The New-Left Rightists in Bolivia

As an Old Bolivian Hand who had visited the West’s highest country three times without ever seeing its tropical lowlands, I had more than one motive for starting my fourth trip in Santa Cruz. The city is only an hour’s flight across the Gran Chaco from Asunción, Paraguay, where I was staying. And it had been the scene not only of the military conspiracy under Colonel Hugo Banzer Suárez that had ousted General Juan José Torres and his Communist colleagues last year, but of the oil and gas installations of the Gulf Oil Company whose expropriation on October 17, 1969 by the Ovando regime led directly to the Marxists’ takeover under Torres a few months later. I wanted to find out, before proceeding to Cochabamba and La Paz, what the conservative lowlanders thought of the takeover and how it had affected them. I wanted to see the oil fields and ask the workers whether they wanted Gulf back. And finally I wanted for once to avoid the altitude sickness that had always laid me low on landing at La Paz’s 13,500-foot airport; everyone assured me that by creeping up gradually by way of Cochabamba I would “outwit” the soroche.

Santa Cruz is Bolivia’s “frontier” city. In an undeveloped region as big as Texas, it is surrounded by unexplored jungles, Amazon-type rivers, fertile fields for growing year-round crops—not to mention immense mineral and petroleum deposits. Its citizens—like those of Guayaquil in Ecuador or San Pedro Sula in Honduras—deeply resent being exploited by the “drones” of the highland capital, and pride themselves on an enterprising individuality that they never tire of comparing with the pioneer spirit of nineteenth-century America. Their provincial capital has none of the Hispanic art treasures of cities like Sucre and Potosí in the Andes to the west, but its people are warm and hospitable and more than once have threatened to make common cause with Brazil or Argentina unless permitted reasonable autonomy.

SR

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Selden Rodman

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As an Old Bolivian Hand who had visited the West’s highest country three times without ever seeing its tropical lowlands, I had more than one motive for starting my fourth trip in Santa Cruz. The city is only an hour’s flight across the Gran Chaco from Asunción, Paraguay, where I was staying. And it had been the scene not only of the military conspiracy under Colonel Hugo Banzer Suárez that had ousted General Juan José Torres and his Communist colleagues last year, but of the oil and gas installations of the Gulf Oil Company whose expropriation on October 17, 1969 by the Ovando regime led directly to the Marxists’ takeover under Torres a few months later. I wanted to find out, before proceeding to Cochabamba and La Paz, what the conservative lowlanders thought of the takeover and how it had affected them. I wanted to see the oil fields and ask the workers whether they wanted Gulf back. And finally I wanted for once to avoid the altitude sickness that had always laid me low on landing at La Paz’s 13,500-foot airport; everyone assured me that by creeping up gradually by way of Cochabamba I would “outwit” the soroche.

Santa Cruz is Bolivia’s “frontier” city. In an undeveloped region as big as Texas, it is surrounded by unexplored jungles, Amazon-type rivers, fertile fields for growing year-round crops—not to mention immense mineral and petroleum deposits. Its citizens—like those of Guayaquil in Ecuador or San Pedro Sula in Honduras—deeply resent being exploited by the “drones” of the highland capital, and pride themselves on an enterprising individuality that they never tire of comparing with the pioneer spirit of nineteenth-century America. Their provincial capital has none of the Hispanic art treasures of cities like Sucre and Potosí in the Andes to the west, but its people are warm and hospitable and more than once have threatened to make common cause with Brazil or Argentina unless permitted reasonable autonomy.