The Truman Administration and Bolivia. Glenn J. Dorn

candidate.26

      For its part, the PURS nominated physician Enrique Hertzog Garaizábal, one of the original founders of the FDA, a Chaco War veteran, and a bureaucrat who had held a variety of cabinet posts throughout the 1930s. His Genuine Republicans, generally regarded as the most conservative and pro-rosca of the parties making up the PURS, also boasted the largest membership. The Socialists and Waldo Belmonte Pool’s Socialist Republicans introduced a spirit of tentative reform to the PURS platform. With the MNR outlawed and the PIR taking a backseat in the presidential campaign, the election of 1947 bore a distinct resemblance to the old intra-elite contests of the 1920s and 1930s between the Liberals and Republicans. Just months after what “experienced observers” considered the “bloodiest” revolution in the nation’s history, Bolivian politics had degenerated to little more than prewar personalism.27

      

      Although deemed to be a clean election by almost all sides, the contest could be considered democratic only in the loosest possible sense of the word. The electorate was composed of fewer than one hundred thousand upper- and middle-class men of European or mestizo descent. That this 3 percent of the population was also the group with the least interest in meaningful reform or any major transformation of the status quo virtually guaranteed a bland campaign. Indeed, both Guachalla and Hertzog clearly represented the old, stagnant order, and both promised only modest reform. So similar were the candidates in their political views that they published a number of joint statements during the campaign on the major issues confronting postrevolutionary Bolivia. Indeed, Guachalla would later become an instrumental member of several of Hertzog’s cabinets.28 The only party that could have interjected anything resembling a genuine call for national rejuvenation, the Partido de la Izquierda Revolucionaria, inexplicably refused to enter the fray.

      Why the PIR, at the apparent apogee of its political popularity, chose to adopt such a low profile remains something of a mystery. U.S. diplomats suggested several explanations for José Arze’s tentative approach. On the one hand, the piristas were occupied by the formidable task of recapturing the “consciences of the mine workers put to sleep by the Nazi Villarroel demagoguery.” On the other, Arze might also have determined that a concerted move for the presidency by the PIR would bring the violently anti-Communist and historically anti-PIR army out of its barracks in response. Until the party had consolidated its position fully within the working class, such a move might be premature, not only because of the military’s hostility, but also because the oligarchy might easily extend its repression of the MNR to the “Communists” of the PIR. Even as Arze concentrated on winning over junior officers and securing a majority in Congress, he understood all too well that the entrenched leadership of the military would not countenance a pirista government and that his best hope lay in supporting and working through Guachalla and the Liberals, whose government the piristas could presumably dominate.29

      The United States and the Cold War might also have been on Arze’s mind. The PIR leadership was nervous, unjustifiably it turned out, about the U.S. reaction to a pirista government. Indeed, Arze’s lieutenant, Ricardo Anaya, approached Ambassador Flack in early August to broach this very subject. Anaya believed that there was “strong feeling against the PIR in the United States” because of the party’s “presumed Leftist orientation” and feared that U.S. aid would be “cut off” if it came to power. Even though opponents of the PIR routinely branded it “Communist,” however, Flack did not; for him, the party was, at worst, “perhaps slightly tinged with pink.”30 After poring through countless FBI reports, the ambassador had concluded that Arze, Anaya, and their fellow piristas, despite effusive praise for Soviet Communism and frequent rhetoric denouncing imperialistic capitalism, were “generally friendly to the United States.” Indeed, Arze, who had worked for Nelson Rockefeller’s Office of Inter-American Affairs while in exile during the war, publicly professed his “admiration and affection” for the United States and understood that, “without the frank aid of the U.S., Bolivia could not raise its economic level.”31 Flack estimated that the PIR had the support of more than 80 percent of the electorate and predicted that, in the coming elections, “the PIR will get a working majority” in Congress and “the next President of the Republic will be a man who takes Arze’s orders.” Confident that the PIR was neither “a Communist organization” nor “likely to develop into one,” Flack welcomed the party’s ascension to power. Indeed, he reassured his superiors that a PIR victory would “presage a period of harmonious United States–Bolivian relations.”32

      Ultimately, lukewarm PIR support was not enough to carry Guachalla to the presidency on 5 January. Of the nearly ninety-three thousand total votes cast, Hertzog won by a margin of fewer than four hundred votes, and with that tenuous mandate, the PURS coalition assumed national leadership. Although Paz Estenssoro predictably denounced the elections as “fixed,” most U.S. and Latin American witnesses could only laud them as the “purest and most extraordinary in the memory of the country.” The incoming president immediately sought to assemble a government of national unity by inviting not only Guachalla but also the PIR into his cabinet.33

      As the traditional parties divided the spoils of their victory, the MNR was forced into a major reassessment. One faction, led by Rafael Otazo, argued for moderation and an eventual peaceful reentry into Bolivian politics. Paz Estenssoro, however, argued that only through revolution could the old order be overturned, and, if anything, the example of Villarroel proved that a barracks coup would not suffice. Paz Estenssoro’s path required a more militant agenda and a much closer alliance with radicalized mine workers. If the MNR saw alliance with the unions as a means to co-opt them, the unions viewed it as an opportunity to infiltrate a political party. Juan Lechín became, at this point, an even more important figure than Paz Estenssoro. With one foot in the MNR and the other in the FSTMB, Lechín was in many ways the link between the intellectuals in exile and the masses in the mines and streets. While the MNR brought organization and a path to power to the workers, the workers transformed the party from a small, tightly knit upper-class venture into a true multiclass mass organization. It would be years, however, before this strategy bore fruit, and, until then, the old parties and the PIR would have national politics to themselves.34

      In the end, U.S. policy makers could hardly have been more pleased with Bolivian developments since the 1946 revolution. The State Department’s highest priority was the elimination of MNR influence, and every party now meaningfully represented in the executive and legislative branches of government was thoroughly committed to keeping Paz Estenssoro in Buenos Aires, or at least out of La Paz. Moreover, the Liberals, spearheading the opposition, had a vested interest in eradicating the economic nationalism that characterized the MNR. Not even the inclusion of the PIR in Hertzog’s cabinet soured Cold War Washington on the new government. Ambassador Flack reminded his superiors that, despite the PIR’s “clenched fist symbol” and a program that “at least roughly parallel[ed] that of the Communists,” there was “no evidence to prove any direct connection between the PIR and Soviet Communism.” Indeed, he asserted, “at the present time there is no Soviet Communism in Bolivia worthy of serious consideration.”35 Because the PIR had more to lose than any other party if the MNR did return to power, the State Department was easily able to find common ground with the closest thing Bolivia had to Communism. Liberal constitutional oligarchy was alive and well.

      The 1947 Tin Contract