By permitting, if not actually encouraging, anti-U.S. propaganda, the U.S. Embassy argued, the MNR was creating an environment in which “Americans coming to work in Bolivian mines [were] gambling with their lives.” Living in small enclaves in and around the isolated mining camps, U.S. personnel and their families were easy and natural targets for intimidation, harassment, and even assault during periods of labor unrest. When Thurston toured the mining camps, he found among the workers a pervasive “anti-foreign” resentment against the “white bosses” either “inspired” or “tolerated” by the MNR that had been “not heretofore witnessed by the American personnel.” In short, with inadequate police protection and labor representatives “inciting the unlettered laborers against the ‘gringos,’ ” the “labor situation is shaping up for an explosion in which United States nationals are going to be hurt.”15
Ambassador Thurston regularly took Villarroel to task over the danger posed by MNR propaganda and warned that “should an American be killed,” it would resurrect the perception that the Bolivian government was a “camouflaged Nazi regime.” Indeed, Thurston considered the threat to U.S. citizens to be so serious that he urged his superiors to make the “discontinuance of incitement of the Bolivian mine workers against Americans by members of the Ministry of Labor” a sine qua non for any new tin contract.16 Because of the need for Bolivian tin, however, his superiors refused; instead, they ordered him to prevail on U.S. employees to remain in Bolivia even though, “as the Department knows, their lives are daily in very real danger.”17 To prevent an exodus that might cripple the tin mines and thereby hinder the war effort, U.S. civilians were to be left in harm’s way.
MNR leaders understood the danger posed by shop floor anti-Americanism and sought to reassure U.S. Embassy officials on several occasions. Continued incidents in the mines, however, only served to illustrate how little control the MNR leadership actually had over the unions or the PIR and POR elements within the rank and file. When MNR leaders Hernán Siles Zuazo and Rafael Otazo argued that the United States did not understand their efforts on behalf of the poor, U.S. chargé Adam vehemently asserted that “no government in the world was more anxious to see the welfare of the proletariat improved than mine”; he discounted the leaders’ claims that the MNR desired amity with Washington. Indeed, when Adam had urged them to purge a militant anti-U.S. agitator from the party’s ranks, they had refused because doing so would “indicate that the MNR was knuckling under to the ‘interests.’ ” Even worse, FSTMB leader Lechín had sent a provocative open letter to Ambassador Thurston.18
In it, Lechín had denounced Thurston, the United States, the rosca, and the capitalists’ “conquering and enslaving” imperialism in the strongest terms. Ambassador Thurston, who had criticized Lechín and the FSTMB on several occasions, came under particular fire as a “trafficker in public opinion” serving U.S. and rosca “imperialism” in the “unequal battle between the exploiters and the exploited.” Thurston’s criticism of Villarroel and the MNR only gave them “strength to fight against oppressors” and illustrated that “American ‘democracy’ each day advance[d] more resolutely on the road to Fascism.” If the MNR sought to become “more popular abroad,” gestures like these were, Chargé Adam retorted, “a hell of a way to do it.”19 Clearly, Paz Estenssoro was harnessing the power of working-class radicalism and nationalism by linking the MNR to the mine workers and did not dare to alienate those constituencies in the name of better relations with the yanqui colossus. No amount of diplomacy or amicable reassurances could reconcile MNR aspirations with the U.S. commitment to liberal capitalism.
Villarroel, the MNR, and the Blue Book
Despite misgivings about the MNR and the social upheaval it was threatening to provoke, U.S. policy makers soon realized that the villarroelista government “would not permit itself to be overthrown without plunging the country into [another revolution],” which might bring on worse instead of better conditions. Even ousting the MNR was dangerous, U.S. officials noted, because “MNR leaders have stated . . . publicly that they will not relinquish power without a fight and will bathe the country in blood if an attempt is made to oust them.”20 Therefore, the best hope rested with Villarroel himself and the more conservative elements of RADEPA, who might eventually cast out the MNR and govern as a more conventional military regime dedicated to stability, rather than reform. This was no idle hope. Indeed, the U.S. Embassy reported in late 1945 that, since the overwhelming MNR victory in the 1944 congressional elections, “a cleavage has existed in the cabinet” between the “too aggressively radical” MNR and the military. Paz Estenssoro considered himself to be a member of the “slightly crazy” (“poco loco”) faction within Villarroel’s cabinet, whose task it was to rein in the “crazy” and “half-crazy” military factions who were “all out for taking the wild point of view on almost any topic,” but U.S. policy makers saw a more ominous split.21
On at least two occasions, Villarroel’s military backers had demanded that the president eliminate the MNR from his cabinet. On the first, when the MNR’s Rafael Otazo placed the entire blame for the 1944 Oruro killings on the army, Villarroel had barely been able to turn back their demands. The second occasion involved Foreign Minister Gustavo Chacón. In October 1945, MNR deputies launched censure proceedings against Chacón in the hopes that Villarroel would replace him with one of their own. The ploy succeeded to the extent that the foreign minister stepped down, but the president temporarily replaced him with Lieutenant Colonel José Celestino Pinto, an officer “linked by family to the rosca,” rather than a movimientista. Villarroel never did name a permanent replacement: doing so would have either infuriated or emboldened the MNR. The officer corps understood all too well that the MNR was “strategically placing” its members in office across the nation and strengthening the FSTMB to secure an independent base.22
When Villarroel proposed a cabinet shuffle to bring in other civilian elements, presumably as a counterweight to the MNR, outraged movimientistas threatened to abandon the government and move into opposition. They called for a massive rally in the Plaza Murillo, one that Villarroel apparently told Pinto was “against you and against me.” Unimpressed, Pinto responded that he could fill the plaza with fourteen thousand troops the next day if the president so desired and asked which group’s support he would rather enjoy. Whereas Paz Estenssoro had once proclaimed that the army and the MNR must “hang together or they would hang separately” because “they would all be shot” if the “traditional parties should return to power,” Villarroel, like the State Department, understood that differences between the two groups were becoming “practically irreconcilable.” In Chacón’s words, “it is either them or us.”23
Thurston did nothing to discourage Villarroel’s disenchantment. When Villarroel asked Thurston for his assessment of the MNR, the ambassador reminded him of the old “pro-Nazi” accusations and cited more recent “disparaging references to democracy, pan-Americanism, etc.” by movimientistas. He was pleased to report that Villarroel “was not particularly interested in defending” the MNR. For Thurston, an open rupture with the MNR (generally cast as the “elimination of totalitarian influences”) would erase “stigmata that have blemished the regime and which might eventually draw to it unwelcome attention of the kind to which Argentina has recently been subjected.”24 Thurston regularly lectured Villarroel about protecting U.S. citizens and warned him that if he did not “use his influence to stop the abuse of political and civil liberties,” he risked “falling into the bad graces of the United States.” Whereas Thurston employed some subtlety in his efforts to convince Villarroel to abandon the MNR’s “brass-voiced casuists,” other U.S. diplomats were more blunt. Adam, for example, simply explained to Foreign Minister Pinto that “relations between the U.S. and Bolivia would be facilitated by the elimination from the government of the MNR” and its “Nazi nucleus.”25
Although Villarroel had clearly soured on his alliance with