Indeed, it was most likely at the urging of the MNR that Villarroel had enacted a wide range of explicitly prolabor, antibusiness policies. “National unity,” the movimientistas had insisted, “cannot be achieved under the regime of free competition since those who are strong, the owners, always vanquish the workers and Indians in the economic struggle to the death between the two classes.”5 Villarroel decreed that workers could not be fired without cause and that the heirs of workers killed on the job be paid two years of the decedents’ wages; he implemented severance bonuses, pay increases, and a minimum wage and mandated improved sanitation and health facilities in mining camps. The Ministry of Labor appointed legal advisors to counsel workers and report violations of the new decrees. The MNR even contemplated a bill barring foreigners from holding managerial positions in some industries. When the Banco Minero mandated that the tin barons nearly double the price they paid ckacchas, self-employed “private contractors,” for the ore they mined on company land, it paved the way for the eventual elimination of this exploitative practice. The tin barons faced not only a barrage of decrees that radically increased their labor costs, but others mandating tax hikes and the seizure of their precious foreign exchange. Moreover, Villarroel’s backers amended the Constitution to permit the national government to monopolize all tin exports and decreed that the government had the right to seize and operate any mine closed by its owners. In short, according to one U.S. diplomat, Villarroel and the MNR had “severely punished the mining industry”—a “stronghold of malefactors, perhaps, but the country’s principal source of income” to “uphold [the MNR’s] demagogic slogans.”6
The most critical development, however, was the emergence of the Federación Sindical de Trabajadores Mineros de Bolivia (FSTMB), the country’s first national mining union. Created with the support of the MNR and at least the acquiescence of Villarroel and the radepistas of the Razón de Patria, the FSTMB, under Juan Lechín Oquendo’s leadership, eventually supplanted weak company unions and the PIR-dominated Confederación Sindical de Trabajadores Bolivianos with an invigorated, politicized organization. For the MNR, perhaps driven by the understanding that it was doomed to remain a junior partner to the officer corps in the government and recognizing the need for mass support, the emergence of the FSTMB, in which the middle-class intellectuals formally pledged their allegiance to the working class, was nothing less than a milestone. Although the MNR’s vision of a multiclass alliance ran contrary to the call for class conflict by the Partido Obrero Revolucionario (POR), Lechín was able to paper over this serious difference for the time being. Allying with the FSTMB was, for the movimientistas, a critical first step because they began to assemble a loose coalition of groups and factions from different regions and classes under its banner. Their efforts to this end, as Christopher Mitchell has noted, were exceptionally well suited to the physically and socially fragmented nation and even extended to the forgotten countryside.7
The MNR’s agenda outside the cities and mining camps was more ambiguous and less revolutionary. The MNR platform supported suffrage and basic rights for indigenous Bolivians but stopped short of calling for full-fledged revolution and land reform. Instead, it hoped to gradually modernize agriculture to increase production and, most important, to draw indigenous subsistence farmers into the cash economy. The white and mestizo members of the MNR, like their counterparts in the old political parties, feared they might be overwhelmed by the indigenous masses and determined to move slowly. The labor system would be reformed, but the large fincas and haciendas would remain in the hands of the rosca. In May 1945, the MNR convened an “Indian Congress” as a cautious first step toward fundamental change in rural Bolivia. The Congress proposed an end to the traditional agrarian system of debt servitude, pongueaje, the establishment of schools in indigenous communities, the creation of a rural police force to stop hacendado depredations, and the formation of modernized rural cooperatives. Even if implemented fully, however, the proposals of the Congress would not have eliminated the rent-in-labor system or threatened the dominance of the landlord classes in the countryside. Still, as Laura Gotkowitz has shown, it was a vital step in the addressing, if not redressing, centuries-old race- and class-based grievances.8
Ambassador Thurston found some aspects of the MNR program laudable but was quick to point out that, “for all the talk of the importance of the Indian,” even MNR leaders could not overcome their “ingrained feeling of superiority” and conducted their policies with a paternalism that only reinforced a “sense of inferiority” among indigenous Bolivians. Moreover, Thurston shared the rosca’s fear that the MNR was taking a senseless “gamble” by lifting indigenous aspirations, one that could easily unleash lawlessness and violence across the Altiplano. “As the Department knows,” he wrote, “the Bolivian Indian is still very much a savage” quite capable of “overwhelm[ing] the white population and their half-breed farm managers.”9 For U.S. policy makers, even a pro-fascist regime might have been preferable to the unpredictable social upheaval that Thurston believed the MNR was courting.
In short, Villarroel and the MNR promised nothing less than the fundamental reshaping of Bolivian labor relations and society. Their ultimate goal was to eliminate the nation’s dependence on tin through economic diversification and self-sufficiency. Recognizing that the country could not continue to subsist off the tin mines forever, they aimed for a statist solution similar to Roosevelt’s New Deal and Truman’s reconversion plans. Paz Estenssoro called for the eventual nationalization of the tin mines but understood that the lack of Bolivian technical expertise made such a step unfeasible in the short term. Instead, to spur economic growth and sustain the nation in the longer term, the Bolivian government would purchase agricultural equipment and build a modern transportation network by increasing taxes on tin exports and by limiting the foreign exchange the tin barons could funnel offshore. Time was of the essence, for if this was not done before Malay Straits tin became available and depressed the value of Bolivian exports, the country would soon “become a nation of ghosts haunting abandoned pits” across the Altiplano. Paz Estenssoro’s diversification and industrialization program even extended to a plan to “destroy” the “taboo” against the domestic smelting of Bolivian tin by constructing a Bolivian smelter. If all went according to plan, the foundations for a new, modern, economically independent Bolivia would be entirely laid by 1948.10
Washington found these developments anything but innocuous. Although finally convinced that MNR leaders were not Nazi puppets (or that, with Hitler’s defeat, it mattered little whether they were), the State Department lamented that they could neither “keep their hands off large enterprises,” which they incessantly “soaked” for tax revenue, nor stop “conceding to mine labor practical immunity from legal action for illegal violence.” Regardless of their party’s antecedents or international position, that the MNR leaders relied on working-class support and were dedicated to breaking the rosca stranglehold on power guaranteed that their program was antithetical to the U.S. goal of promoting capitalism through liberalized trade, despite Villarroel’s oft-stated pledge to be “more a friend to the poor, without being the enemy of the rich,”11
More important, MNR nationalism was explicitly antiforeign and implicitly anti–United States. In Mitchell’s words, the MNR critique “pictured the entire nation as subject to international capitalist exploitation, which made it possible and necessary to postpone any class conflicts until after the winning of full national autonomy.” As a later MNR handbill put it, “the criminal rosca must be considered and combated as a foreign invader, because it is foreign!” But, for the short term, Carmenza Gallo suggests, the MNR exempted the landed aristocracy from its antiforeign critique of those responsible for Bolivian underdevelopment so that it could direct its efforts and outrage almost exclusively against the rapacious tin barons.12 Moreover, Paz Estenssoro publicly acknowledged that, because any government in Bolivia was effectively at Washington’s mercy, prudence dictated a pro-U.S. policy, unless, he joked, that government could somehow find a way to ship Bolivian tin to “Germany by submarine from Lake Titicaca.” Although he claimed to have no quarrel with the U.S. government and even stated that the United States was the only nation that could assist in his endeavors for Bolivian self-sufficiency, MNR propaganda did regularly feature anti-U.S. messages.13
Most Bolivians’ only direct experience and contact with the United States was through their dealings with white-collar employees