Loren Goldner's detailed account and analysis of the Bolivian Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR) which was the key player in the 1952 national revolution, and which was supported by the left despite its pro-fascist, corporatist tendencies.

The following recounts the evolution of the core pre-MNR intelligentsia and future leadership of the movement and its post-1952 government from anti-Semitic, pro-fascist, pro-Axis ideologues in the mid-1930′s to bourgeois nationalists receiving considerable US aid after 1952. The MNR leadership, basically after Stalingrad, began to “reinvent itself” in response to the impending Allied victory, not to mention huge pressure from the U.S. in various forms starting ca. 1942.

However much the MNR purged itself of its “out-of-date” philofascism by the time it came to power, I wish to show it in the larger context of the top-down, state-driven corporatism that developed in key Latin American countries in this period, specifically Argentina, Brazil and (in a different way) Mexico through the Cardenas period.

The following is a demonstration that, contrary to what contemporary complacent leftist opinion in the West thinks, there is a largely forgotten history of reactionary populist and “anti-imperialist” movements in the underdeveloped world that do not shrink from mobilizing the working class to achieve their goals.

This little-remembered background is all the more important for understanding the dynamics of the left-populist governments which have emerged in Latin America since the 1990’s.

The following text is a history and analysis of the fascist and proto-fascist ideologies which shaped the pre-history and early history of the Bolivian MNR (Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario) from 1936 to its seizure of power in 1952.

Friends and comrades who know of my brief (two week) visit to Bolivia in fall 2010 have generally been expecting the text to be a critique of the contemporary government of Evo Morales and the MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo). That was in fact part of my intention in going there, but the enormity of the task, the brevity of my visit and my experiences there began to alter that plan after I returned to the U.S. My momentum in writing about the present was also undercut by the discovery of the excellent articles of Jeffery Webber on Morales’s neo-liberal economic policies since coming to power, based on much more in-depth research and a much longer involvement in Bolivia itself than mine, saying more or less exactly what I intended to say, and more . Finally, in past writing about different countries (e.g. Portugal, Spain, Korea) an indispensable aid has always been finding “my crowd” in such places, and while I met many excellent people who gave freely of their time and knowledge, this did not occur in Bolivia.

But the impulse behind the direction the article finally took lies deeper. Long ago I was deeply influenced by the book of Jean-Pierre Faye, Langages totalitaires (published in France in 1972, and still outrageously not translated into English) which describes the “oscillation” between the elements of the far left and the far right in Germany between 1890 and 1933 (personified in the figure of Karl Radek), the “red-brown” crossover between nationalism and socialism that ultimately produced …National Socialism and its more radical spinoff, the National Bolsheviks. These various “Trotskyists of Nazism” (such as those most famously associated with the “red” wing of the Nazi Party led by the likes of Ernst Roehm and Gregor Strasser) were massacred by Hitler’s SS along with hundreds of others on the “Night of the Long Knives” in 1934. (Faye hints briefly in an afterward at a “National Bolshevik” moment in Bolivia, though in the 1970’s, not in the period leading up to the MNR revolution of 1952.) There was the further enticing hint of the very same Ernst Roehm’s two-year presence in the Bolivian Army High Command in the late 1920’s, which in fact turned out to confirm my early working hypothesis in spades. Finally, I noticed that even the best treatments of the early MNR founders gave short shrift to their fascist moment.

Lacking access to “my crowd” in Bolivia (if it in fact exists), I had to fall back on books and whatever discussions came up. Almost immediately I encountered what would be a main, and troubling, theme of the trip: the apparently widespread belief that Marxism, class, capitalism and socialism were “Eurocentric” concepts, to which the “plurinational”, “pachakuti” higher synthesis of “European” and “Andean-Amazonian” cultures—essentially the ideology of the regime– was the real alternative. It seemed on further inquiry to be a local variant of the identity politics that had overwhelmed much of the Western left after the defeat of the upsurge of the 1960’s and 1970’s.

While this is indeed the ideology of the Morales regime and is articulated by staffers, foreign and local, of the swarm of NGOs from which the regime seems to have drawn many of its personnel, I first heard it from the intellectually-inclined manager of a La Paz bookstore, where I was buying volumes of the Trotskyist Guillermo Lora’s highly useful (if politically not fully reliable) history of the Bolivian working class. What was particularly troubling about this “discourse” (to use a loathsome word from contemporary faddish jargon) was the utter caricature of the West to which the indigenous side of the synthesis was counterposed. It was as if, in these people’s experience, 1950’s Soviet-type Zhdanovian “Marxism” was all they had ever encountered. Marxism was “linear” “developmentalist” and hardly different epistemologically from Newton and Descartes .

Octavio Paz once described Latin America as the “suburbs of history”, trapped for geopolitical reasons in something of a backwater. I would not want to exaggerate this, particularly since, in the law of combined and uneven development, today’s apparent backwater can be tomorrow’s cutting edge. But in conversations with militants in Bolivia and then Peru ( where I also spent a week in fall 2010) it emerged that almost no one had ever heard of Marx’s Ethnographic Notebooks, Rosa Luxemburg’s extensive writings on pre-capitalist societies (in her Introduction to Political Economy ), the Grundrisse (though it was translated into Spanish in 1972), Ernst Bloch, Korsch, Lukacs, the Hegel Renaissance in Marxism generally, I.I. Rubin, Bordiga, German- Dutch council communism, the Socialism or Barbarism group, Guy Debord, Camatte, Dauvé , CLR James or many other figures one could mention from the ferment in the West since the 1950’s. Rosa Luxemburg seemed little known, and even Trotskyism (the major current of the Bolivian working class from the 1940’s to the 1980’s) seemed to have been largely eclipsed by the perspective of “social movements” and pluri-nationality. (In Peru, the left is dominated by Stalinism and Maoism, with Trotskyism a poor third; the Shining Path movement is making a comeback with guerrilla action in the countryside and a significant urban base of supporters.)

Much could be said about this, and since I was little more (where Andean South America is concerned) than a better-informed-than- average tourist, I hesitate to press very far. In addition to the Aymara and Quechua majority, there are approximately 35 identified “ethnicities” in Bolivia, such as the Guarani in the Amazonian region. One Aymara woman in Cochabamba told me “yes, I was an anarcho-Marxist militant for a number of years, but then I realized that these were Eurocentric ideas”. When I countered, hoping to draw her out, that a large number of the Trotskyist miner militants from the 1940’s to the 1980’s had been Quechua or Aymara, she replied that, “yes, that was true, but up until recently the left never talked about it. For the left, they were just workers.”

Clearly the turning point in modern Bolivian history and the backdrop to this ideological turn was the gutting of the mines under the mid-1980’s neo-liberal regime, in which 80% of Bolivia’s miners were laid off and dispersed around the country . It was a rollback as great as Thatcher’s defeat of the British miners’ strike, at exactly the same time. Many of these miners did manage to re-establish themselves somewhat, particularly in the huge hard-scrabble exurb of El Alto, just above La Paz, where the 2005 gas war was centered and which was definitely strengthened by their earlier militant experience of mass struggle .

One sad reality of the trip, however, was the absence from Bolivia, while I was there, of Oscar Oliveira, by all accounts a central self-effacing rank-and-file leader of both (2000 and 2003) water wars. Prior to 2000, he had been a militant in a shoe factory. His book, Cochabamba! , contains his riveting account of the uprisings, which amounted to the constitution of a virtual soviet taking over the city and stopping the privatization of the local water works, a “social movement” that pulled in what seemed at times like almost the whole population. The savagery of the privatization law was such that, in addition to price increases sometimes amounting to 20% of family incomes, people with wells on their property were required to cap them, and it was illegal to trap rain water in a barrel.

Oscar Oliveira also made a scathing critique of the Morales government in August 2010 , having been declared an “enemy” by Morales two years earlier. In summer 2010, he decided to withdraw from political activity, apparently deeply demoralized. At the time, he was the head of the Federación de Trabajadores Fabriles de Cochabamba, an association of one hundred workplaces in the city. When he submitted his resignation for personal reasons, it was overwhelmingly rejected by the membership. At that point, Morales intervened, trying to get the MAS supporters in the organization to oust him. They refused, and instead the membership put Oliveira on a kind of leave of absence, welcome to return at any time. (He was apparently taking a personal trip to Europe.) Oliveira had refused Morales’s offer of a ministerial position and all other perquisites, preferring (unlike many key figures of the 2000-2005 struggles) to stay with the base.

Though I missed the chance to meet Oliveira, Cochabamba was nonetheless where I had one of the outstanding encounters of the trip. I was in a local bookstore with a cultural anthropologist I had met, and she pointed to a big book: “You should read this. It’s by a guy who broke with Morales even before he came to power”. This turned out to be the above-cited book of Filemon Escobar, who from the 1950’s onward was, with Guillermo Lora, the leading Trotskyist miner militant in Bolivia, where, as indicated, and unlike in all but a handful of other countries (Vietnam in the 1930’s and 1940’s, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) up to the 1960’s) Trotskyism was the dominant current of the mass workers’ movement and Stalinism a miserable sect on the margins . (Stalinism in Vietnam, of course, was unfortunately not a marginal sect.)

I was fortunate enough to meet Escobar shortly thereafter. I had read a good deal of his book, and my aim was above all to hear from someone with such a rich experience as a Marxist militant in the Bolivian workers’ movement, over decades, how he had come to reject “Eurocentric” Marxism and embrace the “pachakuti”. Escobar did me the great favor of showing me all the “underground” books on the indigenous question written over the past century, to which the radical left had been deaf and indifferent, and a fair number of which I read upon returning to New York. There is in fact a lineage of indigenous writers going back 200 years to Pazos Kanki, an Aymara who translated Thomas Paine ca. 1810. Another key figure is Pablo Zarate Willka, who led an indigenous insurrection of considerable proportions in 1899, in the middle of a civil war between two factions of the white elite, which ended in defeat for the indigenous forces and Zarate’s execution (Willka is an Incan word meaning a kind of chief). Given my bent for uncovering German romantic populists and folklorists at the origins of authoritarian movements in developing countries , Escobar did me the further favor of putting me on to the foremost Bolivian ideologue of such a sensibility, Franz Tamayo (1878-1956), an unabashed admirer of Fichte with years of experience in Wilhelmine Germany. The discovery of Tamayo, and from such a source, was the true beginning of the text that follows.

One key part of the pachakuti ideology, in Escobar’s book and in the general movement, is the idea of “reciprocity”, apparently the key to the Aymara and Quechua communities. Explained in simple language, it seems to mean (as Escobar put it) that you eat before I eat, and in reciprocity you make sure that I eat. Somehow, it didn’t sound so different from the ethos of the primitive Christian communities. Similarly, shortly before his execution, Zarate Willka, (in a quote highlighted at the beginning of Escobar’s book) had said: “With great feeling I order all Indians to respect the whites (…) and in the same way the whites must respect the Indians”. Hard to disagree with, but a sentiment that one could have heard in any speech in the early civil rights movement in the U.S.

Closely tied to reciprocity in the indigenist ideology is the centrality of the ayllu, the pre-Columbian community that some have even elevated to assert that Incan society prior to the arrival of the Spanish was “communist”. Decades of debate raged in the past over this question, which seems to have ebbed away in the grudging recognition that the Incan empire, which barely established itself one century before the arrival of Pizarro, had in fact been expansionist, and had crushed and enslaved populations of previous dominant groups in the Andean region from what is now Ecuador to Chile.

The cultural anthropologist who put me onto Escobar had this to say about the survival of the ayllu:

“The structure of the ayllu with its traditional authorities still persists, but within a much smaller territorial space than it was the case in pre-Columbian times, in some areas of the highland regions of Bolivia, mostly in the altiplano, northern and southern Potosi, the western highlands of Cochabamba and a few places in Chuquisaca. In some cases, the ayllu has been reconstituted in areas where it had ceased to exist after the law of popular participation of 1994. The main problem with Filemon´s (and others) idea of using the ayllu as the building block to develop an Andean version of socialism is that it highly romanticizes social relations within the ayllu and/or community as if these were horizontal and equal, denying the social differentiation that exists within them since pre-Columbian times. This differentiation may be minimal within very poor regions.”

In short, I found myself somewhere among the identity politics against which I had polemicized for some time, some Bolivian variant of the Russian peasant commune which fascinated Marx and Bordiga, and the “new Marx” emerging from previously unpublished (or unread) writings on cultures and movements on the margins of capitalism.

My problematic, however, was populism as an anti-working class ideology and political reality. From the era (1930’s to 1950’s) of Peron in Argentina, Vargas in Brazil, or Cardenas in Mexico, nationalist populism as a statist, top-down movement, backed by the military, has turned a page. (The Bolivian MNR, in less developed circumstances where the military temporarily collapsed, presents a somewhat different dynamic.) The contemporary Latin American populism of Lula, Chavez or Morales is a “social movement” populism, much as, in Europe in the 1960’s and 1970’s, “worker self-management” replaced the older hierarchical unions as a form of working-class containment .

One thread in the following text is the German ideological influence in Bolivia, from the Fichtean Tamayo, who first posed the “indigenous question” in 1910, to the Spenglerian Carlos Montenegro, the foremost theoretician of the MNR’s “national revolution’ against “foreign” influences, including Marxism. The shift from Latin America’s authoritarian populism and corporatism, as it existed into the 1950’s, to the more supple “social movement” populism of today, calls to mind a parallel shift before and after 1945 in two German theorists of the so-called “Conservative Revolution” with complicated relations to Nazism, Ernst Jünger and Martin Heidegger. Jünger’s soldier-worker, the “storms of steel” on the Western front in the First World War, and technicist “total mobilization” of reality gave way after to 1945 to mythical musings about astrology as expessing “the need for metaphysical standards” and about “a revolt of the earth with the help of man”. The hardened 1920’s “decisionism” of Heidegger which led him into his involvement with the Nazi Party was replaced after World War II with poetic “Gelassenheit”, or “letting Being be” and studies in the “history of Being”.

This text, then, limits itself to the earlier, “Conservative Revolution” phase of Bolivian populist ideology, as it evolved from Franz Tamayo to Carlos Montenegro, and must necessarily leave the flowering the “Pacha Mama” (Mother Earth)/indigenist cover for the Morales-MAS neo-liberalism to others.

New York, February 2011

Few people on the U. S. and European left today remember the Bolivian Revolution of 1952. Fewer still are aware of its history, and above all of the early (1930’s, 1940’s) fascist origins of the MNR (Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario ) which it brought to power. The radical phase of the revolution was short enough, and its memory has faded, having been eclipsed for contemporaries by more recent developments in such countries as Cuba, Chile or Nicaragua. The rise and decline of the MNR, nonetheless, ranks with developments in Mexico (1910-1940) and Cuba (1958- ) as one of the most important Latin American revolutions of the 20th century.

Of all of these Latin American revolutionary movements, however, the Bolivian MNR stands out as a prime example of the recycling of proto-fascist and fascist ideologies of the interwar period in “progressive” “anti-imperialist” form after 1945 .

Bolivia was and is, in the Americas, second only to Haiti in poverty. But much more than Haiti, it has been weighed down by the contrast between its rich endowment in raw materials (tin, oil, natural gas and, most recently, lithium) and the overall impoverishment of the country by foreign investment in those materials. Along with Peru, Bolivia inherits the complex and ongoing legacy of the pre-colonial Andean civilizations, present in its large Quechua and Aymara-speaking populations, as well as the thirty-odd smaller ethnicities in the Amazonian east of the country.

Remote, poor and landlocked as modern Bolivia may have been, its political and social evolution nonetheless fits the global pattern of the impact of German romantic populist nationalism in the process whereby conservative and fascist ideologies, initially spawned in Europe between 1870 and 1945, migrated to the semi-colonial and colonial world and were then re-imported by the Western left in suitably “anti- imperialist” guise.

Bolivia’s history, in the eighty years preceding the MNR revolution, was a rude awakening to the world market dominated by Anglo-American imperialism. Its political system, like most political systems in Latin America between the 1870’s and the 1929 world depression, was a restricted affair of two political currents, Republican and Liberal, both representing factions of the small elite which had wrested independence from Spain in 1825, and which was periodically elected, after 1880, by the narrow enfranchised sliver (2%) of the population. This elite in turn dominated the much larger mestizo and above all indigenous, overwhelmingly rural population which periodically expressed itself in local and occasionally national revolts, the fear of which shaped the elite’s unabashed racism .

One such failed nationwide indigenous revolt, associated with the name of Pablo Zarate (El Temible) (The Dreaded) Willka, took place in 1899, in the midst of a civil war (1898-99) in which the Liberals ended two decades of Republican domination and won control of the political system until 1920.

Republican or Liberal, the Bolivian elite hardly excelled in protecting national interests. Between 1879 and 1935, Bolivia lost a significant part of its national territory and its entire coastline in successive wars and conflicts with Chile (1879), Brazil (1903) and finally with Paraguay in the infamous Chaco War (1932-1935), the bloodiest engagement ever fought in Latin America in modern times and the real beginning of the ferment leading to the MNR revolution in 1952.

It is little appreciated today to what extent Germany, from the Kaiserreich to Nazism, influenced developments throughout the semi-colonial and colonial world, including Bolivia, prior to 1945. After its long-delayed national unification in 1870, and its stunning defeat of France (previously considered the dominant continental army) in the Franco-Prussian war of the same year, Germany began the long process of contesting Anglo-French and later American dominance in the world economy. Being itself, as a latecomer, largely excluded from the imperialist land grab of the 1870’s and 1880’s, and having been compelled, in its own struggle to unify, to shake up the European balance of power built on the fragmentation of the Germanic lands since 1648, Germany up to 1945 could plausibly present itself in many parts of the world, to nations and nationalist movements under the heel of the dominant imperialist powers, as a supporter of “national liberation”. Germany was, in that very real sense, the first successful “developing country”; its (initially) highly successful economic and military emergence made it a “model” for would-be developing countries everywhere, much in the same way that Japan (itself a star pupil of Germany) became such a model for Asia a bit later, and above all after World War II. But along with economic and military prowess, Germany increasingly attracted the attention of the semi-colonial and colonial elites with its stellar culture, a culture developed precisely in opposition to the dominant Anglo-French liberal paradigm from the Enlightenment onward. From Japan, Korea and China to the African Negritude movement, via the origins of Turkish and Arab nationalism, to the German immigrants and military advisors in Latin America, there is scarcely a part of the pre-1945 developing world that was untouched by attempts to imitate the “German model” in all its various dimensions.

In Bolivia, the 1880’s saw the founding of the first commercial houses for German immigrants. German-Bolivian trade took off in that period with the sale of German heavy machinery and locomotives in exchange for Bolivian rubber. While British finance capital, funding above all railway construction, was still dominant over Germany in Bolivia, the Krupp and Mauser arms producers were already selling weaponry to most Latin American armies, including Bolivia’s. Overall, from 1880 to 1920, Bolivia’s foreign trade was expanding greatly. German trade there surpassed France’s by 1900 . By the 1890’s, tin had replaced silver as Bolivia’s main export, and by the 1930’s the three largest “tin barons”, known popularly as “La Rosca” and quite detached from the real life of the Bolivian masses, were the core of the dominant oligarchy . In 1910, Bolivia was the world’s second producer of tin.

By 1900, German (mainly Prussian) military officers were training armies throughout Latin America, and with the well-known role of military elites in nation-building in the developing world, were often, along with trade and immigrants , the conduit through which broader German influence entered a specific country. Between the Franco-Prussian War and the outbreak of World War I, these officers repeatedly displaced French officers in training new armies, from Japan to the Ottoman Empire to Argentina, Chile and finally (after 1911) Bolivia. Some German-trained officers of the latter countries in turn trained armies in Peru and Ecuador. 1908 also saw the German-Bolivian Treaty of Friendship and Commerce.

Undoubtedly the most notorious German military adviser to the Bolivian Army, over a twenty-five-year period, was Gen. Hans Kundt , the commander of a number of German officers with colonial experience in such settings as Cameroon or the suppression of the 1900 Boxer Rebellion in China. In 1914, Kundt returned to Germany to play an undistinguished role in the First World War, after which he participated in the proto-fascist Freikorps and then in the failed 1920 Kapp Putsch against the newly-founded Weimar Republic, whereupon he had to leave Germany and returned to Bolivia.

Despite these German ties, Bolivia sided with the Western allies in the war, breaking relations with Germany in 1917, under the pressure of the U.S. and Britain, the major investors in Bolivian tin and also the major market for it. Kundt returned to La Paz in 1920 and became Minister of War, and would continue to deeply influence the Bolivian army until the debacle of the Chaco War. During his tenure there, Bolivia’s Revista Militar, the leading journal of strategy for the officer corps, was not accidentally dominated by Germanophiles.

German influence, in Bolivia as elsewhere, was hardly limited to the economic and military spheres. The first intellectual of the “cosmopolitan”, i.e. Anglo-French oriented Bolivian elite to pose the question of the indigenous majority, as least as a cultural program imbued with German romanticism, was Franz Tamayo. He was undoubtedly the foremost Bolivian intellectual and cultural figure of the pre-MNR generation. In his 1910 book, Creacion de una Pedagogia Nacional (first serialized in fifty-five articles in a newspaper) one of the most arresting formulations was: “What does the state do for the Indian? Nothing. What does the state take from the Indian? Everything.” Tamayo asserted that 90% of the energy of the Bolivian nation came from the indigenous majority and that instead of slavishly copying European models, Bolivia should put the Indian at the center of its culture and education.

Franz Tamayo (1878-1956), played in Bolivia a role somewhat similar to that, somewhat later, of Jose Carlos Mariategui in Peru (cf. below), although, in contrast to Mariategui, totally outside of any Marxist or leftist problematic. Tamayo was born into the latifundia class; his father, Isaac Tamayo, had published a sociological novel in 1914, Habla Melgarejo, which by some estimations contains all of his son’s later affirmations about the centrality of the Indian in Bolivian history and culture, and the elder Tamayo is considered by some to be the “true father of indigenismo in Bolivia”.

Franz Tamayo was a major literary, intellectual and occasionally political figure in Bolivia from from the early 20th century until his death. Like many men from the Latin American elite, he had spent years prior to World War I in England, France and above all Germany on the mandatory tour of the continent. (Unlike most such Bolivian men, however, his mother was Aymara, and Tamayo grew up bilingual in both Spanish and Aymara.) In Paris, he married a Parisian beauty of la belle époque and brought her back to live, incongruously, on his remote Bolivian estate. His major intellectual influences were Goethe, Nietzsche, the geopolitician Rätzel and above all Fichte. Like many similar figures from underdeveloped countries, he (like his father) pointed repeatedly to Japan as a model for such countries to follow, because it had (in his estimation) totally internalized what the West had to offer, while preserving its own culture.

Tamayo’s work consists more of poetry and other literary forms rather than political writings. The work Creacion de la Pedagogia Nacional , his main venture into social analysis, is a call for Bolivia to emerge as an indigenous nation, and was profoundly influenced by Fichte’s Speeches to the German Nation. From Fichte, Tamayo took the idea of “national will”; he denounced the Europe-addled “Bovaryism” of the Bolivian elite, with its pale imitations of Europe, saying rather that Bolivian education needed to prepare the youth for struggle, because “life is struggle, the struggle of interests, struggle on every terrain and of every kind”. Bolivia, in Tamayo’s view “had to eliminate the European and mestizo elements and make itself into a single indigenous nation.” The work is shot through with 19th-century Teutonic terms such as “life”, “force” and “race”. “National energy” required “fighters, not literati”. Tamayo saw Nietzsche as the philosophical negation of, in his words, “the poisonous books” of Rousseau. Fascinated as well by Schopenhauer, Tamayo similarly had no use for the world historical progress informing the outlook of Hegel.

Tamayo, for all his desire to escape from “Europe”, was totally a prisoner of late 19th century European race theory, in which biology was destiny; a race for him was

“a group from people possessing the same biological inheritance, identifiable by external physical characteristics, which have a definite relation in types of behaviour and which give rise to cultural differences.”

Tamayo had no more use for any universalist outlook than today’s theorists of identity politics, who might at least blush at the biologist foundation of such a predecessor:

“The ideal of humanity! That is an unreality which never existed, except as a false and artificial product of French romanticism which nations have never practiced!”

and

“The human ideal, if it exists, is a preparation for the forces of the nation, not for an impossible Saturnalia of peace and universal concord, but in a recognition that everything is a struggle without truce, a struggle of interests, a struggle on every terrain and of every kind, in markets as on the battlefield.”

In Tamayo’s paternalistic view, of course, the indigenous masses of Bolivia are not to be the protagonists of any struggle to throw off the weight of European culture:

“Who is to carry out this movement (for the overthrow of Spanish culture)…? It is not the Indian directly, but rather us, the thinkers, the leaders, the rulers, who are beginning to become conscious of our integral life and our real history.”

Given his central role and his controversial views, there were obviously many reactions to Tamayo. In the view of one critic, Juan Albarracin Millan “Tamayo’s irrationalism, basically racist, posits ‘Bolivian man’ as the ‘new man’…With its insistence on the mystique of blood, race and soil”, in Albarracin’s view, “Tamayo’s orientation was not called irrationalism, voluntarism, vitalism or mysticism, but, quite the contrary, ‘indianista’. Tamayo was, in this view, ”anti-liberal, anti-democrat, anti-socialist and anti-masses.” Eduardo Diez de Medina, a writer and diplomat, cursed Tamayo for “his puerile adoration of Fichte, Nietzsche, Max Stirner, the Kaiser and Hitler.” and said that “only Adler, Jung, Scheler…or Freud could have understood Tamayo’s writings.” . For Augusto Cespedes, a major MNR intellectual and generally an apologist for the MNR’s early anti-Semitism and proto-fascism , said of Tamayo that “his mind admitted only an abstract national pedagogy suitable for an empty utopia…his condition (was that of) a latifundist, landowner and master of serfs.” . Guillermo Lora, the leading Trotskyist in Bolivia over decades, contrasted Tamayo to another figure of the elite, Bautista Saavedra (Bolivian president 1920-1925), saying that if the latter had not left his study and gone to seek the masses in the outlying neighborhoods, “he would have remained in the same position as Franz Tamayo, the poet, essayist and owner of haciendas and houses, forgotten in the midst of a flood of intellectual memories and dusty books.”

Tamayo does not fare better in the critique of a major theoretician of indianismo , Fausto Reinaga . In Reinaga’s view, Tamayo soared in thought, “but always had his feet planted on the side of feudal exploitation”. After the 1952 MNR revolution, according to Reinaga, the “youth turned to Tamayo”, and the latter responded: “No revolution”. With his “black class hatred”, Tamayo opposed agrarian reform. He joined the “Rosca”, the oligarchy deposed in 1952, in calling the MNR “communist”. His work had been hailed in the publications of the Falange Socialista Boliviano (FSB), the authentically fascist current after World War II. After 1952, Tamayo had written “I had always considered communism to be the most terrible retrogression…” He had been, in Reinaga’s view, “the greatest enemy and detractor of the working class in Bolivia”; the working class for him was “la canalla”. In a speech to parliament in 1931, Tamayo had already said “We know that communism is an immoral doctrine, destructive of all principles, it is a human pestilence.” In the estimate of his most serious intellectual biographer , Tamayo’s reactionary outlook was closest to those of Burke and Maistre. Charles W. Arnade, whose book Historiografia Colonial y Moderna de Bolivia surveys the gradual discovery of indigenous reality in Bolivia’s long tradition of Eurocentric historiography, considered that Tamayo had pushed the “the racial themes to absurd extremes”.

The assessment of Marcos Dumich , albeit theoretician of the Bolivian Communist Party, is no less harsh. He sees Tamayo as a healthy reaction to the early 20th century reactionary and cultural pessimist Alcides Arguedes, author of the 1909 book Pueblo Enfermo (A Sick People) but who then falls into talk of the “indigenous race”. In Dumich’s view, Tamayo opposed humanism, liberalism, scientism, and intellectualism, for which he substituted voluntarism and authoritarianism . Politically, Tamayo’s contempt for bourgeois democracy and his “heroic authoritarianism and grandiloquent nationalism” puts him on the ideological terrain of pre-fascism. In a 1934 speech, Tamayo denounced the Russian Revolution and called for a “strong hand against its Turano-Mongol nihilism”. “Tamayo”, for Dumich, “contributed to creating that emotional tone so hard and so necessary for the fascist currents.”

Tamayo, in fact, did not limit himself to theory and literary works. He intermittently intervened in politics throughout the period under consideration here. He founded the Radical Party in 1912, falling on the Liberal side of the intra-elite battle between Liberals and Republicans. Tamayo played a leadership role, becoming chancellor, in the disastrous Chaco War with Paraguay (1932-1935), and was then elected president in 1934 but prevented from taking office by the coup of 1935, while both his house in La Paz and his rural estate were burned to the ground. He had run at the urging of the proto-fascist, later pro-Axis secret military lodge Razon de Patria (RADEPA), and then had become the president of the Constituent Assembly in 1943 in the government of Villaroel, also a RADEPA member. Tamayo (who left political office in 1945) remained notably silent during the mini- civil war of August 1949, preparatory for the MNR revolution three years later, as a well as on the 1950 massacre of workers in the Villa Victoria district of La Paz. The MNR seriously considered him for their presidential candidate in the decisive 1951 elections, which began the immediate crisis prior to the 1952 revolution, but he was passed over for Victor Paz Estenssoro.

Tamayo’s Fichtean nationalism, then, based as it was on a racial affirmation of the “true” Bolivia rooted in the indio, was the kernel of what would become, in a more cultural but still highly Germanic form, the ideology of the “national revolution” against the “foreign” elite elaborated by Carlos Montenegro.

Charles Andrade’s study, reputed to be the first which brushed aside the white elite-centered historiography and unearthed the indigenous tradition, also places Franz Tamayo in perspective, while revealing the racism of much of the treatment of the indigenous question, for and against. Rene Moreno, the most important Bolivian historian of the 19th century, was a declared racist. Nineteenth-century historians generally were “a mixture of narrow provincialism and French intellectualism…they failed to understand the great social problems of their nation. The above-mentioned Alcydes Arguedes (1879-1946), another Francophile historian of the period, was influenced by reactionaries such as Le Bon, Gobineau, and Vacher de Lapouge, but was nonetheless “one of the fathers of Bolivian indigenism”. (He also was funded by the Patiño tin empire to write a tendentious multi-volume history of Bolivia.) Jaime Mendoza (1874-1939) was, for Andrade, “the first aristocrat who, without vacillation, demagogic intensions or pat phrases, proclaimed the potential equality of the Indians…he opposed changing the mode of life of the Indians, in the sense of subjecting them to Europeanization” . Mendoza’s book Factor geografico (1925) emphasized the Indians’ “love of the land” and thus, in Andrade’s view, “the cult of Pachamama was born”http://insurgentnotes.com/2011/03/anti-capitalism-or-anti-imperialism/ - footnote_anchor-44.

Such, then, were some of the contending currents with which the Bolivian elite entered the global crisis ushered in by World War I and its aftermath, prior to the appearance, after 1928, of the future MNR generation.

The period 1914-1945 was a period of violent reorganization of world capitalism, of the demise of the British world hegemon and the struggle for succession to world hegemony between the emerging contenders, Germany and the United States, a struggle which played itself out quite explicitly in Bolivia. It was also a period of transition, on a world scale, (to use Marx’s language) from the phase of “formal”/extensive to the “real”/intensive domination of capital .

After the First World War, Bolivia’s economy was hard hit by the 1920-21 world depression. With the end of war demand, the world tin price, and hence Bolivia’s tin exports, collapsed. It was at the same time a period of heavy foreign investment in the country’s public utilities and government securities. In 1920-21, Standard Oil of Bolivia was created, and Spruille Braden, a dominant figure in U.S. business and diplomacy in Latin America over the subsequent decades , negotiated the very advantageous sale of four million hectares of Bolivian soil to Standard Oil, a sale which would later inflame Bolivian nationalism before and during the Chaco War. With recovery after 1921, something of a new educated middle class emerged. German investment returned, carving out a spot behind U.S. and British interests in transportation and communication. In 1923, Wall Street banks floated the so-called Nicolas loan of $33 million, which refunded Bolivia’s state debt, taking 45% of government income for repayment . This was followed in 1927 with a $14 million loan from Dillon, Read. In the same year, Walter Kemmerer, a Princeton economist, spent three months in Bolivia as a consultant, ultimately outlining the “Kemmerer reform”, which proposed the U.S. Federal Reserve System as a model for the Bolivian Central Bank. Kemmerer also recommended tax reforms and a return to the gold standard. Kemmerer’s intervention was followed in 1928 by a new Dillon, Reed loan of $23 million. In 1929, Bolivian tin production peaked at an all-time record, a level never attained again and, given the country’s then-total dependence on tin exports, a serious problem over subsequent decades, as Bolivia was eclipsed by tin production in Malaya, Indonesia and Nigeria. On the eve of the world collapse in 1929, foreign debt was still taking 37% of the state budget, and government finance remained in deep crisis over the following decade.

Bolivia was, in short, a classic semi-colonial country, totally beholden to competing imperialist powers for finance and technology, and whose immense natural resources benefited primarily those foreign investors.

The Bolivian working class emerged in its modern form amidst all this economic turmoil, after an earlier period of the Proudhon-inspired mutualism widespread throughout Latin America prior to 1914. As happened in so many countries immediately after the war, a strike wave swept Bolivia in 1920, led by the railway workers, who called a general strike in January 1921. Tin miners had struck at the Catavi mines in August 1920, but their strike was crushed. Another general strike in La Paz in 1922 forced the government to concede, but the Uncia mining massacre of 1923 marked a pause in labor unrest.

Along with strike activity, as well as peasant ferment, a flurry of new left-wing organizations emerged. A (non-Marxist) Socialist Workers’ Party was founded in the fall of 1920, and a Socialist Party, with ties to the more developed Chilean workers’ movement, was founded in 1921. Later in the decade, the newly-created Third International began activity in Bolivia, from its continental headquarters in Buenos Aires . In 1927, Tristan Marof (1898-1979), an important left-wing figure over subsequent decades, helped found a Labor Party (Partido Laborista), the first self-identified Marxist party in the country. (For his troubles, Marof was exiled from the country for a decade.) In the same year, an indigenous revolt of 100,000 peasants in the Bolivian south was crushed, a revolt caused by rise in the price of land due to railroad construction and land seizures by landholders. Agitation spread for the eight-hour day, which was adopted in some sectors.

All this economic turmoil, worker and peasant ferment, and the proliferation of socialist and labor organizations (many ill-defined) had to have ideological repercussions, and by the late 1920’s a tumultuous mix including Marxism, nationalism and indigenism all reached the educated middle class, a ferment which would bear its ambiguous fruits after the Chaco War. In August 1928, the first convention of the Bolivian University Federation (FUB) took place , where particularly the Cochabamba intelligentsia was swept up in discussions of the Mexican and Russian Revolutions, as well as the ideas of Peruvian Marxist Jose Carlos Mariategui . This agitation was also significant in that virtually all the major figures of post-Chaco radical politics came of age politically in these years. The deepening world depression after 1929 and looming Chaco War would provide the context for their emergence. The late 1920’s, in short, was the period in which Marxism of different varieties swept educated strata in Bolivia.

Peruvian Marxist Jose Carlos Mariategui (1894-1930), was the first Latin American Marxist to underscore the problematic of the Andean indigenous population for socialism, and had a major impact in Bolivia as well as early as the late 1920’s Mariategui, in a short life, wrote hundreds of journalistic articles. His major work is a collection entitled Seven Essays for the Interpretation of Peruvian Reality. Mariategui was denounced by the Comintern in the Third Period as a “populist”, and denounced by the populists (of Haya de la Torre’s APRA party) as a Marxist.

Mariategui was initially formed by the leading Peruvian anarchist of the preceding (pre-World War I) generation, Manuel Gonzalez Prado, whose prominence was based on the early mutualist (Proudhon-inspired) phase of the Peruvian and Latin American workers’ movement ( which was more or less superseded by the global impact of the Russian Revolution). Mariategui traveled to Europe after the war and was in Italy during the factory occupations of 1920. It was in Italy that he most directly experienced the realities of the European workers’ movement. He is a tangle of influences, including Georges Sorel and surrealism. He founded the highly original journal Amauta (1926-1930), which propagated his theses at a time when the Peruvian elite was totally Europe-oriented, and both disdainful and fearful of the seemingly mute indigenous majority. He helped to found the Peruvian Socialist Party in 1928, so named precisely to demarcate it from Third International Communism as well as Haya De la Torre’s APRA.

In addition to Mariategui, a second figure on the Andean left who raised the indigenous question to prominence was the (above mentioned) Bolivian Tristan Marof , the nom de guerre of Gustavo Adolfo Navarro. Marof was an aristocrat who served as a diplomat in Europe from 1920 to 1926. He was expelled from Bolivia, as indicated, for pacifism during the Chaco War, and upon his return attempted to found a real Marxist party there. Marof, in Andrade’s view, wrote an unprecedented history of Bolivia, albeit with an “exaggerated interest in the Inca empire”, which Marof saw as superior to the present. For Marof as for Tamayo, the “Bolivian people were the Indians, and they were not sick but merely sad at the loss of their ‘great past’” . Marof figured prominently in a debate within Andean Marxism about the possible “communist” character of Incan society, a viewpoint that has faded away.

In 1930, under the impact of the world depression, revolts and revolutions overturned the governments of Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Chile . These developments were the South American moment of the worldwide collapse of classical 19th-century liberalism in the depression decade, and in Bolivia, as in the other Latin American countries, this meant the impending defeat of the old oligarchic elite parties based on restricted suffrage, and the entry of the masses into politics . In the Bolivian case, with the return to power of the Liberals, this collapse and reshaping of the political, social and economic system stretched over more than two decades, as the Bolivian moment of the world transition to forms of social organization appropriate to the new “intensive” form of accumulation.

During these developments, the German military presence had continued apace.

Over the course of the 1920’s, General Kundt had imposed more and more discipline on the military. Faced with instability and revolt, the Republican Hernan Silas government (1926-1930) became more and more dependent on the army, and hence on Kundt. In 1926, Ernst Roehm, the founder of Hitler’s stormtroopers, was invited to Bolivia as a military adviser and arrived there in 1928, along with a number of other far-right military personnel from Danzig, who had been demobilized by the Treaty of Versailles. The Liberal overthrow of the Bolivian government in June 1930 was a revolt from the right, placing in power Daniel Salamanca, after which Roehm briefly joined the Bolivian General Staff, though Hitler recalled him to Germany months later. In the upheaval, Kundt’s house was attacked by a mob because of his association with Silas. Other German officers supported the rebels.

In January 1931, the Liberals consolidated their mandate in a landslide electoral victory (once again within the restricted suffrage). In the same year, Bolivia became the first Latin American country to suspend payments on its foreign debt during the depression decade. In March 1931, Salamanca took office as president. The Trotskyist militant and intellectual Lora commented on this development: “Our greatest liberals may have had a few democratic ideas in their heads, but their very existence was based on the servile labor of the peasants.’ Almost immediately, in April 1931, Salamanca was confronted with a general strike, centered in the postal and telephone workers, and managed to suppress it.

For years, Bolivia and Paraguay had fought minor skirmishes on their vague shared border in the Chaco, a huge and very sparsely populated area of jungle, desert and shrub land in Bolivia’s east. Disputes have continued ever since the Chaco War about the ultimate reasons for the conflict, which cannot be settled here. During and after the war, the great majority of Bolivians believed it was provoked by Standard Oil, backed by Argentina and/or Brazil, for reasons such as the desire for an outlet to the sea. Serious historians such as Herbert Klein dispute this . Whatever the case, Chaco War fever initially helped Salamanca to divert domestic passions away from his abysmal failure to deal with the economic crisis. In May 1931, he pushed for military penetration of the Chaco just as he was unleashing massive repression of May Day demonstrations around the country. In early 1932, the Bolivian Parliament debated a “Law of Social Defense” allowing it to exercise “legal dictatorship”, also denying the right to unionize and to demonstrate. A government roundup of leftist intellectuals ensued. Nonetheless, at the same time, there was growing anti-war sentiment in the labor movement, culminating perhaps in a major demonstration in Cochabamba on May 19th, but, according to Lora, many leftists also capitulated to war hysteria.

Salamanca pushed for war in the Chaco, confident of victory. Bolivia had twice Paraguay’s population , and superior armed forces. What the Bolivian elite did not reckon with was the huge incompetence revealed by the general staff, the extremely hostile terrain (many more troops died of thirst and disease than from combat) and the rapid demoralization of the front line troops, who were in their overwhelming majority indigenous draftees pulled from remote villages without the slightest idea of what the war was about.

In 1932, General Kundt, having fled after the overthrow of the Silas government in 1930, returned to Bolivia with full powers as commander-in-chief in the Chaco War, after Bolivia’s initial defeat at Boqueron provoked a clamor for his reinstatement. Kundt’s popularity was heightened by a growing fascist influence on middle-class youth, a number of whom had studied in Germany during the rise of Nazism. In addition to economic ties to Germany, cultural clubs and colegios (high schools) spread the growing appeal of authoritarianism and fascism in Europe . Be this as it may, Kundt, who was seemingly committed to a cumbersome strategy of position, was definitively ousted after another defeat at Campo Via.

All in all, Bolivia lost 60,000 men in the Chaco War, and Paraguay lost 40,000, by the time Bolivia agreed to an armistice in 1935 . Deserters had been shot in droves, and leftists protesting the war were intentionally sent to the front lines to be killed there. Thousands of Bolivian troops perished from thirst when logistic lines were interrupted by incompetence and neglect. The peace negotiations, overseen by representatives from the U.S., Argentina, Chile and Brazil, dragged on until 1938, and ultimately awarded Paraguay territory that doubled its size. The economy was reeling under accelerating inflation. By 1935, the traditional Bolivian Liberal and Republican parties of the tin barons had been totally discredited, never to recover in their old form. The social ferment unleashed by the Chaco debacle turned Bolivian society upside down. In that ferment, fascist, corporatist and socialist ideologies battled for dominance in a chaotic and highly fluid postwar situation.

The collapse of elite liberal and republican parties in southern South America, under the impact of the post-1929 world depression, as well as the rise of increasingly radicalized workers’ movements, as often more anarchist than socialist, required the ruling classes of Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Chile to fundamentally remake their political systems if they were to retain power. This transformation was the Latin American moment of the worldwide proliferation of statist regimes of different types in the global restructuring of capitalism then underway. Earlier immigration to southern South America from Spain, Italy and Germany made crisis responses in Europe significantly present, to different degrees, in the debates over how to accomplish this. The Primo de Rivera dictatorship in Spain (1923-1930) with its definite corporatist overtones, fascism in Mussolini’s Italy, and, a few years later, Nazism in Germany all came into play as references for the new era of mass politics. These forces were received somewhat differently in the less urban, less industrial countries of the Andes such as Bolivia and Peru, with their large indigenous populations. Yet, in Bolivia, perhaps in the long run the model most studied was the Mexican Revolution (1910-1940), particularly its left-corporatist phase under Cardenas after 1934. But this came later, after the Bolivian “movimientistas” were compelled, by the Allied defeat of the Axis in World War II, to shed their infatuation with the Italian and German examples.

Let us look, then, at some of the 1930’s developments in neighboring countries, confronting the dilemma, for the capitalist class, of organizing top-down statist forms of working-class containment, or of facing the prospect of a bottom-up working-class revolt that could not be contained:

“…In the Brazil of 1930, for instance, it was clear that the ‘social question’ could no longer be left entirely to the police to deal with…the proletariat was a significant presence in the cities. Not only was it a proletariat; it was in a very disturbing sense an a organized proletariat with an impressive history of protest, strikes, demonstrations…one of the possible ‘courses of action’ of the new regime in relation to the urban proletariat was to give them some crumbs, so as to get their souls in exchange. The ‘welfare state’ was about to be born in Brazil: its midwife was the Ministry of Labor, which was set up in 1930.”

And:

“…the basic finding of such an analysis (is): the fundamental effect of the labor laws has been…to make it extremely difficult for the working class to organize effectively and autonomously for political action…The very fact that the government changed its approach toward the working class (from repression to inducements plus repression) contributed to partially annihilate the ability of the working class to answer the renewed waves of repression with corresponding countermeasures such as strikes and public demonstrations.”

In his section on “Corporatist Control of the Working Class” the author sums up:

“The legal framework of labor relations established by Vargas, and left practically intact up to present-day Brazil, is based on three structures: the syndicates, the labor courts, and the social insurance system.”

A few years later, a similar dynamic brought forth the same responses in Mexico, in the culminating (Cardenist) phase of its revolution:

“What was decisive in this change in the conception of revolutionary politics was not merely recognizing the working masses as its central element, but especially being disposed to convert them once again into an active element in the service of the revolution, of course, in the best imaginable way: by organizing them, and organizing them for something close to their hearts: their demands.”… “There is no doubt that the revolutionaries (here the author refers to the Cardenistas-LG) had rediscovered the master key to mass politics: organization.” .

Finally, in Argentina from 1943 to 1950, the same drama was played out again, in the emergence of Peronism:

“…At the very moment in which the masses were mobilized politically…they were being co-opted into a corporatist project led by a nationalist sector of the armed forces…Peron’s overall labor strategy was now becoming clearer, as were his words in 1944 when trying to reassure Argentina’s employers: ‘…It is a grave error to think that workers’ unions are detrimental to the boss…On the contrary, it is the best way to avoid the boss having to fight with his worker…It is the means to reach an agreement, not a struggle. Thus strikes and stoppages are suppressed, though, undoubtedly, the working masses obtain the right to discuss their own interests at the same level as the employers’ organizations…That is why we are promoting trade unions, but a truly professional trade unionism. We do not want unions which are divided in political fractions, because the dangerous thing is, incidentally, a political trade unionism.’ Peron never deviated from this essentially corporatist vision of social affairs and his ‘revolutionary’ image in a later period…was never reflected in practice.”

With this general framework as it developed in other parts of Latin America, we now turn to the complex process of ferment unfolding in Bolivia, in reaction to the Chaco debacle.

As early as 1933, the Legion of National Socialist Veterans (LEC) was founded, though it defined itself as a political party only in 1936. Its program called for “national socialist action”. Some German immigrants had organized a National Socialist party after Hitler’s triumph in Germany in 1933. Elections in 1934 put an end to Salamanca’s bankrupt presidency, but a coup led by Jose Luis Tejado Sorzano prevented Franz Tamayo from taking office and set the stage for military government.

On the left, 1934 saw the formation of the POR (Partido Obrero Revolucionario), the Trotskyist group which would play a highly influential role from the late 1940’s onward . Also formed immediately after the war was the Confederacion Sindical de Trabajo Boliviano (CSTB). One intellectual influenced by Trotskyism, but more accurately described as a centrist for his career of overtures to bourgeois parties , was (the above-mentioned) Tristan Marof, whose book La Tragedia del Altiplano had made the case that the Chaco War had been fought to obtain an oil port for Standard Oil and to defend Standard Oil’s four million hectares against Dutch Royal. Throughout the country, innumerable “socialist” clubs were formed. War-weary youth were reading the post-World War I antiwar classics of Remarque and Barbusse. A Partido Republicano Socialista identified with “evolutionary socialism” and flirted with the Italian fascist idea of corporatism . In 1935, the South American Bureau of the Comintern established the Provisional Secretariat for the Communist Groups in Bolivia, with the aim of unifying disparate groups into a Communist Party. The Bureau denounced the peace negotiations then underway in Buenos Aires and called for a peace without annexations and without conquest, and for the abolition of Bolivia’s external debt. It further called for the formation of Quechua and Aymara republics, and, in keeping with the Comintern’s new global line, for a Popular Front.

Other veterans were sympathetic to the nationalism of Carlos Montenegro, one of the core future pro-fascist founders of the MNR. Perhaps most important of all for the subsequent decade, a group of Chaco junior officers, many of whom had been trained in Germany and in Mussolini’s Italy, and who had then spent serious time in Paraguayan POW camps, founded the secret military “lodge” called Razon de Patria (RADEPA), centered in the Escuela Superior de Guerra in Cochabamba , clearly committed to fascist ideas. Its subsequent influence, up to 1946, would be second only to that of the MNR which, in 1936, existed only in embryonic potential in the overall ferment.

On May 17 1936, Tejada Sorzano, who had ousted Salamanca two years earlier, was himself overthrown in a coup by two Chaco war heroes, Colonels David Toro and German Busch, initiating the ten-year period (1936-1946) in which European, and above all Italian and German fascist influence in Bolivia would contest hegemony with the “sellout’ democracy” (democracia entreguista, selling the country out to foreigners) oriented to the U.S., Britain and, of course, the Bolivian oligarchy itself. (During the war, Busch had risen to prominence by leading the “great defense of the Camiri oil fields”.) The Toro-Busch coup began a four-year experiment they called “military socialism” which, along with the further military government of Gualberto Villaroel (1943-1946) would have an important impact on the development of the MNR (itself founded in 1942). Because of its secret character, it is not always possible to identify the influence of the RADEPA junior officers in the successive regimes, but there is no question that they were a serious presence.

Adolf Hitler had assumed power in Germany in January 1933, to the general enthusiasm of most of the German-speaking immigrants in Bolivia. Throughout the ensuing twelve years, until the defeat of the Third Reich, Germany’s main thrust into Latin America would be economic and, secondarily, through espionage, although the propaganda wars on both sides often exaggerated the real German presence. Hitler’s Finance Minister Hjalmar Schacht in August 1934 imposed strict barter on Germany’s foreign trade, on a bilateral basis , and a German trade delegation went to South America later that year. While the delegation did not go to Bolivia, it was definitely interested in Bolivia’s extraordinary mineral wealth. The Reich’s Foreign Ministry, on the other hand, wanted “no political ties” to Bolivia.

The Toro-Busch period was the first real political expression of the post-Chaco attempt to remake the bankrupt Bolivian political and social system, in general revulsion at the traditional parties controlled by the tin magnates, echoing the parallel regime crises in Brazil, Mexico and Argentina mentioned above. As Herbert Klein put it : “Thus after fifty years of struggle, the civilian party system was overturned by a reawakened military establishment.”. In this development, the ideology of “anti-imperialism” was at its peak. Neither Toro nor especially Busch were sophisticated political figures, and the whole period evidenced serious eclecticism, generally of a corporatist kind. Mussolini’s Italy was, for purposes of reorganization, more of a model than Nazi Germany, if only because it was older and more formed. (Toro’s ambassador to Germany did express admiration for German National Socialism, and Oscar Moscoso, the Defense Minister, was also a Nazi sympathizer.) Toro announced his regime as “state socialism”, and for the first time, in keeping with world trends, a “right of the State”, (in contrast to the old liberal constitutionalism theoretically founded on the individual) was articulated. On other occasions, the Toro regime called itself a “syndicalist state”. Carlos Montenegro, whose later book Nacion y coloniaje (1953) would be the quintessential statement of MNR nationalism (cf. below), had been a co-conspirator in the coup . The government was also supported by labor and by the Legion of Chaco War Veterans (LEC). The LEC formed the Frente Unico Socialista and called for “authoritarian nationalism”. Toro created state-controlled “functional syndicates”; these had the official support of the Socialist Party, which wanted them to be anti-communist . When the syndicates proved a failure, Toro tried to fashion a “state socialist party”. The new regime saw the meteoric rise of young officers, among them members of RADEPA. This “military socialism” never took up questions of latifundismo or of the indigenous masses, and its main base of support was the urban middle class. From Italian fascism, “military socialism” took over mandatory unionization, a corporate type of regime in parliament, mandatory worker savings plans, a social security system, and state-subsidized food stores. It established the first Ministry of Labor with the first worker minister, as well as the first Ministry of Indian Affairs in Bolivian history. The Ministry of Labor in particular was attacked for “creeping radicalism”; it became notorious for hiring (self-designated) Marxists. The ministers of Foreign Affairs and of Hacienda were from the Socialist Party and were pro-corporatist . On May 25 1936, the Toro government announced its “fifty-two points of action”, including compulsory unionization. The Toro and Busch regimes, with all their pro-worker rhetoric, were confronted with a number of general strikes in the 1936-1939 period, led by the miners and railroad workers.

The true nucleus of the future MNR was the daily newspaper La Calle, founded in 1936 by a group around Victor Paz Estenssoro (1907-2001), who dominated MNR politics into the 1980’s, and all the major “movimientista” intellectuals such as Augusto Cespedes (1904-1997), Carlos Montenegro (1903-1953), and Jose Cuadros Quiroga (1908-1975) . La Calle became an organ for German fascist propaganda and virulent anti-Semitism , and as of 1938, used only German news services; Augusto Cespedes himself called it the “megaphone” of the MNR, and decades later said La Calle was “almost fascist” in the years after the Chaco War. Jose Cuadros Quiroga, the most outspoken anti-Semite in the group, excelled in writing catchy, sarcastic headlines that made La Calle a popular broadsheet, in contrast to the staid press controlled by the tin barons. According to Guillermo Bedregal Gutierrez, (Quiroga’s) “philofascist and anti-Semitic streak was a ‘fashion’ of the time. There was great German influence in Bolivia and Quiroga felt that ‘it was important to be anti- Semitic as an element of popular agitation’.” (This takes on particular significance because it was Quiroga who, in 1942, wrote the founding program of the MNR, in which these fascist echoes were still present). La Calle was pro-Republic in the Spanish Civil War which erupted in July 1936, but the La Calle team was “awed” by early German and Italian successes in World War II . Quiroga apparently wrote most of the anti-Semitic articles . For the group around La Calle, German Busch loomed as a saviour of Bolivia. Paz Estenssoro, who proved to be the greatest political survivor of all the founders, never wrote for La Calle, but did write for the weekly named (appropriately) Busch, edited by Montenegro, which was founded during a brief period when La Calle was suppressed. It was an elite group, condensing the ferment of the period. The fourteen founders included three future presidents, and ranged ideologically from socialism and Marxism to totalitarian tendencies such as those of Cuadros and Roberto Prudencio

La Calle was eloquent about its political options, on the subject of early Trotskyist influence in Bolivia, with headlines such as “Trotzkyite (sic) Loud-Mouths Bring Anarchy to the FOT”, “Will We Be Governed by Deserters?”; Another article “called for an ‘iron fist’ to ‘purge the country’ of the ‘red extremism’ of ‘adherents of the Third and Fourth Internationals’”.

Echoing the developments in Brazil, Argentina and Mexico described earlier, La Calle supported “the renovation of union structures”. But this renovation could not be limited to such structures but must rather “make concrete the institutionalization of the regime in a Corporative State” and give special significance to the “disciplinary function of syndicalism extended as a factor of social cohesion more than as an instrument for the defense of class objectives.”

The 1936-1940 period of “military socialism” was a maelstrom of ideological, foreign policy and organizational ferment which might be considered the first blush of the future MNR forces’ attempt to position themselves, in response to a whirlwind of both domestic and international pressures, not the least of them German Nazism. It is necessary to follow them in some detail, to navigate the flood of ideologically-motivated propaganda coming from all sides.

In January-February 1936, Montenegro (who was very close to Busch) and Augusto Cespedes had founded the Partido Socialista, which in Herbert Klein’s view best articulated the “national socialist” perspective . The “national socialists” in 1936 had been influential enough, as indicated, to get Toro to propose the corporate model and forced unionization under state control. For Klein , Toro articulated “in essence and in its most articulated form” the “philosophy which the small group of politically conscious and advanced young officers proposed for the regeneration of national life…some of whom had received some type of training in Italy in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s.” Toro in fact issued a harsh anti-communist decree to appease the oligarchy, but it was stopped by Waldo Alvarez, the Minister of Labor. The radicals at the Labor Ministry were adamantly against the corporatist proposals and demanded worker independence. Their opposition in fact ultimately ended these plans.

In late June 1936, Toro and Busch created an all-military regime. Elias Belmonte Pabon, a founder of RADEPA and (whose Nazi sympathies were, in Guillermo Lora’s view, “beyond question” ), was Minister of the Interior in the new cabinet. Belmonte had worked with Ernst Roehm during the latter’s stay in Bolivia, and Busch sent him to Germany as a diplomat . Other RADEPA members were send to Italy. Militants from another far-right group, the Estrella de Hierro (Star of Steel) were also in the Busch government.

The broader social context was increasingly tense. A strike wave began in early 1936 and by May it has evolved into “greatest strike movement that Bolivia had ever experienced.” There was intense discussion of the proposed mandatory syndicalization in the labor movement. Some parts of the left saw Toro’s labor policy as more fascist than socialist . In early July , the radicals in the Ministry of Labor formed the ANPOS (Asemblea Nacional Permanente de Organizaciones Sindicales) . In Guillermo Lora’s estimate, the ANPOS “one of the most important creations of the leftists connected to the Ministry of Labor” (who) “wanted to transform society from above”; it ultimately had an ephemeral existence. This conception, in which “worker associations recognized by the Ministry sent their delegates to the meetings”, with the authority of the state “recognizing” different organizations of society, reflects the essence of corporatism.

The Busch-Toro regime in its first weeks pushed ahead with its plans for “military socialism”. On July 6, it issued a decree on mandatory work by all. Chaco veterans were to be reincorporated into their previous jobs within twenty days. Henceforth, anyone without employment papers (carnet de trabajo) would be declared “unemployed” and liable to be enrolled in state labor brigades. Companies were called upon to make their labor needs known to the state. Lora saw this as forced labor expressing a “totalitarian, i.e. fascist-oriented” mentality, apparently inspired by Mussolini . Mass demonstrations took place in support of the Ministry of Labor and compulsory unionization. Toro in a speech in late July declared himself “in favor of a corporative state” and for a “regime of trade-union association identified with the organs of power and political representation.” As in Brazil, or Mexico, or later Argentina,

“…the National State, as the definitive successor to the oligarchic State prior to the Chaco War, would replace class conflicts by a division of productive functions, in which contradictions would give way to integration within a development project directed by the State.”

On the day after the mandatory labor decree, Toro issued a Ley Organica de Petroleos to curb speculation and concessions to the foreign exploitation of Bolivia’s oil. Two weeks later, on July 24, this was followed by a decree creating the Banco Minero. On August the decree on mandatory unionization was issued. According to the decree, unions would henceforth “will be under the ‘permanent protection and control’ of the socialist government and were ‘incorporated into the state mechanism’. Employers and workers, following the Italian syndicalist model, would be in the same union. According to Lora, “In practice…it fell to the Ministry of Labor to organize the unions and to administer them in all times and circumstances”. This fit into a broader plan of the government “to mobilize the entire active population for an intensive program of production”.

In November 1936, the First National Congress of Workers took place, and debated the creation of a Confederacion Sindical de Trabajadores de Bolivia (CSTB) oriented to the left parties. By this time, however, Toro had moved to the right and appointed a leading lawyer for the Hochschild mining interests to the Ministry of Labor, while the radicals were removed from the Ministry. As Klein put it “A mixed syndicalist-corporatist state grafted on to the old political party system was contemplated”.

Further steps along such lines followed on Dec 21 1936, with the creation of the Yacimientos Petrofileros Fiscales Bolivianos (YPFB- Bolivian State Oil Deposits), a prelimary step to Toro’s historic nationalization of Standard Oil in May 1937. This expropriation of a major U.S. firm was unprecedented in Latin America, a full year prior to the better-known nationalization of oil by the Cardenas regime in Mexico. Further, the government regulation of the tin industry, initially a temporary measure during the Chaco War, was made permanent . In the wake of this rapid flurry of decrees and state takeovers, the Toro- Busch government came under fire from the right by the tin interests and from the left by various Marxists. Bolivia’s statist measures were followed by similar steps in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay. In “military socialism”, of course, the Bolivian Army continued to account for 37% of the government budget.

On July 13 1937, German Busch unseated Toro as sole military ruler. Busch viewed himself as champion of the May 1936 general strike. Toro had never lost labor support or persecuted the radical left, but he had lost the support of fascist and reformist-minded junior officers around Busch. In some of his immediate measures,

Busch closed state-subsidized food stores and rolled back some other controls of the previous year. (He also allowed Tristan Marof to return to Bolivia after ten years in exile.)

Once consolidated in sole power, Busch in November 1937 recommended an expansion of the earlier Labor Code (Codigo de Trabajo), itself (by some estimates), influenced by the Italian Carta di Lavoro and the Nazi Arbeitsfront . In reality, however, mandatory syndicalization never took hold. Klein summarized the period as follows : “In the four years of military socialism the basis of the old parties had definitely rotted away…in the end, the left emerged as the dominant factor in political life.” In March 1939, in recognition of this shifting ground, a Concordancia of the three traditional political parties was formed , in which the pre-1930 parties were forced to recognize the end of old system and become (in Klein’s estimate) “class-conscious representatives of oligarchy”.)

A further important development during the period of Busch rule was the March 1938 constitutional convention. The proceedings reflected the impact, among others, of the Mexican Revolution , just then reaching its left-wing limits under Cardenas. The new constitution demarcated itself from its liberal predecessors, with their orientation to the individual and to private property, by a corporatist emphasis on state-recognized professional or occupational organizations, and anticipated further elaboration after 1952. It was accompanied by a new property law pushing social ownership. It proposed agrarian reform, legalization of the ayallu (the pre-Hispanic rural commune, still in existence in some regions), and the nationalization of the mines (though this was ultimately rejected). It forced a regroupment of traditional parties from the pre-Chaco period. The regime decreed (in principle) free universal education and the creation of rural education centers for the highland indigenous population .

March 1938 also saw the complete triumph of the Frente Unico Socialista in elections. Carried along on this momentum, the (in Klein’s view) “extremely radical” constitutional convention of 1938 amounted to “a vital turning point in Bolivian history” . It repealed the 1880 liberal constitution, and developed “social constitutionalism” (a concept first elaborated for Latin American purposes by the Mexican Revolution). Property, previously conceived in individual terms, was redefined in function of the state. (This recentering of constitutionality on the state, and its legal recognition–and enforcement by compulsion of such recognition–of different bodies, from property owners to professional associations to labor unions, is the essence of corporatism.) The convention was also influenced by European radicalism and socialism as well as by 20th century indigenism, articulated by figures like Mariategui and Tamayo. It approved worker participation in profits, and proclaimed the function of the state as the provision of social welfare.

A few months later, again showing the continental projection of the Cardenas phase of the Mexican Revolution, the Confederacion de Trabajadores de America Latina (CTAL) was founded in Mexico City. According to Lora , “it had a huge influence on the Bolivian trade union movement” and had a practical influence in shaping the character and of the (Stalinist) Confederacion Sindical del Trabajo Boliviano (CSTB). Later, during World War II, the CTAL was controlled by the Stalinists, headed by the notorious Mexican Stalinist and trade union bureaucrat Lombardo Toledano .

The intensifying geopolitical struggle between Germany and the U.S. was hardly absent from Bolivian developments in the late 1930’s, as this social radicalization was deepening. By 1938, Germany accounted for 17% of Bolivia’s foreign trade.

The German foreign trade boards, for their part, wanted to exchange railroad equipment for Bolivian raw materials under Schacht’s new system of managed trade. Standard Oil was waging a major campaign for compensation for the Toro nationalization of its Bolivian assets, and Busch told the Germans he “didn’t want much to do with Americans” given this standoff. The United States was making efforts through the Pan-American Union (which it dominated) to counter German influence.

In April 1939, German Busch proclaimed himself dictator. While the Bolivian ambassador in Washington declared that that the Bolivian government and Bolivian people felt no sympathy for Nazi or Fascist ideology, Busch moved closer to the Third Reich .

One anomaly in the last two years of “military socialism” (1938-1940) was Bolivia’s unique policy, for the world at that time, of open admission of European Jewish refugees. The result was the arrival of between five and ten thousand Jews, mainly from Germany and the German-speaking areas of Central Europe. The purpose of the policy was to promote agricultural development of Bolivia’s remote and nearly-empty eastern hinterlands, for which the largely middle-class professional population of Jewish immigrants were exceptionally unsuited. By the end of World War II, most of these immigrants moved on to other countries, but their presence, and difficulties of assimilation in a country where they could neither speak Spanish well nor use their professional skills, also fed the anti- Semitism of La Calle, which found its way into the first program of the MNR in 1942 (cf. below Section 16).

In May 1939, however, the Busch regime issued a new Labor Code providing for greatly improved working conditions, effectively the most lasting change of his years in power . The Code’s first article excluded agricultural laborers, i.e. the masses of peasants. It was protectionist, setting a maximum of 15% of foreign workers in any given workplace. It provided for worker-employer unions, and granted the right to strike under government control, and also the employers’ right to lock-out and imposed mandatory arbitration.

Guillermo Lora elaborates further :

“(the decree) …in reality was a document worked out during the presidency of Col. Toro, when Waldo Alvarez was Minister of Labor and organized discussions in commissions created for that purpose. Organized workers participated in those discussions. This reality deflates the legend that Busch imposed the Labor Code from one day to the next on a working class that had done nothing to deserve it. There is a visible international, and particularly Mexican, influence on the Bolivian law…The approval of the Labor Code had enormous political repercussions. It confirmed the workerist (obrerista) character of the new government and Busch was automatically transformed into the knight errant of the popular movements. This enthusiastic support allowed the regime to acquire an unexpected political stability. The Chaco hero, even though he had issued no equivalent measure for the nationalization of oil, was identified by friend and foe as a caudillo of the left. The Labor Law and other measures adopted by the government even propelled a considerable number of Marxists to join the ranks of the unconditional supporters of Busch…the bulk of the masses and not a few Marxists considered this body of laws to be synonymous with socialism…Many authors of treatises and other exegetes wrote about the Busch Code and almost all of them are convinced that, especially in a backward country such as Bolivia, the exploited can be liberated by social legislation…(the philo-Trotskyist university professor Alberto Cornejo) finds a presumed identity between the labor code and the Transitional Program of the Fourth International…Cornejo fancies that the struggle for serious social legislation is nothing less than the Gordian knot of revolutionary activity.”

As Lora said: “State socialism, far from abolishing the principle of private property, would limit itself to modernizing it, giving it the content of a social function.”

Along with all this labor ferment and legislation, Busch imposed a great increase in the taxation of mines. When the tin mine owners from Comite Permanente de Mineros forced the government to abolish special taxes and foreign currency requirements, Busch responded in June 1939 with a Schacht-type system of currency controls. The decree required the mandatory handover of all foreign currency from mineral exports to the central bank, citing Germany, Russia, Spain, as well as Argentina, Brazil and Chile as antecedents. This measure increased state revenues by 25%.

The Bolivian representative in Berlin announced Bolivia’s intention to withdraw from the International Tin Pool and put the Banco Minero in charge of tin exports, creating a state monopoly. The Germans saw this as an opening through which the Reich could acquire all Bolivian mineral production in exchange for mining equipment . In July 1939, the Reich representatives in Bolivia, Walter Becker and Horst Koppelmann, were asked to reorganize German-Bolivian trade through the centralization of the ASKI marks in the Central Bank, thereby obtaining all Bolivian mineral products (above all tin) in exchange for ASKI marks, and to sign a treaty, a “Convenio Comerical de Pagos” on all credit transactions between the two states . Bolivia, like other countries which entered into these barter agreements with Nazi Germany, was flooded with cameras, Bayer aspirin and ASKI marks .

Busch then nationalized the Central Bank, and Alberto Ostria Gutierrez, a pro-Anglo- American diplomat, resigned from the government in protest at the drift of economic policy. On the same day German emissaries signed a preliminary protocol with the Ministry of Foreign Relations ; in it, Germany and Bolivia agreed to give Reich-Credit-Gesellschaft and the German Bank of South America the regulation of trade in ASKI-marks. The protocol also anticipated a five-year treaty under which Bolivia would sell all products to Germany for ASKI marks (with some exceptions for tin). The last part of agreement proposed oversight of Bolivia’s Central Bank by a mixed commission of Bolivians and the “German Minister in Bolivia”. It also established the role of the Reichsmark and it reserved for Germany the right to use 50% of its “creencias de compensacion” (i.e. ASKI marks) in the purchase of Bolivian tin. The U.S., Britain and Japan attempted to exert counter-pressures, but six days later the two German banks signed an agreement with the YPFB, the state oil company, agreeing to help Bolivia in oil industry development. Walter Mehring, “the special plenipotentiary of the YPFB “ and a German citizen, was ordered to sign an agreement with the two German banks. Four million marks were slated for equipment in exchange for oil and raw materials.

This flurry of activity marked the high point of German-Bolivian commercial relations in the 1936-46 period, but the anticipated exchanges never materialized and served more to focus U.S. attention on these developments; up to this point, the U.S. had been more interested in the Bolivian-Paraguayan negotiations in the wake of the Chaco War, which dragged on until 1938, and which had taken precedence over concerns about Bolivian “military socialism”. The German envoys ultimately left Bolivia empty-handed.

“Military socialism” in Bolivia came to an abrupt end on August 23, 1939, with the (apparent) suicide of German Busch. There were widespread popular doubts that his death was indeed a suicide and many suspected that Busch had been assassinated by the tin barons and their “superstate”. . Indeed, Busch was not replaced by Baldivian, his vice president, but instead a special commission convened to install General Carlos Quintanella as provisional president until April 1940. Quintanella promptly overturned the Busch decree on foreign currency and in late 1939, issued a modified decree suited to the wartime situation .

Bolivian politics following the death of Busch entered a new period of the restoration of the oligarchy’s power, in suitably modified form with an open orientation toward the emerging Allied side in the Second World War and a simultaneous right-wing shift on the domestic front. As early as September 1939, a rapid falloff in Bolivian-German trade took place as Bolivian trade with the U.S. eclipsed it. The German presence in Lloyd Aereo Boliviano was eliminated .

The new period represented by the 1940-1943 presidency of Enrique Peñaranda, following the Toro-Busch period of “military socialism”, marks a shift of the pendulum away from previous pro-fascist foreign policy and left-corporatist appeals to the working class, and toward a pro-Allied international stance combined with a hardening of the regime’s relationship with workers and peasants. The pendulum would swing again after Peñaranda’s ouster by the coup of December 1943, ushering in the 1943-1946 return to the previous Toro-Busch dynamic, naturally modified for wartime conditions, under Villaroel. Following Villaroel’s overthrow and lynching in July 1946, the pendulum swung back again, and hard, in the repressive “sexenio rosquero ”, the six-year period leading up to the MNR revolution, in which the tin baron “superstate” returned to power with a vengeance, before being definitively overthrown in 1952. Hence it is necessary, as heretofore, to follow this crossover between international pressures and domestic developments in detail . From 1940 onward, when the U.S. turned its attention to Bolivia as the sole tin producer in the world not under Axis control, the U.S. and Britain engaged in a propaganda barrage depicting the emerging MNR as “Nazi-fascist”, and increasingly intervened in domestic Bolivian politics. After the war, during the “sexenio rosquero”, it was pointed out with some irony that under Bolivian “fascism”, workers were urged to unionize and peasant questions were at least theoretically addressed, whereas in “democratic” (read: pro-Allied) phases, workers and peasants were repressed and massacred. In the decade before the outbreak of the Cold War in 1948, “Nazi- fascist” was the epithet of choice reserved for anyone who opposed American interests, thereafter being replaced by “communist”.

Beginning with its founding in 1940, the PIR (Partida de la Izquierda Revolucionaria- Party of the Revolutionary Left) emerged as the most influential self-designated Marxist party in Bolivia, with a pro- Soviet and an indigenous faction. The main personality of the PIR, Jose Antonio Arze , was not, however, (at least in Lora’s view), a “sectarian Stalinist”. In the absence of any established Communist Party in Bolivia, the PIR functioned effectively as the local pro-Stalinist party, and followed the Soviet line as faithfully as any CP elsewhere. From the time of Nazi Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 to the outbreak of the Cold War, the PIR so aggressively depicted critics of the Allies, whether from the MNR or the Trotskyists, as “Nazis”, that it wound up in a close alliance with the tin baron superstate, ultimately even involving itself (in 1947) in bloody repression of workers. This abject pro-Allied, pro-“democratic” stance of the PIR so totally discredited it in the eyes of the Bolivian masses, especially the working class, that the party’s mass support of 1940 simply evaporated by 1950, when it shrank to a miserable sect. This self- destruction of the PIR (hardly unique among pro-Soviet political parties in the 1940’s) was an important factor in the emergence of Trotskyism as the dominant current in the Bolivian working class in the late 1940’s and beyond . During the war, the MNR was pro-Axis, at least until U.S. pressures (and the imminence of German defeat) forced it to moderate its tone; the marginal Falange was pro-Axis throughout .

Thus on Apr. 12,1940, Enrique Peñaranda was elected president, ending the provisional rule of Quintanilla and re-establishing the tin baron superstate’s direct influence in the government. The 10,000 votes (out of 56,000 total) for Jose Antonio Arze, the PIR leader, were the real shock of the elections, particularly given the elite character of the enfranchised 2%. Peñaranda’s priority of reorienting Bolivian foreign policy to the U.S. ran into the obstacle of Standard Oil’s ongoing clamor for compensation for the 1937 nationalization of its assets.

Alberto Ostria Gutierrez, who had resigned under protest from the Busch regime, was back in charge of diplomacy. He claimed to have forced Washington to back down on the oil issue in exchange for full cooperation in the war effort .

In this new period, moderate left, middle-class intellectuals were anti-U.S. and influenced by fascist ideology . The pro-German and pro-Italian “national socialists” were in favor of the nationalization of basic industries, above all the tin mines. In Klein’s view, it was in their interest to foster a radical mine labor movement” and the time was indeed propitious; in October 1940 there were wildcats in the mines and a major railroad strike.

The new dispensation under Peñaranda was accelerated by the so-called “Nazi putsch”. A letter was published in Bolivian newspapers on July 20, 1941, ostensibly naming Bolivian attaché Elias Belmonte in Berlin and the German ambassador in La Paz in a plot for a Nazi takeover in Bolivia. Though the letter was actually a caper of British intelligence services , it gave the Peñaranda government all the pretext it needed for harsh repression of those associated with the Toro-Busch years. The German ambassador was expelled from the country, German and Bolivian Nazis as well as MNR activists were jailed, the Italian contractors in Cochabamba were expelled, La Calle was shut down, and Carlos Montenegro was also jailed for four months.. Up to that time, the MNR had been the loudest critic of compensation to Standard Oil. The “Nazi putsch” also solidified the working alliance between the PIR, now (after the German invasion of the Soviet Union the previous month) in its anti-fascist “Democratic Front” with the Rosca oligarchy. The military, however, never completely eliminated the nationalist younger officers who oriented to Toro-Busch military socialism, which would be important in the subsequent (1943-1946) Villaroel period.

Not all went smoothly for the new right-wing course; in September and October 1941, Siglo XX miners and railway workers struck and won a 20% pay increase, and Ostria Gutierrez was forced out in controversies over the sales of minerals and the compensation questions. Nonetheless, by late 1941 the U.S., seriously in need of tin, enrolled Bolivia in its Lend-Lease program. After Pearl Harbor (December 1941) the Peñaranda government issued a pro-U.S. statement, froze German and Japanese assets, and agreed to $1.5 million in compensation for Standard Oil . In late January 1942,

Bolivia broke diplomatic relations with Germany and expelled more German citizens.

The left parties did make big gains in the spring 1942 elections, in which the MNR also participated for the first time. But the Peñaranda government issued its infamous State Security Decree (Decreto de Seguridad de Estado), banning organizations with “international ties”, no doubt aimed at sympathizers of Germany and Italy. In June, Bolivia joined the Allied forces in the world war, and under this pressure the MNR began to take its distances from Germany. One early spur to this realignment was the Economic Cooperation Agreement with the United States, which had resulted from the Inter-American Conference in Rio de Janeiro and the report of the U.S. government’s Bohan mission. The agreement provided $15 million for oil prospecting, highway construction and funding for the Bolivian Development Corporation (Corporacion de Fomento Boliviano-CFB), which would play a major role after the 1952 revolution. (Critics pointed out that the sum provided hardly made up for Bolivia’s sales of tin and wolfram to the U.S. at below world market prices. )

The MNR was founded on January 25, 1941 (and more formally on June 2, 1942), with the La Calle intellectuals such as Montenegro, Cespedes, Paz Estenssoro and Cuadros Quiroga providing the main inspiration. One historian called it a “uniquely Bolivian blend of nationalism and socialism, but never outright fascism”. Augusto Cespedes, much later, agreed with Ostria Gutierrez that there was more than a whiff of Nazi influence in the founding program, but went on to say that it was the “fashion” (sic) of the time . Another author later asked Cuadros Quiroga, who drafted the program, about the anti-Semitism in the original document of the MNR; the latter replied that it was due to (the Jewish tin baron) Hochschild. Cuadros Quiroga referred to the “sinister figure of the Jew Mauricio Hochschild…the pontiff of palace machinations.” In Cuadros Quiroga’s view, anti-Semitic sentiment was widespread in Bolivia at the time, but he claims that after the Holocaust he himself gave it up. For him, Hitler was seen in Bolivia as an “alternative formula to bourgeois and oligarchic democracy.”

In Cuadros Quiroga’s “Principles and Action of the National Revolutionary Movement”, the 1942 founding document of the MNR, the following points are enumerated : 1) against false “entreguista”, or sell-out (to foreigners), democracy; 2) against the pseudo-socialism of a new exploitation. On the latter point, the document continues: “we denounce as anti-national any possible relationship of the international political parties and the maneuvers of Judaism.” It concludes with a call for the “absolute prohibition of Jewish immigration, as well as any other immigration not having productive efficacy”. And finally, 3) a call for “solidarity of Bolivians to defend the collective interest and the common good before the individual interest”, possibly a direct translation of the Nazis’ “Gemeinnutz vor Eigennutz”

It is enlightening to read some attempts to contextualize the collective views of the early MNR leaders, written decades later by MNR sympathizers. Walter Guevara Arze, in his 1988 book calling for a renewal of the movement, and commenting on the torrent of pro-Allied propaganda calling the MNR “Nazi”, wrote: “…unfortunately some texts of the party which confused the struggle against imperialism with support for Nazi-fascism appeared to justify, at a certain moment, this absurd accusation…to this we have to add the declarations of some officers who believed, more or less sincerely, that this was the position most beneficial for the country…”

Guillermo Bedregal, in a massive study of Victor Paz Estenssoro, the most visible political face of the MNR over decades, writes that in 1939, World War II

“…gave rise to great expectations and obvious sympathy for the impressive military victories of Germany. Some people therefore believed that the matter was summed up in a twofold idea: the history of humanity, after capitalism and communism, was entering into a national-proletarian, national-peasant phase, whose paradoxical emergent form was then represented by European “fascisms” (sic), and some were convinced that the advent of the new era had as its precondition the triumph of the Axis in the world war…Many young Bolivians believed in the European victory of the Axis and in a peace that might be favorable for the Indo-American peoples…Latin America had never had any problems with German hegemonism or attempts at domination…To this we have to add the important influence of political developments in Brazil and in Argentina…(such as) an anti-U.S. politics enriched by the emergence of the syndicalized workers’ movement of the “descamisados” of Eva and Juan Peron…the founding opposition of the MNR was driven by great passions and also great disinformation. No one, until the final defeat of Nazi Germany, knew about the existence of the famous concentration camps…Sympathy, there was; disinformation, I repeat, there was in spades.”

(Presumably the crushing of all organizations—parties, unions–of the German workers’ movement as well as all other parties of the center and the right, concentration for enemies of the regime, 200,000 political refugees before the outbreak of the war, the Nuremberg Laws on racial purity, the expulsion of Jews from public life and the Kristallnacht had been insufficient reasons for skepticism.)

Guevara Arze and Bedregal are at least willing to face up—to some extent–to these currents for what they were. Consider, then, the attempt of Eduardo Arze Cuadros, in his 2002 book (dedicated to…Jose Cuadros Quiroga) to finesse the same questions in a far more laudatory view of the early MNR. For Arze, the critics (presumably Marxists) who see the key struggle as “class against class”, in opposition to the MNR’s insistence on the “nation against imperialism”, are “Eurocentric”. He makes virtually no mention of the existence of RADEPA. In his chapter on La Calle, he invokes only its support for the Spanish Republic, and makes no mention of its pervasive anti-Semitism. After this whitewash of La Calle, Arze goes on to say that Bolivian anti-Semitism in this period has been “decontextualized”. Sinking further into quicksand, he continues with a priceless passage:

“…other objective elements of analysis of the period, such as the observable fact of the demographic and political gravitation of “semitism” (sic) to the city of New York, the neuralgic point of the grave world crisis of 1929 and the principal headquarters of capitalist finance, (…) can underscore the objectivity of an association of big international finance capital with semitism (sic) in a nation which had just emerged from a serious defeat in a regional war and which was then involved, almost without wanting it, in a new conflict…” .

With apologists such as these, the early MNR hardly needs critics.

While the MNR was making its entry into Bolivian politics, the labor situation under Peñaranda was spinning out of control. In late September 1942, the unions issued demands at the Catavi mine owned by Patiño; two weeks later railroad strikes erupted.

The strike wave intensified through November and December, until on December 21/22 hundreds of asse