Arze and Paz Estenssoro both headed promising civilian movements, but a third force emerged within the ranks of the junior officers in the army in the 1940s. Whereas the PIR and MNR both sought some form of expanded democratization of Bolivian society and hoped to ally themselves with the nation’s rapidly growing labor unions, the third emerging faction, semisecret military lodges such as Iron Star and Razón de Patria (RADEPA; formerly Santa Cruz), sought for the most part authoritarian solutions to Bolivia’s many problems. Founded in a Paraguayan POW camp at the end of the Chaco War, RADEPA brought together disenchanted junior officers who were disgusted by the incompetence of their civilian leaders and military superiors. It was dedicated to nothing less than the renovation of the country and the elimination of the rosca’s stranglehold on the national polity. Fighting in the trenches, these junior officers had risked their lives with their troops while white, elite generals sat safely behind the lines and spent their time cultivating “politicians fishing for opportunities” and engaging in other political intrigues. Strongly influenced by European corporatist thought of the 1930s and bolstered by a strong sense of patriotism, RADEPA sought to revitalize the nation through a familiar mix of hierarchical statism and a vague brand of syndicalism. Although the military had long been the most formidable tool of the rosca, the officers of RADEPA saw their struggle as equal to Bolivia’s wars of independence; they proclaimed their willingness to die “for the noble ideal of forging our nationality.”35
Despite the increased call for radical reform from the working classes, the PIR, the MNR, RADEPA, and the other new parties and factions, the old order remained firmly in control during the early stages of World War II. General Enrique Peñaranda del Castillo, the chief of the army in the last year of the Chaco War, easily won election to the presidency in 1940, opposed only by José Antonio Arze and his PIR. Elected explicitly to maintain the status quo, Peñaranda did little to stave off the coming radical challenges and filled his cabinet with members of the traditional Liberal, Socialist, and Republican Parties. World War II, however, forced difficult choices on the regime when Japanese expansion in Southeast Asia cut off the United States and Great Britain from their traditional sources of tin.36
Peñaranda bowed to necessity by opting for virtually total cooperation with Washington. In 1937, “military socialists” had, as part of the post-Chaco wave of nationalism, expropriated Standard Oil’s properties in Bolivia, driving a wedge between the United States and Bolivia. With war looming, U.S. policy makers hoped to unite the hemisphere against the Axis and to secure a reliable source of tin for war industries by working toward rapprochement with Peñaranda’s government. Eager to partake of U.S. economic and military aid, Peñaranda was quick to respond. He welcomed a team led by State Department officer Merwin Bohan to develop a program for economic diversification of the Bolivian economy, agreed to a number of “denazification” measures, and signed a military assistance pact. Most important, he settled with Standard Oil soon after Pearl Harbor and agreed to pay the company $1.5 million for its expropriated properties. He was rewarded with Lend-Lease aid and financial assistance to start implementing the Bohan Mission’s findings. In short, the war brought the two nations into an unprecedented partnership and seemed to offer the promise of future cooperation.37 The only dark cloud on the horizon was the undecided price for Bolivia’s tin.
Peñaranda eventually agreed to sell the nation’s entire tin production to the Allies for a price well below what most Bolivians expected. Even worse, the tin barons, with at least tacit U.S. support, squeezed their labor force to maximize production and profits. The deteriorating working conditions in the mines and the restrictive contracts with the United States, which, nationalists claimed, cost Bolivia as much as $650 million in lost revenues throughout the war, provided easy fodder for dissidents.38 The “unfavorable contracts over raw materials, the commitments to contribute to the democratic cause, the inhuman persecution of Japanese and Germans[, who had] settled for many years in the country”—persecution undertaken at the behest of the United States—brought nothing but “pain, grieving, and impoverishment” to the Bolivian people. As the foremost standard-bearers of this critique, which melded xenophobia, outrage toward Peñaranda’s subjugation of the national interest, and traditional antirosquismo, Paz Estenssoro and the MNR rapidly emerged as the foremost opposition group.39
Although Malloy describes the wartime MNR as a “small group of intellectuals stirring up what fuss they could,” the Roosevelt administration considered it the most dangerous element in Bolivian politics. In late 1941, British agents, presumably hoping to cement Peñaranda’s support for the Allied cause, had forged letters incriminating elements of the MNR and the officer corps in a conspiracy with the Germans to overthrow him. The MNR accused Peñaranda’s cabinet of forging the letters, but the State Department, alarmed over the apparent Nazi threat to the Western Hemisphere, unquestioningly accepted the forgeries as real.40 As a result, no U.S. diplomat could view the MNR as anything less than Nazi tainted for years. This was not an entirely unjustified view. In 1941, on the anniversary of Hitler’s ascension to power, one MNR newspaper editorialized that “the lesson of Hitler and the New Germany is a lesson of optimism” and that Bolivia, with its history of territorial loss to all of its neighbors, had “much to learn from Lebensraum.” U.S. diplomats, already predisposed to view every event in Latin America through the prism of the war, became fixated on the “anti–United States and anti-Jewish” MNR.41
On 21 December 1942, a violent incident at Patiño’s Siglo XX tin mine in Catavi created the opportunity the MNR had long sought. When miners assembled to protest for improved conditions and higher wages—they were earning less than $1.50 a day—Peñaranda’s troops fired upon them, killing dozens, if not hundreds. The MNR and the PIR immediately escalated their efforts against the government; the leaders of the MNR branded Peñaranda a tool of the rosca in general and of Patiño in particular. For its part, Aramayo’s La Razón condemned the workers for seeking wages of $1.50 a day and lauded the president for his decisive action.
The Catavi Massacre exposed the hypocrisy and brutality of the old order for all to see and thoroughly discredited the government, even in the eyes of its U.S. patrons. Peñaranda clung to power for another year, but his fate was sealed. The PIR worked toward a popular revolt, several generals plotted their own coups, and the MNR forged alliances with the RADEPA and Iron Star lodges. The MNR and RADEPA won the race to unseat Peñaranda, and their “Revolution of the Majors” seized power almost a year to the day after the massacre.42
According to Paz Estenssoro, the MNR had been involved in several plots that had been brewing for months and had even attempted to seize Peñaranda weeks earlier in Cochabamba. At one point, Peñaranda’s chief of the General Staff offered his loyalty to the MNR in exchange for its support, and another general, Angel Rodríguez, apparently approached Paz Estenssoro to enlist the MNR’s participation in a plot financed by Mauricio Hochschild. Paz Estenssoro “terminated this conversation” by telling the general that “he would be delighted to [participate] if Rodríguez would promise to execute Hochschild the day after they took power.” Allying himself instead with junior officers such as Major Gualberto Villarroel López and the members of RADEPA, Paz Estenssoro understood that he had to move quickly: Peñaranda planned a crackdown on the MNR immediately after Christmas 1943.43
The president apparently remained ignorant of the plots against him, despite a number of mistakes by the MNR and RADEPA. The Ecuadoran Embassy in La Paz somehow acquired details of the coup the day before it occurred,