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The Quiet Experiment in American Diplomacy: An Interpretative Essay on United States Aid to the Bolivian Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

G. Earl Sanders
G. Earl Sanders*
Affiliation:
California State University, Northridge, Northridge, California
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Extract

In a personal letter dated October 1, 1953, to the President of the United States, Víctor Paz Estenssoro, President of the Republic of Bolivia, urgently appealed for both food and economic assistance for his nation. “Our availabilities in foreign currency,” Paz wrote, “have diminished so considerably through the fall in the price of tin and other minerals that we find ourselves in the insurmountable difficulty of not being able to provide food and other essential articles for the people, since in order to import them we need foreign currency.”

Never particularly stable, even by Latin American standards, the fragile fabric of the nation had been rent by the revolutionary change of April 1952 which brought the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario from underground and from exile to power. The MNR, led by Paz himself, had instituted rapid, radical modifications in the political, economic, and social structure of the country. These changes, however, exacted their toll. The most serious consequences were a decline in productivity of both minerals and foods. The nation, which had long depended on food imports, could not feed itself, and its foreign exchange earnings were insufficient to permit purchase of foodstuffs from abroad.

Type
Articles
Information
The Americas , Volume 33 , Issue 1 , July 1976 , pp. 25 - 49
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 1976

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References

1 U. S. Department of State, Bulletin, Vol. 29, p. 584.Google Scholar

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid., p. 82.

4 The best, although somewhat differing, treatments of the factors leading to the military reformist administrations of Toro and Busch are to be found in Klein, Herbert S., Parties and Political Change in Bolivia: 1880–1952 (Cambridge, 1969)Google Scholar and Malloy, James M., Bolivia: The Uncompleted Revolution (Pittsburgh, 1970)Google Scholar. Klein sees the Chaco War as the major stimulus in the rise of Toro and Busch (Chapters 6 and 7). Malloy, on the other hand, considers the Chaco War primarily an “accelerator” (after Chalmers Johnson); see his Chapter 4.

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44 Statistical Abstract of the United States (1952). Aid to the American Republics over the same year totaled over two hundred million dollars.

45 Letter to the author from Merwin L. Bohan dated July 12, 1971.

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76 Eighth Special Forces Group, First Special Forces, Historical Report (nd). Not all of the mobile training teams were “offensive” in nature, in the sense that they prepared the Bolivian armed forces to “hunt down” insurgents. A number were civic action in nature; however, civic action, besides the developmental or nation-building meaning it originally had, also took on a special connotation in counter-insurgency—the elimination of the factors that lead to insurgent movements (hunger, disease, illiteracy, etc.).

77 Ortuño, René Barrientos, Primer Mensaje del Presidente Barrientos (La Paz, 1964), p. 7 Google Scholar. “En el campo de la iniciativa privada, que tiene mucho que hacer en el país, incluyo a los inversionistos nacionales y extranjeros, quienes contarán con todas las garantías y todos los incentivos que dentro de la ley sean necessarios para que radiquen capitales en nuestro territorio al abrigo de un estatuo ecuánime y alentador.”

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87 Ibid., p. 353. Rostow is conventional in this sense; he also implies that U. S. recognition of nationalist movements (“transitional,” “developing,” or “colonial” areas) not only came as a result of their increasing significance, but also as a response to the Soviet drive to woo those areas, which had begun in 1953.

88 Graebner, Norman A., “The Limits of Military Aid,” Current History, Vol. 50–51 (June 1966), 353.Google Scholar