Denounced by the MNR as a “rosca-pirista,” Communist-plutocrat alliance, the FDA united almost all of the nation’s significant political parties, PIR’s mass base, and the wealth of the tin barons and landed elite into one organization comprising as much as 80 percent of the “politically conscious populace.” Committed to the restoration of democratic government, it explicitly demanded that the military return to the barracks and, much to the chagrin of U.S. diplomats, rejected any compromise with Villarroel. Even more important, however, the FDA announced that, once it took power, it would convene special “People’s Courts” to put on trial and punish those who had served in or collaborated with the Villarroel government. José Arze even spoke about emulating the war crimes tribunals of Nuremburg. With these pronouncements, the FDA discouraged any civilians that Villarroel might invite into the government as a counterbalance to the MNR and, indeed, ensured that no such invitations could be made. Although Pinto considered the military-MNR alliance to be a “marriage that turned out badly,” he and fellow officers were not inclined to give the opposition an “entering wedge” that might lead to their death sentences.27
Nonetheless, if efforts by the United States to drive Villarroel and the MNR apart had at first been ineffectual, in February 1946, they became actually counterproductive, when the Frente Democrático Antifascista took an aggressive turn just as Assistant Secretary of State Spruille Braden mounted a new offensive. Having served as ambassador to Argentina during the formative stages of peronismo, Braden—whom Bolivian ambassador Victor Andrade called “the embodiment of the conscience of the American people as a champion of principles and ideals against authoritarian regimes”—had waged an embarrassingly activist campaign to derail Perón and his followers. From Braden’s new post, he opted to continue a crusade that had repercussions across South America.28 Embassy personnel like Adam and State Department officials like Joseph Flack and James Espy from the Division of North and West Coast Affairs were Braden appointees who wholeheartedly endorsed his belief that Villarroel was little more than an Argentine proxy. If the destruction of Nazi Germany seemed to eliminate the threat posed by a “pro-fascist” regime in Bolivia, the MNR and, to a lesser extent, Villarroel were now deemed to be, at best, symptomatic of the spread of Perón’s brand of “totalitarian” populism across South America and, at worst, pawns in an Argentine drive to forge a “southern bloc.” Laurence Whitehead has suggested that it is easy (if “depressing”) to trace the U.S. “reclassification” of the MNR from “Nazis” to “Communists” during the Truman presidency, but an important, if largely overlooked, stage in that reclassification was “Peronists.”29
Assistant Secretary Braden and his staff had spent six months sorting and compiling German archival records into the infamous “Blue Book” to use against Perón in his bid for the presidency. Braden released the Blue Book, formally but deceptively entitled Consultation Among the American Republics with Respect to the Argentine Situation, weeks before the election in an effort to paint the Peronists in Argentina as Nazi sympathizers and totalitarian puppets. He included sections that purported to show links between the Nazis, the MNR, and RADEPA in an effort to resurrect the old accusations and, for the first time, to directly and formally “implicate” Paz Estenssoro in “collusion with the Argentines and Nazis.”30 Although the MNR was able to shake off the flimsy U.S. accusations of pro-Nazi behavior rather easily, allegations of collaboration with Peronist Argentina were more persistent and haunted the party throughout the Truman presidency.
In fact, there is little if anything to suggest any meaningful Argentine role in the coup that brought Villarroel to power beyond the usual accusations
of interference by neighboring states that accompanied almost every South American revolution. The best evidence anyone could procure was that Paz Estenssoro had visited Buenos Aires in June 1943 as part of an academic exchange. Still, U.S. secretaries of state from Cordell Hull to Dean Acheson remained convinced that the MNR leaders, if not Villarroel himself, owed their position, at least in part, to an alliance with Argentine nationalists. Indeed, the “Revolution of the Majors,” coming as it did just months after the Argentine “Colonels’ Revolt” ousted a moderately pro-Allied government in 1943, invited comparisons. Both revolutions had been led by secret military lodges and officers somewhat sympathetic to, if not actually trained by, Germany. Both embarked on nationalistic campaigns to industrialize the nation, demonize a vendepatria elite that had dominated the nation for decades, and achieve economic self-sufficiency. Both forged alliances with the working class to carry out what the State Department considered to be a “totalitarian” agenda. Moreover, at the height of the 1944 nonrecognition crisis, Bolivian Foreign Minister José Tamayo had proposed the formation of an “austral bloc” of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile. Although Tamayo’s memorandum was denounced by all sides and he was immediately dropped from the cabinet, it added fuel to the fire.31
The State Department was not alone in its suspicions: even Villarroel’s first ambassador to Argentina apparently warned his president that “if I find any evidence of Peronist involvement in your coup, I’ll resign.”32 Evidently, he did not. The State Department never really found much, either. “So far as the Embassy is aware, it has never been proved that the Revolution of December 20, 1943, received any financial assistance from Argentina,” one foreign service officer observed, but “of course the charge was made by the Department of State” nonetheless. The U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires could find no evidence, either, except for a highly suspect report from Mauricio Hochschild, whose “penchant for stirring up trouble is well known,” as was his desire to see a government in La Paz more responsive to his interests.33 None of this, of course, deterred Braden from his course.
For their part, the Peronists did, to some extent, see the MNR as a potential ally. Both movements were, the Argentines believed, the targets of an unholy “Communist-oligarch” alliance that had been hammered together in Braden’s office in 1944 between José Arze and Mauricio Hochschild. Braden had supposedly told the tin baron and the PIR leader that “we shall kill the dog and then the fleas will die,” suggesting that his campaign against Perón would eventually lead to Villarroel’s demise. Whether the story was true or not, Peronists viewed the U.S. campaign against Villarroel as an effort to diplomatically “isolate the Argentine Republic.” In the view of the Argentine Embassy in La Paz, if Argentina could acquire “substantial quantities of tin” from Bolivia, “the economy of [that] country [would] change its center of influence” from Washington to Buenos Aires. Villarroel had entered discussions with Peronists to have the iron fields of Mutún opened up to Argentine capital, and in a matter of “greatest importance” to Bolivia, the Argentine Banco Central was offering him loans that Washington and Wall Street refused to consider.34
Despite, however, the Argentine courting of a prolabor government “unprecedented in the institutional history of [Bolivia],” U.S. diplomats reported that “the Bolivian Government has appeared to give the Argentine considerable reason for annoyance.” Bolivian diplomats concurred and even admitted privately that the Argentines had legitimate reasons for a certain mistrust of Villarroel. Disputes arose from Bolivia’s “misuse” of Argentine rolling stock and “its inefficiency in railway matters in general”; they had escalated to the extent that the Argentines had, at one point, recalled their ambassador from La Paz.35
Far more serious, however, was Villarroel’s willing participation in Assistant Secretary Braden’s embargo against Argentina. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation had purchased the entire Bolivian rubber production throughout the war and allocated it to the Allies. As a neutral, Argentina had received no rubber quota and, despite widespread smuggling, was suffering from serious shortages