Hochschild had partial control over Ultima Hora, while Patiño owned one-third of El Diario. Through their wealth, power, and control over most of the news outlets, the tin barons constituted nothing less than what their critics claimed was a “superstate” that far overshadowed the national government. Nonetheless, because their wealth made them the most visible target of reformers, the barons were forced to pay the lion’s share of taxes to support the state; their partners in the rosca, the landed aristocracy, paid next to nothing.20
Although Mauricio Hochschild was generally considered to be the most politically active of the tin barons, and Carlos Aramayo the most ruthless, Simón Patiño, one of the ten richest men in the world and the “King of Tin (Rey del Estaño),” was without a doubt the most formidable. Starting with one tin mine, “La Salvadora,” which for a time produced 10 percent of all the world’s tin, Patiño had built a globe-spanning empire by 1930. He controlled the richest tin veins in Bolivia and used his profits to purchase controlling interest in the 95,000-ton capacity Williams, Harvey tin smelter in England, establishing the Consolidated Tin Smelters, Ltd., in 1929. Within five years, his General Tin Industries, incorporated in Delaware and allied with the National Lead Company, had gained control of more than fifteen British and German tin smelters and mines across Southeast Asia. His name became as synonymous with tin as Henry Ford’s was with the automobile.21 Although Patiño died in 1947, his son, Antenor, followed closely in his father’s footsteps, ensuring that Simón Patiño’s legacy would persist through the sexenio.
Still, the tin barons by and large remained above most Bolivian politics. An urban petit bourgeoisie, directly or indirectly dependent on the barons for its financial well-being, constituted what passed for the Bolivian political class. Composed largely of mine company employees, bureaucrats, lawyers, doctors, and other professionals, this mostly urban middle class created political parties, managed government, regularly contested elections, intrigued for power, and periodically rebelled within carefully prescribed limits on behalf of the 80 percent of the nation disenfranchised by literacy, property, and wealth requirements imposed on those seeking to vote. For decades, various factions and alliances of Liberals, Republicans, Socialists, and soldiers had jockeyed for control of the national government and periodically attempted cosmetic reform, but underlying their petty disputes was the enduring, virtually omnipotent old order of the rosca.
In essence, the broad power of the tin barons economically and politically stifled the nation. Because Patiño and his fellow tin barons remitted their profits to shareholders overseas or channeled them into lucrative foreign investments, Bolivian tin had an exceptionally low retained value for the nation. And because Bolivian tin concentrates were processed, smelted, and rolled at facilities in Great Britain, Holland, and eventually the United States, the role of Bolivian tin workers was reduced to simple extraction. Although this model suited Patiño, who owned most of the world’s smelting facilities, it did little to stimulate growth or investment in other industries on the Altiplano. Moreover, the subsistence wages paid to miners were insufficient to, as John Thoburn puts it, “generate a market for local consumer goods, and thereby spread development.”22 Even worse, finding no worthwhile investments within Bolivia, the tin barons continued to export as much of their surplus capital as they could. Bolivian politics was strictly confined to intra-elite battles within carefully prescribed rules. The taxation of tin provided enough revenue for the oligarchy to forswear meaningful changes in the political economy, particularly if such changes risked unleashing a social revolution. Although some within the white and mestizo political class understood that the old order was deeply flawed, virtually all shared the assumption that they owed it every privilege they enjoyed.23
For those not among the privileged classes, however, the tin barons’ empire had come at “the inhuman cost of tuberculosis, misery, and backwardness” in a nation whose per capita income was the second lowest in the hemisphere. Put simply, U.S. officials found it “difficult to comprehend how the Altiplano Indian manage[d] to stay alive” under the brutal conditions he was forced to endure.24 The Bolivian tin mines, one U.S. ambassador asserted, “make Russia’s Siberian labor camps look like Labor Day picnics.” This was not much of an exaggeration: overcrowded, unhygienic mining camps produced malnourished children and an “exceedingly high” though unmeasured infant mortality rate. Earning at most $8.00 a week, miners routinely spent entire twelve-hour shifts underground, and at the Hochschild mine in Pulacayo, they were expected to work a forty-eight-hour shift once every month.25
For most observers, the conditions in the mines defied description. Temperatures could reach 135 degrees as “rock dust fill[ed] the air and lungs,” and “carbon dioxide bubble[d] from the freezing water that drip[ped] from the ceiling.” Thousands of miners, “clad only in a G-string and rubber boots,” toiled until mine accident or disease claimed their lives. A 1951 study revealed that 20 percent of miners suffered from silicosis, 7 percent from tuberculosis, and fully one-third from other respiratory maladies. Indeed, a member of a United Nations survey team asserted that “after five or six years, virtually every worker” fell victim to silicosis. Not surprisingly, a miner’s life expectancy was less than forty years, and by the end of World War II, almost half the workers in Patiño’s mines had been forced to work there by the enganche (conscription) system.26
The two component groups of the rosca had created two distinct economies that intertwined in a bizarre pattern of underdevelopment. The shortcomings of life on the Altiplano only exacerbated the problems of the tin miners, who supported their families at an altitude of more than fourteen thousand feet, sustained by incessant coca chewing, Cuban sugar, Argentine meat and fats, U.S. wheat, Chilean rice, and Peruvian clothing.27 Even with the vast majority of the population dedicated to agriculture, the nation was critically dependent on foreign products (and thus on the foreign exchange generated by tin sales abroad). Large areas of northern and eastern Bolivia represented, according to one U.S. diplomat, “immense virgin resources” that remained untapped due to the inability or unwillingness of the “Altiplano Indian to adjust physically to conditions at or near sea level.” Yet, even in 1952, there was no reliable highway or rail line connecting the cities and mines of the Altiplano with the eastern lowlands. Whereas the demands of the tin economy had made it essential to have easy and reliable access to Chilean ports for the export of minerals and the import of European and North American finished goods and machinery, there was no apparent incentive to connect the areas of Bolivia that lay outside the “national system.”28
More than three-fifths of the nation was covered in rich tropical lowlands that would have been ideal for a lumber industry, agriculture, or ranching, if only the labor and transportation issues could be resolved. Without transportation, however, there was little market for lowlands agriculture or incentive for the indigenous peoples of the highlands to abandon their homes to work in hot, disease-infested jungles to which they were not acclimated. Indeed, a UN mission in 1951 concluded that only 2 percent of Bolivian soil was actually being cultivated; the 1950 census noted that more than 70 percent of the population derived their income from agriculture.29 With most of the population politically inert and engaged in subsistence agriculture on plots scattered throughout the Altiplano, the nation was forced to import most of its food, machinery, and consumer goods. The resulting drain on foreign exchange placed an entirely unnecessary burden on a population that could ill sustain it and exerted a constant pressure on government to extort more foreign exchange from the tin barons. In short, according to Carter Goodrich, “the economy of Bolivia is that of a mining camp”: it “sells what a mine sells, and like a mining camp, buys everything else.” Thus the average resident of La Paz consumed just eighteen hundred calories per day at an altitude that demanded three thousand in a nation where three-quarters of the population engaged in agriculture, and where tin had made Patiño one of the wealthiest men on earth.30
The rosca had for decades used repression, propaganda, and armed force to keep the indigenous masses and the miners under their control, but the disparities in wealth and racial inequities had not gone unnoticed. In the 1930s, a new generation of critics emerged within the political class; they were soon joined by tin miners, railroad employees, and other workers in Bolivia’s nascent industries. The fervor of these critics was spurred by two disasters during the 1930s:
