States and anti-Jewish” MNR.41
On 21 December 1942, a violent incident at Patiño’s Siglo XX tin mine in Catavi created the opportunity the MNR had long sought. When miners assembled to protest for improved conditions and higher wages—they were earning less than $1.50 a day—Peñaranda’s troops fired upon them, killing dozens, if not hundreds. The MNR and the PIR immediately escalated their efforts against the government; the leaders of the MNR branded Peñaranda a tool of the rosca in general and of Patiño in particular. For its part, Aramayo’s La Razón condemned the workers for seeking wages of $1.50 a day and lauded the president for his decisive action.
The Catavi Massacre exposed the hypocrisy and brutality of the old order for all to see and thoroughly discredited the government, even in the eyes of its U.S. patrons. Peñaranda clung to power for another year, but his fate was sealed. The PIR worked toward a popular revolt, several generals plotted their own coups, and the MNR forged alliances with the RADEPA and Iron Star lodges. The MNR and RADEPA won the race to unseat Peñaranda, and their “Revolution of the Majors” seized power almost a year to the day after the massacre.42
According to Paz Estenssoro, the MNR had been involved in several plots that had been brewing for months and had even attempted to seize Peñaranda weeks earlier in Cochabamba. At one point, Peñaranda’s chief of the General Staff offered his loyalty to the MNR in exchange for its support, and another general, Angel Rodríguez, apparently approached Paz Estenssoro to enlist the MNR’s participation in a plot financed by Mauricio Hochschild. Paz Estenssoro “terminated this conversation” by telling the general that “he would be delighted to [participate] if Rodríguez would promise to execute Hochschild the day after they took power.” Allying himself instead with junior officers such as Major Gualberto Villarroel López and the members of RADEPA, Paz Estenssoro understood that he had to move quickly: Peñaranda planned a crackdown on the MNR immediately after Christmas 1943.43
The president apparently remained ignorant of the plots against him, despite a number of mistakes by the MNR and RADEPA. The Ecuadoran Embassy in La Paz somehow acquired details of the coup the day before it occurred, Villarroel had hinted to friends on 18 December that a revolution was coming, and Paz Estenssoro himself had all but announced it in a session of Congress. At the last moment, Majors Villarroel, Edmundo Nogales, and Antonio Ponce even sought what Nogales called a “patriotic understanding” in “defense of national interests” with Peñaranda. They hoped to convince him to abandon the “the Great Tin Barons and North American Imperialism,” to whom he had “surrendered” a price of tin “as a gift” in the name “of continental unity, the good neighborhood of peoples, and the defense of democracy.”44 When Peñaranda rejected their demands, RADEPA and the traffic police effected an almost bloodless coup, installing Villarroel as president on December 23, 1943.
The British believed that the revolution was a “good thing for Bolivia and the United Nations,” brought about by “left-center” nationalists disgusted by the “corruption and inefficiency of the previous government.” The chief of the U.S. Military Mission in La Paz considered the revolutionaries “sincere patriots, to the point of idealism,” and many in the State Department were reluctant to label them “totalitarian” or “pro-Nazi.” As Philip Bonsal tried to explain to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, the “unfriendly” statements and acts by MNR members or military officers detailed in his memorandum were “only a very small proportion” of their activities and were more or less an “automatic” response to anything Peñaranda did. The MNR and RADEPA, Bonsal said, actually represented the “legitimate and respectable, if perhaps unattainable, aspirations of certain sectors of the Bolivian people.” Laurence Duggan went further, comparing the MNR to Louisiana populist Huey Long. He argued that the MNR was genuine in its call for the uplift of the masses and indeed might lead Bolivia to “evolve peacefully and gradually from semi-feudalism to something approaching twentieth century civilization.”45
For President Roosevelt, however, this was no time to be “wishy-washy.” And Secretary Hull, though no great supporter of Peñaranda, was outraged by the emergence of a cabinet featuring five majors, Paz Estenssoro, and two other supposedly pro-Nazi MNR members. Convinced that the MNR and the military were “connected with Nazi groups in Germany and Argentina” and “received financial support from pro-Nazi sources,” Hull inaugurated a policy of nonrecognition against Villarroel’s government in the hopes of provoking a counterrevolution or at least the removal of the MNR. The United States was joined by the other nations of the hemisphere (except Argentina), but Hull refused to tell Villarroel what he had to do to secure U.S. recognition. Through veiled hints and suggestive conversations, it eventually became clear that Hull sought the expulsion of German and Japanese nationals from Bolivia and the elimination of the MNR from the cabinet.46
In April, Villarroel removed the MNR ministers from his cabinet and replaced MNR prefects with nonpartisan army officers. In May, he complied with a U.S. demand to turn over eighty-one German and Japanese nationals. Although U.S. diplomats were barraged with “for-God’s-sake-don’t-recognize” pleas from Aramayo and other oligarchs, by June, every other nation in the hemisphere except Uruguay supported recognition of the regime. With congressional elections pending, the U.S. recognized Villarroel in the hope that this would strengthen his hand against the MNR and encourage other parties to join the government. Within months, however, Villarroel formalized his alliance with the MNR by appointing Paz Estenssoro to the post of finance minister and other party members to other cabinet posts. The MNR had won a share of power but had also earned the enmity of the rosca, the PIR, and the United States.47
Villarroel is best seen as a harbinger of the National Revolution of 1952. When Harry S. Truman became president in April 1945, Villarroel had been entrenched in the Palacio Quemado for more than a year and a half. The tentative steps Villarroel had undertaken toward changing the status quo were a clear warning to the rosca and the political classes. Patiño, Aramayo, Hochschild, and the hacendados may have been content to preside over the hopelessly warped economy of Bolivia, but more astute observers understood that, without reform, revolution was inevitable. For the next seven years, Villarroel and his more traditional successors sought to achieve national development without dismantling the centuries-old foundation of the Bolivian political economy. They faced the almost impossible task of finding a middle road between Paz Estenssoro’s promised National Revolution and the intransigent stonewalling of the rosca.
World War II Tin Diplomacy
Although Washington’s drive for a global capitalist order and Bolivia’s struggle for national development were obviously critical elements in the diplomacy of the sexenio, perhaps the most decisive aspect was the postwar destruction of the international tin cartel and the establishment of an Anglo-American tin purchasing monopoly. If the governments of the sexenio hoped to bankroll modest reforms with tin export revenue, they required high tin prices to, if nothing else, prevent a disastrous economic downturn. Because World War II had left Bolivia as the sole major producer of tin concentrates for the Allies and the State Department did indeed fully support efforts to block the MNR, there was cause for optimism. However, developments in the international tin trade quickly overshadowed all other aspects of the U.S.-Bolivian relationship.
Before the war, Bolivia produced roughly one-sixth of the world’s tin concentrates. Two-thirds came from the Malay Straits, especially the Dutch East Indies and Malaya, and one-ninth from Nigeria, the Belgian Congo, Siam, and China. The United States, which had only produced two thousand tons of tin in the previous sixty years, consumed more than 40 percent of the world’s total, and European nations, led by Great Britain, another 45. In 1927, Patiño’s Consolidated Tin Smelters and John Howeson’s London Tin Corporation formed a producers’ cartel, the International Tin Committee (ITC), to stabilize the world tin market, protect themselves from the devastating fluctuations that periodically wracked the industry, and guarantee their profits. By 1931, they were joined by representatives from all the major tin producers—Bolivia, Nigeria, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies.48 Government officials and private tin producers united to set quotas, restrict output, and at one
