Siekmeier’s study of Bolivia reveals that this was the case on the Altiplano as well, and the stakes for the U.S. vision were high. Not only was Víctor Paz Estenssoro’s MNR, like Peronism, mistakenly considered an offshoot of European Fascism, but also Bolivian tin was critical for both the U.S. economy and the new demands of the national security state. Scholars such as John Child, Chester Pach, and Roger Trask have explored how the Truman administration militarized its diplomatic relations with Latin America through the Rio Conference, arms standardization, and military cooperation. The desperate need for Bolivian tin added yet another dimension and an element of urgency to U.S.-Bolivian relations.13 As Dwight Eisenhower put it later, “it would be much better to have tin in Fort Knox than gold.” Because the United States produced almost no tin for its own military or civilian needs and World War II had disrupted the global tin industry, Bolivia suddenly acquired an importance for Washington that it had never had, nor would ever have again.14 The global tin shortage of the postwar years also guaranteed that U.S. diplomacy would be conducted not only by the State Department, but also by the wartime and postwar procurement agencies, whose agendas were far different. The results were little short of disastrous for the governments of Bolivia as their nation’s security and stability were subordinated to the demands of U.S. reconversion and European reconstruction.
Instead of acting to undo or at least mitigate the damage, the Truman administration, not perceiving a major Communist menace, simply braced for the consequences of what it saw as an inevitable “coming depression” in South America. Most Latin American nations had enjoyed the benefits of exporting large quantities of raw materials to the Allies at good prices during the war, but the war was now drawing to a close. Assuming that Asian and European production would soon be restored, U.S. policy makers understood that the “cessation” of U.S. purchases would “result in our being blamed in large part for the ensuing depression.” Naturally, “friendliness toward the United States [might] be expected to wane.”15 In other words, at the exact moment that radical nationalism was reaching its peak, the postwar economic order espoused by Washington was poised to create a climate in which it would flourish to the detriment of U.S. diplomacy. The State Department would be facing a wave of nationalist challenges aimed explicitly at the economic order the Truman administration was hoping to build; it would be shackled by its inability to completely control U.S. foreign policy. Bolivia offered perhaps the most striking example.
The Bolivian Political Economy
Whereas the United States stood alone as the most stable and prosperous nation in the Western Hemisphere, if not the world, prewar Bolivia had long been among the most unstable and impoverished. Landlocked since the War of the Pacific in 1879, Bolivia had endured more than sixty separate governments in its first 125 years as a nation. Its land, however, was a treasure trove of mineral wealth. The silver mines of Potosí had inexorably drawn the Spanish to the heart of South America and become graves for millions of Native Americans. The Spanish had been content to plunder what would become Bolivia, heedless of the consequences of their actions, and after independence, their successors had not deviated too far from that unfortunate example. In short, Bolivia’s social and economic patterns remained disturbingly close to their colonial antecedents, with the rosca replacing Spaniards as feudal overlords, ruthlessly exploiting the indigenous masses to tear profit from the land.16
The two distinct groups making up the rosca, the landed hacendado aristocracy and the enormously wealthy tin barons, had dominated all facets of the Bolivian political economy for decades. The white rural elite enjoyed almost completely unchallenged rule throughout much of the nation, dominating local politics in most departamentos and rarely needing to join the national political fray. They paid “ludicrously light” taxes (less than one-fifth of a percent) based on their own undervalued assessments of their lands and built fortunes on the backs of their indigenous workforce with tools and practices that had changed little, if at all, in more than three centuries. Sharecropping colonos, almost indistinguishable from serfs, had scant incentive or opportunity to produce more. Landowners, with almost no expenses and a virtually guaranteed income, had even less incentive to risk upsetting their lucrative but stagnant system.17 They simply rented parcels to the colonos in exchange for three to four days a week of free labor on their land, the “rent-in-labor” system, and demanded additional personal service through pongueaje and mitanaje. The indigenous masses, most of whom spoke Aymara or Quechua rather than Spanish, were so isolated from the national political economy that, when defining the terms “Bolivia” and “Bolivian,” U.S. diplomat James Espy clarified that he was referring only to “the literate, dominant classes of people” and not to “the toiling Indian or other manual workers,” whose primitive, subsistence agriculture combined the most onerous aspects of feudalism and slavery.18
Still, according to political scientist James M. Malloy, the “dominant culture saw the city as the repository of civilization and the hacienda, its rural outpost” against the indigenous masses. What remained outside the control of the hacendados was what Malloy has called the “national system,” centered in the capital, La Paz, and extending to Cochabamba, Oruro, Potosí, Sucre, and the tin mining camps. As absolutely as the landed elite ruled the countryside, mining executives, most notably the tin barons Carlos Aramayo, Mauricio Hochschild, and Simón Patiño—the “Big Three”—ruled the cities and mining camps. Because the tin ore and other minerals they pried from the Altiplano constituted more than 80 percent of Bolivian exports, they were the economic backbone of the nation.19
The influence of these men extended far beyond economics, however. For example, Aramayo owned La Razón, the largest and most influential newspaper in the country, Hochschild had partial control over Ultima Hora, while Patiño owned one-third of El Diario. Through their wealth, power, and control over most of the news outlets, the tin barons constituted nothing less than what their critics claimed was a “superstate” that far overshadowed the national government. Nonetheless, because their wealth made them the most visible target of reformers, the barons were forced to pay the lion’s share of taxes to support the state; their partners in the rosca, the landed aristocracy, paid next to nothing.20
Although Mauricio Hochschild was generally considered to be the most politically active of the tin barons, and Carlos Aramayo the most ruthless, Simón Patiño, one of the ten richest men in the world and the “King of Tin (Rey del Estaño),” was without a doubt the most formidable. Starting with one tin mine, “La Salvadora,” which for a time produced 10 percent of all the world’s tin, Patiño had built a globe-spanning empire by 1930. He controlled the richest tin veins in Bolivia and used his profits to purchase controlling interest in the 95,000-ton capacity Williams, Harvey tin smelter in England, establishing the Consolidated Tin Smelters, Ltd., in 1929. Within five years, his General Tin Industries, incorporated in Delaware and allied with the National Lead Company, had gained control of more than fifteen British and German tin smelters and mines across Southeast Asia. His name became as synonymous with tin as Henry Ford’s was with the automobile.21 Although Patiño died in 1947, his son, Antenor, followed closely in his father’s footsteps, ensuring that Simón Patiño’s legacy would persist through the sexenio.
Still, the tin barons by and large remained above most Bolivian politics. An urban petit bourgeoisie, directly or indirectly dependent on the barons for its financial well-being, constituted what passed for the Bolivian political class. Composed largely of mine company employees, bureaucrats, lawyers, doctors, and other professionals, this mostly urban middle class created political parties, managed government, regularly contested