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With strong backing from Washington, President Víctor Paz set about to drag Bolivia toward his vision of modernity. His authoritarian approach to development was fueling the rapid militarization of the Bolivian countryside, and armed force had been unleashed against recalcitrant miners. Depicted by modernizers in La Paz and Washington as obstacles to economic progress, leftists shed the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR; Revolutionary Nationalist Movement) in droves, and the revolutionary party atrophied into a hollow redoubt of development technocrats and military officers. As Paz Estenssoro began his constitutionally dubious third term,1 left-wing miners and right-wing guerrillas agitated to bring him down. Alienated by Paz’s newfound anticommunism, his authoritarian approach to labor, and his unabashed alliance with the United States, the Bolivian Left had finally been thrust into the awkward embrace of the MNR’s eternal right-wing enemies. Through it all, the Johnson administration never wavered from its predecessor ’s pro-MNR approach, even as Paz faced widespread popular revolt. By mid-1964, the MNR regime operated exclusively at the pleasure of the armed forces, and military-led development threatened to take on a more literal meaning. Barrientos’s Magic Bullet When an assassin’s bullet ended President Kennedy’s life, Bolivia’s revolutionary leaders were understandably concerned. Víctor Paz had just received a Chapter5 SeedsofRevolt The Making of an Antiauthoritarian Front 132 C H A P T E R 5 magnanimous reception at the White House, and his supporters worried that the incoming Johnson administration would be less sympathetic. The Bolivians were soon comforted. Far from abandoning President Paz to his multiplying enemies on the right and left, Washington’s new leaders only increased US support for Paz’s regime. The December 1963 hostage crisis had forged Paz’s reputation as an iron-fisted reformer, and a Kennedy-appointed “Alliance for Progress ideologue”2 further ensured that development and modernization would continue to guide the US Embassy’s approach to Bolivia.3 For the incoming Johnson administration, the 1963 hostage crisis provided proof positive that Paz was the only man to guide such a chaotic country. According to Ambassador Henderson, “We never really had any problems of deciding whether Johnson was as good a man as Kennedy. . . . We went immediately into this [hostage] issue and the next eleven days we got thoroughly immersed in it.”4 If Johnson’s 1964 presidential contender’s criticism that “Cuba is gone, Bolivia is going”5 had any effect on the White House’s approach , it was only to further accentuate Washington’s unconditional support for the MNR regime. The Bolivians eventually came to realize that Kennedy appointees continued to control US foreign policy toward Bolivia, and Henderson recalls that “the fact that I was named, nominated, and confirmed under Kennedy, [and] that I was reconfirmed under Johnson, was all that they, the Paz government, needed to know.” Even Thomas Mann, Johnson’s straight-talking appointee as assistant secretary for Latin America, described the Paz regime as so authoritarian that he “had difficulties in distinguishing politically” between it and the Alfredo Stroessner dictatorship in neighboring Paraguay. He meant that as a compliment.6 President Johnson showed no signs of reevaluating US foreign policy toward Bolivia. He wrote Paz days after the hostage crisis that he hoped “we can move ahead with renewed vigor on our many cooperative endeavors,” expressing his “earnest desire to continue strengthening the Alliance for Progress.”7 With this White House imprimatur, Ambassador Henderson and local CIA officials issued a joint request for an increase in Washington’s covert subsidy, first approved during the Irupata violence of mid-1963, to assist President Paz in his drive “to wrest control of labor organizations away from Juan Lechín Oquendo, the [MNR Left Sector], and the PCB [Partido Comunista de Bolivia (Communist Party of Bolivia)].” Before leaving office, Kennedy appointee Assistant Secretary Martin “agreed that an increase in the subsidy was justified,” and the 5412 Special Group promptly approved an expanded covert program at its next meeting on 10 March 1964.8 S E E D S O F R E V O LT 133 By early 1964, Washington’s entire foreign policy bureaucracy saw Paz as sufficiently authoritarian to bring about needed economic reforms and secure US political interests. The State Department reported that the regime’s willingness to authorize violence against the miners “had shown a readiness to orient its policies more to development needs and take...

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