From Development to Dictatorship: Bolivia and the Alliance for Progress in the Kennedy Era

Preface

During a six-month jaunt around South America in early 1963, American journalist Hunter S. Thompson became fixated on what he called “Baffling Bolivia: A Never-Never Land High above the Sea.” Swigging bourbon whiskey on the couch of a US Embassy official as armed workers and peasants patrolled the streets, Thompson was enthralled by the “manic atmosphere” he found in revolutionary Bolivia’s capital city, La Paz, “compared to the gray formality of Lima and the tomb-like dullness of Quito.” Summing up his experiences in typical tongue-in-cheek fashion, Thompson wrote that “Bolivia is a land of excesses, exaggerations, quirks, contradictions, and every manner of oddity and abuse.”1 US officials in Bolivia rivaled Thompson’s prose. Ambassador Ben Stephansky noted in 1962 that he had been assigned to a “complicated and perplexing country.” Two years later, his successor Douglas Henderson likewise complained that Bolivia had an “Arab-like political world” with “byzantine complexity.” In May 1963, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative General Edward Lansdale—himself no literary slouch—lamented that Bolivia “is a land of vexing paradox for the US.”2 Little has changed in fifty years. Since I began work on this book, Bolivia has experienced violent civilian uprisings, at least one peasant massacre, the declaration of a US ambassador persona non grata, the expulsion of the Drug Enforcement Agency, a weeklong strike by mutinous national police, and most recently the ejection of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Over the past seven years, I have been intrigued by the Bolivian riddle. In the process, I have incurred many debts. Preface x P R E FA C E My conversations with historian Luis Antezana Ergueta significantly contributed to my Bolivian orientation. His book on the 1964 coup is passionate and provocative, and I sometimes think I would have never understood anything in this country’s political life without our early conversations. Several people shared contacts and helped me feel at home in Bolivia, personally and intellectually. These include Evan Abramson, Hervé do Alto, Guido Antezana , Ricardo Calla, Jorge Calvimontes, José Luis Cueto, Emilse Escóbar, Alex Fernández, Ingrid Fernández, Loyola Guzmán, Bill Lofstrom, Juan Molina, Nancy Nallar, Uvaldo Nallar, Lola Paredes, Phil Parkerson, Luis Pozo, Pablo Quisbert, René Rocabado, Andrés Santana, Carlos Serrate, Carlos Soria, and Eduardo Trigo. Thierry Noel kept me company—often against his wishes—as I typed through endless drafts. His unparalleled knowledge of the Bolivian armed forces, and his excellent espressos and araks, significantly contributed to this book’s completion. In my reconstruction of the narrative of US development assistance to revolutionary Bolivia in the years leading up to the 1964 coup, government records have proven especially useful. This book benefited greatly from documentation at the Biblioteca y Archivo Nacional de Bolivia in Sucre, where a massive collection of papers from Víctor Paz Estenssoro’s second presidency (1960–1964) was made available to scholars in the early 2000s. Long hidden in the rafters above the presidential palace, these documents demonstrate the centralized manner by which Paz ruled, depict his government intentionally utilizing the communist threat to secure ever-increasing levels of US assistance , and reveal the extent to which Bolivia’s revolutionary leaders viewed economic development as their only path to national liberation. Archive Director Marcela Inch offered me an informative introduction, and archivists Álvaro López, Óscar Hurtado, and Corina Garcia provided patient professionalism during my many visits. This book also benefited from the expert archival assistance of Rossana Barragán at the Archivo de La Paz, Marta Paredes at the Foreign Ministry Archive, and Edgar Ramírez at the archive of the state-run mine company, the Corporación Minera de Bolivia. Each repository provides its own perspective on the intensity with which the Bolivian government sought rapid modernization in the early 1960s, even at the occasional expense of democratic liberties. Vlasta Měšťánková at the Archiv Národní in Prague sent digital scans from the archives of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, which contain numerous memoranda of private conversations with Bolivian officials and Communist Party members. The archive of Paz Estenssoro’s Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR; Revolutionary Nationalist Movement) and the records of the Central Obrera Boliviana P R E FA C E xi (COB; Bolivian Workers’ Central), both located at the Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine in Nanterre, France, bring into stark relief a bitter feud between Paz’s technocratic, modernizing approach...