Bolivia: Friend or Foe?

Bolivia has always been a country of personalities rather than parties, and this is just as true in our time of social revolutions as it was in the century of caudillos that succeeded Bolivar, General Hilarión Daza, who was in command at La Paz when Chile seized Bolivia’s seacoast in 1879, reputedly failed to react in time because he neglected to transfer the unopened telegram containing this bad news to the pocket of a domino costume from Paris which he had just donned to participate in a weekend masquerade.

The Bolivian social revolution of 1952, that nationalized tin and gave land to the peasants, capsized because one of its two leaders found reckless bravery no substitute for diplomacy and the other succumbed to old-fashioned fiscal corruption. Their successor, and General Ovando’s predecessor, General Rene Barrientos, survived (until he sideslipped his helicopter into a power line) because his machismo endeared him to the campe- sinos: His diversion of state funds to personal extravaganzas counted for nothing beside his jovial acknowledgements of paternity when confronted by his many peasant mistresses, or his leap from a plane to prove that at least one of his paratroopers’ chutes was capable of opening. During Che Guevara’s ill-conceived invasion, the Bolivian saying was that the only sure way of defeating the Communists would be to give them Bolivia and watch them die of indigestion.

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Selden Rodman

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Bolivia has always been a country of personalities rather than parties, and this is just as true in our time of social revolutions as it was in the century of caudillos that succeeded Bolivar, General Hilarión Daza, who was in command at La Paz when Chile seized Bolivia’s seacoast in 1879, reputedly failed to react in time because he neglected to transfer the unopened telegram containing this bad news to the pocket of a domino costume from Paris which he had just donned to participate in a weekend masquerade.

The Bolivian social revolution of 1952, that nationalized tin and gave land to the peasants, capsized because one of its two leaders found reckless bravery no substitute for diplomacy and the other succumbed to old-fashioned fiscal corruption. Their successor, and General Ovando’s predecessor, General Rene Barrientos, survived (until he sideslipped his helicopter into a power line) because his machismo endeared him to the campe- sinos: His diversion of state funds to personal extravaganzas counted for nothing beside his jovial acknowledgements of paternity when confronted by his many peasant mistresses, or his leap from a plane to prove that at least one of his paratroopers’ chutes was capable of opening. During Che Guevara’s ill-conceived invasion, the Bolivian saying was that the only sure way of defeating the Communists would be to give them Bolivia and watch them die of indigestion.