party announced its intention to run its own slate of candidates against the PURS. Ironically, this most reactionary and elitist of the major parties found itself thrust into an anti-PURS coalition with the Marxist PIR, a coalition that chose the politically moderate Luis Guachalla to be its presidential candidate.26
For its part, the PURS nominated physician Enrique Hertzog Garaizábal, one of the original founders of the FDA, a Chaco War veteran, and a bureaucrat who had held a variety of cabinet posts throughout the 1930s. His Genuine Republicans, generally regarded as the most conservative and pro-rosca of the parties making up the PURS, also boasted the largest membership. The Socialists and Waldo Belmonte Pool’s Socialist Republicans introduced a spirit of tentative reform to the PURS platform. With the MNR outlawed and the PIR taking a backseat in the presidential campaign, the election of 1947 bore a distinct resemblance to the old intra-elite contests of the 1920s and 1930s between the Liberals and Republicans. Just months after what “experienced observers” considered the “bloodiest” revolution in the nation’s history, Bolivian politics had degenerated to little more than prewar personalism.27
Although deemed to be a clean election by almost all sides, the contest could be considered democratic only in the loosest possible sense of the word. The electorate was composed of fewer than one hundred thousand upper- and middle-class men of European or mestizo descent. That this 3 percent of the population was also the group with the least interest in meaningful reform or any major transformation of the status quo virtually guaranteed a bland campaign. Indeed, both Guachalla and Hertzog clearly represented the old, stagnant order, and both promised only modest reform. So similar were the candidates in their political views that they published a number of joint statements during the campaign on the major issues confronting postrevolutionary Bolivia. Indeed, Guachalla would later become an instrumental member of several of Hertzog’s cabinets.28 The only party that could have interjected anything resembling a genuine call for national rejuvenation, the Partido de la Izquierda Revolucionaria, inexplicably refused to enter the fray.
Why the PIR, at the apparent apogee of its political popularity, chose to adopt such a low profile remains something of a mystery. U.S. diplomats suggested several explanations for José Arze’s tentative approach. On the one hand, the piristas were occupied by the formidable task of recapturing the “consciences of the mine workers put to sleep by the Nazi Villarroel demagoguery.” On the other, Arze might also have determined that a concerted move for the presidency by the PIR would bring the violently anti-Communist and historically anti-PIR army out of its barracks in response. Until the party had consolidated its position fully within the working class, such a move might be premature, not only because of the military’s hostility, but also because the oligarchy might easily extend its repression of the MNR to the “Communists” of the PIR. Even as Arze concentrated on winning over junior officers and securing a majority in Congress, he understood all too well that the entrenched leadership of the military would not countenance a pirista government and that his best hope lay in supporting and working through Guachalla and the Liberals, whose government the piristas could presumably dominate.29
The United States and the Cold War might also have been on Arze’s mind. The PIR leadership was nervous, unjustifiably it turned out, about the U.S. reaction to a pirista government. Indeed, Arze’s lieutenant, Ricardo Anaya, approached Ambassador Flack in early August to broach this very subject. Anaya believed
