What emerges from this complex interplay of powerful forces is the realization that U.S. diplomacy was unable to coherently address the coming of the National Revolution, contributed to the demise of three successive governments that it sought to bolster, and inadvertently provided assistance to a movement it considered, at various points, to be “Nazi,” “Peronist,” and “Communist.” The needs of the national security apparatus, embodied in the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and the creation of the tin stockpile, completely overrode U.S. diplomatic priorities and, through a convoluted process, actually hastened an anticapitalist revolution that threatened to destabilize a major supplier of the U.S. defense industries, if not the entire Andean Cordillera.
The chapters that follow examine the Truman administration’s dealings with six distinct and quite different governments of Bolivia in some detail (see table 1). Chapter 1 focuses on the supposedly “fascist” regime of Gualberto Villarroel and his MNR allies, whose first effort at societal reform ended in the lynching of the president. Chapter 2 details attempts by the junta of Tomás Monje and the Bolivian elites to regain control of the nation and to rebuild liberal constitutional oligarchy at the beginning of the sexenio. Chapter 3 deals with the presidency of Enrique Hertzog and his failed diplomatic initiatives in Buenos Aires and Washington; chapters 4 and 5, with Mamerto Urriolagoitia’s efforts to suppress the MNR, rein in the tin barons, and secure a tin contract that might stave off the coming revolution. Chapter 6 tells of General Hugo Ballivián’s desperate attempts to reach agreement with the RFC. Chapter 7 begins with the National Revolution of 1952 and the regime of Víctor Paz Estenssoro and ends with Truman’s departure from the presidency in 1953. The conclusion briefly discusses the early days of the Eisenhower administration, when a more sophisticated, if not effective, U.S. approach to Bolivia finally emerged.
We have, of course, certain practices of party discipline and order, but the difference between them and the goosestep is as great as from La Paz to New Orleans. This is a government of essentially nationalist tendencies—let us say clearly, an eminently democratic government.
—Víctor Paz Estenssoro, 24 December 1943
One is led to suspect that though the MNR may have absorbed Fascist argot and Fascist ideology during its formative years, faced with the actual task of governing it will not be prepared to apply Fascist methods as thoroughly as they have been applied in Europe, if for no other reason than that the social climate of Bolivia and that continent are so different that first, the MNR could not effectively absorb European Fascism and second, Fascism as known in Europe is not fully applicable to Bolivian society, especially not at the present stage of its economic development.
—Walter Thurston, 13 February 1945
When Harry S. Truman assumed the presidency at the close of World War II, the final defeat of the Axis in Europe and Asia obviously preoccupied every branch of the U.S. government. For the heirs of Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy, however, that valiant struggle extended deep into the heart of South America as well. Since 20 December 1943, when Major Gualberto Villarroel López had risen from the barracks to seize control of Bolivia, U.S. policy makers had viewed issues on the Altiplano almost entirely through the prism of the war against Hitler’s Germany. That fateful perspective paved the way for seven years of misconception, misunderstanding, and deeply flawed policy making because it impeded U.S. efforts to formulate an effective response or even to fully understand events in the region. Nonetheless, by the end of the war, the State Department had discovered a far more realistic rationale for its opposition to both the Villarroel government and its MNR backers.
Simply put, Villarroel’s government was the harbinger and Paz Estenssoro’s Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) the driving force behind an urgently needed populist transformation of Bolivia that postwar Washington could not endorse. U.S. statesmen spent much of their time attempting to discern obscure links between the Bolivian regime and Juan Perón’s Argentina, not just because both shared some imagined link with now-defunct Nazism, but also because the nationalistic underpinnings of both Peronism and the MNR threatened U.S. conceptions of liberal capitalism in South America. Villarroel and Paz Estenssoro were working assiduously, if somewhat haphazardly, to break the back of “the old and ruthless exploitation” practiced by the rosca, to “fight for economic liberation against the tin oligarchy” and its “history of abuse, violence, and corruption,” to end the virtual enslavement of indigenous Bolivians, and to lay the foundations of a wider democracy in which most, if not all, Bolivians would have at least some voice in government.1 Although the Truman administration professed its support for most of these objectives, it simply could not countenance a mass movement based on the primacy of labor, statist intervention in the national economy, and the eventual nationalization of the tin mines.
The Villarroel Government
Despite their initial opposition to the Villarroel regime, by 1945, U.S. diplomats had, for the most part, arrived at a more realistic assessment of events on the Altiplano. The Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario had once been “very much in accord with the principles of the Nazi Party,” U.S. chargé Hector Adam stated, “but the character of the party had changed considerably” over the previous year. Functionaries at all levels of the State Department could find little fault in Villarroel’s wartime record of cooperation with Washington. Indeed, as the department’s Division of North and West Coast Affairs concluded, Villarroel’s “cooperation with the United States,” though not “all we could wish it to be” and “forthcoming for reasons other than those of affection,” was far superior to General Peñaranda’s. U.S. Embassy personnel agreed that the members of the revolutionary government were “much more accessible, receptive, and much less obstructionist than their predecessors.”2 Secretary of State Edward Stettinius bluntly proclaimed that Villarroel’s government “is cooperating in the war effort to a very full extent, as its predecessor was not” and had shown no sign of “collaboration or particular affinity” with “either the Nazis or the Colonels’ Clique in Argentina.” Even if the Villarroel government did share with other “primitive and unstable American republics” a tendency toward “arbitrary action,” and was “inept, demagogic, dishonest,” and corrupt, at least it was not “terroristic and totalitarian.” As Ambassador Walter Thurston, no friend of the regime, grudgingly acknowledged, “regardless of its insincerity and venality,” its “war record is not bad.”3
By the end of the war, the State Department had abandoned its claim that Villarroel was emulating European Fascists by running a brutal police state. Although the regime had “at certain times been bloody and tyrannical,” the “devil must be given his due.” In 1945, there had been, the U.S. Embassy claimed, “only one death as a result of a political measure,” no “political murders or kidnappings,” and fewer than a dozen political prisoners incarcerated without justification. Although the documented killing of several opponents by “hot-headed elements of the Government” in Oruro in November 1944 and rumors of arbitrary arrests continued to taint Villarroel’s government, most U.S. leaders had to concede that these paled before the actions of virtually any previous Bolivian government. Ambassador Thurston himself acknowledged a “tendency toward moderation” and conceded that the “abuses” of 1945 were “mere pranks by comparison with earlier outrages” and far from atypical of South American politics. But, even though Villarroel had managed to partially rehabilitate himself in the