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.