ABBREVIATIONS
COB Central Obrera Boliviana
COMIBOL Corporación Minera de Bolivia
CTC Combined Tin Committee
DPA Defense Production Agency
FDA Frente Democrático Antifascista
FEA Foreign Economic Administration
FSTMB Federación Sindical de Trabajadores Mineros de Bolivia
ITA International Tin Agreement
ITC International Tin Committee; International Tin Council (after 1956)
ITO International Trade Organization
MNR Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario
OAS Organization of American States
PIR Partido de la Izquierda Revolucionaria
POR Partido Obrero Revolucionario
PURS Partido de la Unión Republicana Socialista
RADEPA Razón de Patria
RFC Reconstruction Finance Corporation
The use of the word “democratic” throughout this dispatch, as applied to the present government of Bolivia, should be construed in its limited sense as distinguishing the type of government, i.e., as against a dictatorship, communist regime, et cetera, rather than that it embraces all other generally accepted concepts in the meaning of the adjective “democratic.” It might otherwise be described as a liberal constitutional oligarchy.
The Bolivian case, in schematic definition, is one of three and a half million inhabitants, dominated and exploited by a minority who utilizes the visible forms of a democratic regime to give the patent of legality and perpetuate essentially undemocratic privileges.
—Víctor Paz Estenssoro, March 1951
On 16 October 2003, truckloads of workers descended on La Paz, Bolivia, to help unseat an unpopular, corrupt, decadent regime, break the back of the free market economy it espoused, broaden Bolivian democracy, and seize control of the nation’s subsoil riches. It was not the first time they had done so. In April 1952, tin miners rallied to the defense of Víctor Paz Estenssoro, his Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR), and their National Revolution against “liberal constitutional oligarchy.” Whereas what has been called the “Third Bolivian Revolution” of 2000 to 2006 paved the way for Evo Morales’s landslide presidential victory, however, the National Revolution put an end to the sexenio—the Bolivian elites’ unsuccessful six-year battle to preserve the established order against a rising tide of popular unrest. That the United States, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank helped set the stage for the latest revolution—by encouraging the Bolivian adoption of neoliberalism and the “Washington consensus” and by militarizing the eradication of coca as part of the War on Drugs—is well documented.1 Much less studied was Washington’s role in events leading to the National Revolution of 1952.
The story of U.S.-Bolivian relations in the years after World War II represents a unique convergence of three major factors. The first was the efforts of President Harry S. Truman to forge a global liberal capitalist order by overcoming South American nationalists who threatened to derail those plans. The second was the efforts of the Bolivian rosca to preserve its hold on power in the face of a fierce revolutionary challenge from 1946 to 1952 (the sexenio). A third factor was decisive, however, in shaping this all-too-familiar clash between South American nationalism and U.S. hegemony: the determination of U.S. national security planners to secure a more or less permanent source of cheap tin vital for defense industries at the onset of the Cold War. As Bolivian leaders fought to stave off revolution, they anticipated resistance from the forces of populist nationalism but had every right to expect U.S. support. What they did not anticipate was that they would be undercut at almost every turn by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), a U.S. agency given exceptional authority to secure a tin stockpile and dismantle an international tin cartel that had vexed Washington for decades.
For six years, four Bolivian governments desperately sought U.S. support as they battled on every front to forestall the ascension of Paz Estenssoro’s MNR. Truman’s State Department, hoping that the governments of Tomás Monje Gutiérrez, Enrique Hertzog Garaizábal, Mamerto Urrioagoitia Harriague, and General Hugo Ballivián Rojas could succeed in that venture, sought to provide what aid it could. U.S. diplomats, however, found themselves time and time again at loggerheads with the RFC, an independent government agency created by Herbert Hoover to assist in domestic recovery at the height of the Great Depression. With the outbreak of war, Franklin Roosevelt had turned the procurement of critical imports like tin and rubber over to the technocrats, whose primary mandate was to purchase as much Bolivian tin as possible at the least cost to U.S. taxpayers. Each year of the sexenio, an increasingly acrimonious ritual played out in Washington as RFC functionaries entered negotiations with the tin barons and representatives of the Bolivian government. For the Bolivians, the goal was always to secure as high a price as possible to finance modest reforms that might at least stave off an apparently inevitable revolutionary transformation of the country. Despite the efforts of a sympathetic but largely powerless State Department, they enjoyed little success, and in April 1952, the National Revolution finally occurred. Not entirely coincidentally, it occurred in a bankrupted nation as nearly a year and a half of tin shipments sat on Chilean docks awaiting a tin contract that never came.
Although it is impossible to know with certainty—despite Assistant Secretary of State Spruille Braden’s firm assertion to the contrary—whether RFC “bungling” was responsible for the National Revolution and the triumph of the MNR, even Secretary of State Dean Acheson conceded that the agency’s policies contributed to the weakening of four Bolivian governments at a time when they could ill afford it. The tin crisis may not have caused the National Revolution, but, as historian James Dunkerley has eloquently put it, “it was a decided mess within which the status quo was unraveling as fast as its opponents were consolidating.”2 Caught between the revolutionary plotters of the MNR and the thoroughly reactionary tin barons and landlords who dominated almost all facets of Bolivian society, the Monje, Hertzog, Urriolagoitia, and Ballivián regimes faced almost impossible challenges. Not the least of these was their own disunity, incompetence, and inability to understand just how precarious their control over the nation truly was. Still, the role of the Truman administration must not be underestimated. For six years, President Truman permitted the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to exploit a monopolistic position to punish not only the tin barons, but also the Bolivian governments that parasitically survived off the taxes they paid. If a middle course between stagnation and revolution had even been possible, then the RFC eliminated that small chance.
Postwar U.S. Policy in South America
The Truman administration, dominated by the final stages of World War II, reconversion to a peacetime economy, the onset of the Cold War in Europe and Asia, and the battle to create a new global economic order based on liberal capitalism, had few resources to dedicate to Latin America. Although the Western Hemisphere had once been the central preoccupation of U.S. diplomats, the emergence of the United States as a superpower stretched U.S. economic, military, and diplomatic assets to their limit at a moment when revolutionary nationalism was being galvanized across South America. Occurring in tandem, these developments created a confusing panorama that has impeded formation of any real historiographical consensus regarding the diplomacy of postwar inter-American relations.
The onset of the Cold War has probably been the foremost contributor to this confusion. As Stephen