Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
and the opposition and increasing its military spending. At the same time, the Bolivian army
began aggressively probing the disputed frontier with Paraguay in the Chaco: by July 1932,
the
Chaco War
had broken out. Though many Bolivians afterwards came to believe the con-
flict had been provoked by foreign oil companies anxious to exploit deposits in the Chaco
(they later turned out not to exist), in fact it's now clear Salamanca himself deliberately star-
ted the war, perhaps thinking that a quick victory would improve his political standing.
Over the next two years the Bolivian army was smashed and driven out of all the disputed
territory with terrible loss of life. Late in 1934 the army forced Salamanca to resign; early
the next year
Major Germán Busch
ended the Paraguayan advance, and both sides sued for
peace. Some 65,000 Bolivian soldiers had died out of a population of around two million.
Known as the “
Chaco Generation
”, many Bolivians emerged from the war deeply critical
of the traditional political system. The country became increasingly open to radical left-wing
ideas, and the old political parties faded in importance.
These ideas also affected the army. In 1936 a group of young officers led by David Toro and
Germán Busch, seized power, establishing a radical “
military socialist
” regime influenced
by European fascism. In an unprecedented step, the next year the government nationalized
without compensation the holdings of
US Standard Oil
, which had illegally sold Bolivian
oil to Paraguay during the war while claiming it couldn't produce enough for Bolivia. In alli-
ance with a range of left-wing parties, the military regime drew up a new constitution, but its
radical initiatives ended in 1939 when Busch committed suicide. A more conservative mil-
itary regime close to the tin barons followed, but the growth of radical ideas in the postwar
period meant that any return to the prewar consensus was increasingly impossible.
The road to revolution
The most important of the many new political parties that emerged in the period following
the Chaco War was the
Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario
(MNR), which had a
pro-Nazi stance and advocated nationalization of the mines. Together with several left-wing
groups, it quickly came to dominate the national congress. Meanwhile, the union movement
was also growing more extreme, and began to stage frequent strikes - many of which were
brutally put down.
In 1943, in alliance with a cabal of radical army officers, the MNR seized power. The new
regime, with
Major Gualberto Villaroel
as president, supported the labour movement and
soughttoinvolvetheindigenousmassesinnational politics. In1944mineworkers formedthe
Federación Sindical de Trabajadores Mineros de Bolivia
(FSTMB; Federated Union of
Mineworkers of Bolivia), which took over leadership of the labour movement and gave im-
portant support to the MNR - over the following decades it proved one of the most powerful
political forces in the country. In 1945 the government sponsored the first
National Indigen-
ous Congress
and banned the hated labour service obligation required of indigenous com-
