July 2018 Middle Atlantic Review of Latin American Studies II(1); also from the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict and at Research Gate: Despite being the poorest and least developed country in South America, Bolivia was the first to emerge from the period of military dictatorships that dominated the continent from the mid-1960s into the 1980s. This article examines the role of civil resistance in that country’s seemingly improbable early end to military rule, noting how a broad coalition of unions, intellectuals, the Catholic Church, and opposition parties succeeded in bringing down a series of military leaders, eventually ushering in elected civilian governance…
Category: Latin America/Caribbean
Latin America/Caribbean
Civil Resistance Against Coups: A Comparative and Historical Perspective
International Center on Nonviolent Conflict 2017: This monograph presents in-depth case studies and analysis intended to improve our understanding of the strategic utility of civil resistance against military takeovers; the nature of civil resistance mobilization against coups; and the role of civil resistance against coups.
Fidel Castro left Cuba a green legacy
National Catholic Reporter December 9, 2016
While he no longer held any formal position of power since his resignation as president for health reasons eight years ago, Fidel Castro’s death last month marks the passing of an era. In his nearly 50 years in power, few individuals have had had such a profound influence on a country for good or ill — and Castro left plenty of both.
Hillary Clinton’s double standards on human rights
The US role in the Honduras coup and subsequent violence
The National Catholic Reporter March 14, 2016: Thousands of indigenous activists, peasant leaders, trade unionists, journalists, environmentalists, judges, opposition political candidates, human rights activists, and others have been murdered since a 2009 military coup ousted the democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya [who had] raised the minimum wage and provided free school lunches, milk for young children, pensions for the elderly, and additional scholarships for students. He built new schools, subsidized public transportation, and even distributed energy-saving light bulbs.
US Invasion of Grenada: A 30-Year Retrospective
Truthout October 25, 2013 and republished by
The Institute of the Black World 21st Century (IBW21)
On this anniversary, it would be worth looking back at the Grenadian revolution, the U.S. invasion, its aftermath and the important precedent it set for “regime change” through U.S. military intervention…
U.S. Support for Israel Mirrors 80s Support for El Salvador Junta
It’s like the 1980s all over again.
During that decade, the Reagan administration – with the support of Congress – sent billions of dollars worth of unconditional military and other support to the right wing-junta in El Salvador, just as the Obama administration is today with the right-wing government in Israel.
When Salvadoran forces massacred 700 civilians in El Mozote, Congressional leaders defended the killings, saying that the U.S-backed operation was “fighting terrorists.” Similarly, when Israel massacred over 700 civilians in the Gaza Strip early last year, Congressional leaders defended the killings for the same reason.
When Amnesty International and other groups investigated the El Mozote killings and found that it was indeed a massacre targeted at civilians by the Salvadoran army, members of Congress denounced these reputable human rights organizations as “biased.” There was a similar reaction when Amnesty and other groups documented similar Israeli war crimes, with Congressional leaders accusing them of “bias.”
Even when the Salvadoran junta murdered international humanitarian aid workers, that right-wing government’s supporters in Washington insisted that the victims were actually allied with terrorists and that they somehow provoked their own deaths. We’re now hearing the same rationalization regarding the attack on the humanitarian aid flotilla in the eastern Mediterranean.
The difference is that, back in the 1980s, members of Congress and the administration who were responsible for such policies were targeted with frequent protests, including sit-ins at Congressional offices and other kinds of nonviolent direct action. Unlike supporters of the El Salvador’s former right-wing government, however, today’s Congressional supporters of Israel’s right-wing government seem to be getting a free ride.
Senators Barbara Boxer, Ron Wyden, Russ Feingold, Barbara Mikulski, and Carl Levin – who led the attack against Justice Goldstone and others who documented Israeli war crimes – are still supported by many so-called “progressives” who apparently believe that, despite these senators’ attacks on basic human rights, they should still get their vote, campaign contributions, and other support. For example, here in California, Code Pink co-founder Jodie Evans and singer/songwriter Bonnie Raitt, who were active in opposition to U.S. policy in Central America during the 1980s, are major contributors to Boxer’s re-election campaign. The willingness to challenge such right-wing Congressional militarists has substantially diminished.
The problem is less a matter of the power of AIPAC and the “pro-Israel lobby” as it is the failure of those on the left to demand a change in Obama administration policy. Progressives must recognize that the lives of Arab civilians are as important as the lives of Central American civilians; that it is just as inexcusable for the United States to support a government that kill passengers and crew on a humanitarian flotilla in international waters as it is to kill nuns, agronomists and other civilians working in the Salvadoran countryside; and that, when it comes to international humanitarian law, the differences between the policies of Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama are not as great as we would like to think.
http://www.fpif.org/blog/us_support_for_israel_mirrors_80s_support_for_el_salvador_junta
The Power of Nonviolent Action in Honduras
The decision by Honduran coup leader Roberto Micheletti to renege on his October 30 agreement to allow democratically-elected president Manuel Zelaya to return to power was a severe blow to pro-democracy forces who have been struggling against the illegitimate regime since it seized power four months ago. The disappointment has been compounded by the Obama administration’s apparent willingness—in a break with Latin American leaders and much of the rest of the international community—to recognize the forthcoming presidential elections being held under the de facto government’s repressive rule.
Still, there are reasons to hope that democracy can be restored to this Central American nation.
The primary reason the de facto government was willing to negotiate at all was the ongoing nonviolent resistance campaign by Honduran pro-democracy forces. The role of popular nonviolent action has not been as massive, dramatic, or strategically sophisticated as the movements that have overthrown some other autocratic regimes in recent decades. There were no scenes of hundreds of thousands of people filling the streets and completely shutting down state functions, as there were in the people power movements that brought down Marcos in the Philippines or Milosevic in Serbia.
Nevertheless, the nonviolent struggle has been of critical importance.
The sustained nonviolent resistance movement has prevented the provisional government, which was formed after the June 28 coup, from establishing a sense of normalcy. What the movement has lacked in well-organized, strategic focus, has been made up for with feisty and determined acts of resistance that have forced the provisional government into clumsy but ultimately futile efforts at repression—exposing the pretense of the junta’s supposed good intentions.
Sometimes a resistance movement just has to stay alive to make its point. Day after day, thousands of Hondurans from all walks of life have gathered in the streets of Tegucigalpa and elsewhere, demanding the restoration of their democratically-elected government. Every day they have been met by tear gas and truncheons. Over a dozen pro-democracy activists were murdered, but rather than let these assassinations frighten people into submission, the opposition turned the martyrs’ funerals into political rallies. Their persistence gradually has torn away the outlaw regime’s claims of legitimacy. Rather than establishing themselves as a legitimate government, de facto president Micheletti and his allied military officers have been made to look like little more than a gang of thugs who took over an Old West town and threw out the sheriff.
Since the return of the exiled President Zelaya to Tegucigalpa (he successfully sought refuge in the Brazilian embassy), the pro-democracy movement has surged. Micheletti and his henchman initially panicked—suspending basic civil liberties, shutting down opposition radio and television stations, and declaring a 24-hour curfew. This disruption caused the business community’s support for the de facto government to wane; the Obama State Department, which had been somewhat timid in pressing the junta up to that point, began to push harder for a deal.
It has been a great credit to the pro-democracy forces that, save for occasional small-scale rioting, the movement has largely maintained its nonviolent discipline. It would have been easy to launch a guerrilla war. Much of Honduras consists of farming and ranching country where many people own guns. The neighboring countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua have experienced bloody revolutionary struggles in recent decades. Yet, despite serious provocations by police and soldiers loyal to the provisional government, the movement has recognized that armed resistance would have been utterly futile and counter-productive. Indeed, they recognize that their greatest strength is in maintaining their commitment to nonviolence.
Those who have engaged in these courageous acts of resistance will feel betrayed, however, if the Obama administration is indeed ready to defy the international community by allowing Micheletti to stay in office and to recognize the results of an election held under such repressive conditions. The United States does have the power to force the illegitimate regime out and to facilitate the return of the country’s democratically-elected president to power if the Obama administration chose to use it. Indeed, there are few countries in the world as dependent on trade with the United States as Honduras.
As for those of us in the United States, it is not enough to cheer from the sidelines at courageous acts of nonviolent action by the people of Honduras. We must be willing to challenge our own government—through engaging in nonviolent direct action ourselves, if necessary—to support democracy in Honduras.
However, even if the Obama administration refuses to take a more responsible position and the coup is allowed to stand, the struggle will not have been for naught.
The Honduran opposition movement consists of a hodgepodge of trade unionists, campensinos from the countryside, Afro-Hondurans, teachers, feminists, students, and others who, along with insisting on the right of their elected president to return to office, are determined to build a more just society. Prior to the coup this summer, there had never been a national mobilization in Honduras lasting for more than a week, much less four months. The protracted struggle against Micheletti may have served as a vaccination: Popular forces may now have developed the antibodies to engage in a sustained struggle for social justice, deepening the capacity for radical change in a society that has a rather weak tradition of social movements relative to much of the rest of Latin America.
Regardless of who occupies the Honduran presidential palace, there is a critical need to replace the old constitution, imposed by the outgoing military junta in 1981, which minimizes the participation of ordinary citizens in political decisions and effectively suppresses popular social movements. It must be replaced by one in which members of the country’s poor majority will have more of a say in determining their future. It was the movement for a popular, non-binding referendum to gauge support for a Constitutional convention that prompted the coup last June.
This struggle may be only the first chapter of an important and prolonged struggle for justice in one of Latin America’s poorest and most inequitable countries. It is important that the people of North America become engaged as active allies.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/the-power-of-nonviolent-action-in-honduras/
Showdown in ‘Tegucigolpe’
One of the hemisphere’s most critical struggles for democracy in 20 years is now unfolding in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa (nicknamed “Tegucigolpe” for its long history of military coup d’états, which are called golpes de estado, in Spanish). Despite censorship and repression, popular anger over the June 28 military overthrow of democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya is growing. International condemnation has been near-unanimous, and the Organization of American States has suspended Honduras, the first time the hemisphere-wide body has taken so drastic an action since 1962.
In a reversal of many decades of U.S. support for right-wing golpistas in Latin America, the Obama administration has denounced the coup. However, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, rather than backing the largely nonviolent popular uprising for Zelaya’s unconditional return to power, has instead been pushing for the country’s legitimate ruler to compromise with the very forces which illegally exiled him from the country and have been violently suppressing his supporters.
The United States is now offering support for mediation efforts to be led by Costa Rican president Oscar Arias. The Obama administration tried to discourage the exiled Honduran president from his attempt this past Sunday to return to his country and has apparently succeeded, for the time being, in preventing him from trying again. Clinton pressed this point on Tuesday in pushing for mediation, arguing that it would be a “better route for him to follow than attempt to return in the fact of the intractable opposition of the de facto government.”
Clinton also said, “Instead of another confrontation…let’s try the dialogue process.” What this ignores is that while the coup plotters have no legitimate standing, the Honduran people have a constitutionally guaranteed right to rebel under such circumstances. According to Article 3 of the Honduran constitution:
No one owes obedience to a government that has usurped power or to those who assume functions or public posts by the force of arms or using means or procedures that rupture or deny what the Constitution and the laws establish. The verified acts by such authorities are null. The people have the right to recur to insurrection in defense of the constitutional order.
What the Obama administration apparently fears is that if it allows the burgeoning pro-democracy movement to take its course, it may end up with a similar outcome to what transpired in Venezuela in 2002 — following a similar coup against that country’s left-leaning president, Hugo Chávez. Within days, a popular movement had forced right-wing elements of the military and their wealthy civilian allies to step down. Chávez returned to govern and emboldened by such a popular outpouring of support, he moved the country further to the left.
The United States could help such a movement succeed if it wanted to. If the Obama administration chose, the United States could impose strict economic sanctions on Honduras that would, combined with ongoing strikes and other disruptions, grind the economy to a halt and force the illegitimate junta in Tegucigalpa to step down.
Unfortunately, while there’s no evidence suggesting that the United States was responsible for the coup, there appear to be reasons the Obama administration may not want the coup plotters to suffer a total defeat.
Zelaya’s Significance
Despite being a wealthy logger and rancher from the centrist Liberal Party, Zelaya has moved his government well to the left since taking office in 2005. During his tenure, he raised the minimum wage and provided free school lunches, milk for young children, pensions for the elderly, and additional scholarships for students. He built new schools, subsidized public transportation, and even distributed energy-saving light bulbs. He also had Honduras join with Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Cuba, and three small Caribbean island states in the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), an economic alliance challenging the neoliberal orthodoxy that has dominated hemispheric trade in recent decades.
None of these are particularly radical moves, but it was nevertheless disturbing to the country’s wealthy economic and military elites. More frightening was that Zelaya had sought to organize an assembly to replace the 1982 constitution written during the waning days of the U.S.-backed military dictator Policarpo Paz. A non-binding referendum on whether such a constitutional assembly should take place was scheduled the day of the coup, but was cancelled when the military seized power and named Congressional Speaker Roberto Micheletti as president.
Calling for such a referendum is perfectly legal under Article 5 of the 2006 Honduran Civil Participation Act, which allows public functionaries to perform such non-binding public consultations regarding policy measures.Despite claims by the rightist junta and its supporters, Zelaya was not trying to extend his term. That question wasn’t even on the ballot. The Constitutional Assembly would not have likely completed its work before his term had expired anyway.
Yet the Obama administration is implying that the country’s legitimate democratic president somehow shared responsibility for his illegal overthrow. The initial White House response was rather tepid, initially failing to denounce the coup, simply calling upon “all political and social actors in Honduras to respect democratic norms, the rule of law and the tenets of the Inter-American Democratic Charter.” Similarly, Clinton insisted the day after the coup that “all parties have a responsibility to address the underlying problems that led to yesterday’s events.” When asked if her call for “restoring the constitutional order” in Honduras meant returning Zelaya himself, she didn’t say it necessarily would. Similarly, in a press conference on Tuesday, State Department spokesperson Ian Kelly evaded reporters’ questions as to whether the United States supported Zelaya’s return. This places the United States at odds with the Organization of American States, the Rio Group, and the UN General Assembly, all of which called for the “immediate and unconditional return” of Zelaya.
There are serious questions as to whether Clinton can be trusted to make a clear stance for democracy, given her traditionally pro-interventionist position on Latin America. As a senator, she argued that the Bush administration should have taken a more aggressive stance against the rise of left-leaning governments in the hemisphere, arguing that Bush has neglected such developments “at our peril.” In response to recent efforts by democratically elected Latin American governments to challenge the structural obstacles that have left much of their populations in poverty, she expressed alarm, saying, “We have witnessed the rollback of democratic development and economic openness in parts of Latin America.” Though no doubt aware that U.S. policy toward leftist regimes in Latin American in previous decades had included military interventions, CIA-sponsored coups, military and financial support for opposition groups, and rigged national elections, she argued that “We must return to a policy of vigorous engagement.”
The United States and Honduras
The United States certainly has a history of “vigorous engagement” in Honduras, actively supporting a series of military dictatorships from 1963 through the early 1980s. Though military rule formally ended by the end of 1982, the weak civilian presidents who followed in the subsequent decade served only at the pleasure of Honduran generals and the U.S. embassy. John Negroponte, who later served as George W. Bush’s ambassador to Iraq and the United Nations, as well as his Director of National Intelligence (DNI) was the U.S. ambassador to Honduras during this period.
During the 1980s, thousands of U.S. forces were sent to Honduras to train Honduran security forces as well as train and support the rightist Nicaraguan contras, which were engaged in a series of cross-border terrorist attacks. The CIA organized, trained, and equipped a special military unit known as backed Battalion 316, bringing in Argentine counterinsurgency experts as advisors on surveillance and interrogation. These advisors had been part of the “dirty war” in their country during the 1970s, in which more than 10,000 people were murdered. Honduran armed forces chief Gen. Gustavo Alvarez Martinez personally directed the unit with strong U.S. support, even after acknowledging to Negroponte that he intended “to use the Argentine method of eliminating subversives.” Though Alvarez’ personal involvement in large-scale human rights abuses were well-known to State Department and other U.S. officials, the Reagan administration awarded him the Legion of Merit for “encouraging the success of democratic processes in Honduras.”
Former Honduran congressman Efraín Díaz told the Baltimore Sun, in reference to U.S. policy towards human rights abuses in his country, “Their attitude was one of tolerance and silence. They needed Honduras to loan its territory more than they were concerned about innocent people being killed.” Under Negroponte, CIA officers based in the U.S. Embassy frequently visited a secret prison where captured dissidents were routinely tortured. It was one of a number of facilities to which U.S. officials had regular access that were off-limits to civilian Honduran officials, including judges looking for victims of kidnapping by right-wing paramilitary units.
Despite this history, including revelations of his role in covering up for such human rights abuses, Negroponte had little trouble on Capitol Hill during the Bush administration. Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), then the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, praised Negroponte for having “served bravely and with distinction,” and for bringing “a record of proven leadership and strong management.” Representative Jane Harman (D-CA), then the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, praised him as “a seasoned and skilled diplomat, who has served with distinction,” saying he was a “smart choice” to become the first DNI. This enthusiastic support for Negroponte among leading congressional Democrats, despite his well-documented role in human rights abuses while U.S. ambassador to Honduras, is indicative of how little regard the majority party in Congress cares about democracy in Central America.
The Legacy Today
The legacy of U.S. support for repression in Honduras is very much part of recent events.
The leader of the June 28 coup, Honduran General Romeo Vásquez, is a graduate of the notorious School of the Americas, a U.S. Army training program nicknamed “School of Assassins” for the sizable number of graduates who have engaged in coups, as well as the torture and murder of political opponents. The training of coup plotters at the program, since renamed the “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation,” isn’t a bygone feature of the Cold War: General Luis Javier Prince Suazo, who played an important role in the coup as head of the Honduran Air Force, graduated as recently as 1996.
Former members of Battalion 316 were involved in the coup as well.
Unfortunately, while far more knowledgeable of recent history than most recent presidents, Obama doesn’t seem willing to apologize, much less make amends, for U.S. complicity in supporting repression in Latin America. I am writing this article en route to Chile, where the United States played a major role in the downfall of another democratically elected leftist leader, Salvador Allende, back in September of 1973. Just five days before the coup in Honduras, Chilean president Michelle Bachelet visited President Obama in Washington. When asked by Chilean reporters whether he was willing to apologize for the U.S. role in bloody 1973 coup and its aftermath, Obama brushed off the suggestion by saying, “I’m interested in going forward, not looking backward.”
Meanwhile, U.S.-armed and trained security forces have violently dispersed largely nonviolent demonstrators protesting across the country, including shooting into a crowd of demonstrators near the airport on Sunday, killing two. Rather than acknowledge the widespread popular opposition to their illegitimate rule, the Honduran junta, like its authoritarian counterparts in Iran, have instead tried to blame outsiders for the unrest, in this case Cuba and Venezuela. Yet the Honduran people, like the Iranians, don’t need outside agitators or foreign funding in order to resist. This isn’t about geopolitics but about democracy. Unfortunately, backers of the rightist junta in Honduras, like backers of the rightist regime in Iran, are repeating fabricated stories of outside interference to discredit a genuine home-grown pro-democracy movement.
What may be at work in these U.S. and Costa Rican-led mediation efforts is some kind of deal where Zelaya can return, but under conditions that would preclude a constitutional assembly, any challenges to oligarchic interests, or any further efforts to promote economic justice. Similar kinds of pre-conditions were forced upon the deposed Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, prior to U.S. assistance in his initial return from exile in 1994.
How much the junta leaders are willing to compromise will depend on what is going on outside the meeting rooms.
One factor would be the ability of the pro-democracy movement to organize, think strategically, expand their ranks and maintain a nonviolent discipline. Fortunately, the rebellion thus far has been largely nonviolent, which would be far more effective in such circumstances.
For various historical reasons, Hondurans don’t have the same kind of history of armed revolution as their neighbors. Even during the dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s— while the country’s immediate neighbors Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua experienced major armed insurrections — the armed Honduran revolutionary movement was quite small and never had much of an impact.
By contrast, civil society organizations engaged in strategic nonviolent conflict have grown dramatically in recent years, including peasant organizations, indigenous and Afro-Honduran movements, human rights monitoring groups, environmental groups, women’s groups, an anti-militarization movement, and student groups, as well as three major labor federations. A series of strikes, blockages of major highways, and land seizures occurred over the past year as civil society became increasingly mobilized.
The second factor which could tip the balance is how firmly the United States comes down in support for democracy. Obama has at times been clear in his support for the legal process, declaring, “We believe that the coup was not legal and that President Zelaya remains the democratically elected president there.” Recognizing larger implications of this stance, he added, “It would be a terrible precedent if we start moving backward into the era in which we are seeing military coups as a means of political transition rather than democratic elections.”
Still, it was a full week before the United States announced it would slash aid to Honduras, and there have been no imminent signs of tougher sanctions. Unlike most Latin American countries, the United States has not withdrawn its ambassador from Tegucigalpa.
The United States, which hosts a U.S. Southern Command task force at the Soto Cano Airbase, 50 miles northwest of Tegucigalpa, exerts enormous influence on Honduras. Therefore, the pressure pro-democracy forces in the United States can bring to bear upon our government may prove as crucial as the efforts of brave pro-democracy forces within Honduras.
Mauritania’s coup is a setback for democracy
By Stephen Zunes and Hardy Merriman
The overthrow in August of what arguably constituted the most democratic government in the Arab world marks a serious setback in Africa as well as the Middle East.
There had been great expectations for Mauritania when the country had its first free elections in 2006. As one of the poorest and least developed countries in the world and, as with many other African countries, its boundaries and nationhood largely an artificial creation of European colonial powers, Mauritania fanned hopes that if democracy could take hold there, it could triumph anywhere.
Mauritania’s elected government under President Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi proved a disappointment in many ways, with widespread corruption and factional disputes with parliament. What brought down the government, however, was the all-too-familiar scourge faced by many nascent democracies: the coup d’état.
Whatever the failures of President Abdallahi’s administration, history has shown that military coups against an unpopular leader, even when the generals claim the best of intentions, tend to create more problems than they solve. Furthermore, there are far more democratic means of holding leaders accountable.
Coups tend to concentrate power among a small number of individuals and therefore make it more difficult for the people to hold their government or military accountable. When military officers have taken the risk to launch a coup, they often feel entitled to exercise state power themselves. For example, in Mauritania, a puppet civilian State Council announced by the putschists never materialized, leaving no formal checks and balances available to hold the new military leadership accountable.
Furthermore, in violating international norms by taking over a government by force, coup plotters usually require the support of a foreign power, thereby compromising their country’s sovereignty. In the case of Mauritania, its powerful neighbor Morocco, where coup leader Gen. Mohamed Ould Abdelaziz received his training, appears to be backing the military takeover. Such support can hardly be reassuring for Mauritanians, since the U.S.-backed Moroccan monarchy for many years claimed Mauritania as Moroccan territory and has invaded and occupied the neighboring country of Western Sahara, on which it had made similar territorial claims.
Finally, coups set a terrible precedent for future transitions of power. As we have seen in Haiti, Thailand and a number of African countries, once coups are established as the de facto method of power transfer, they are far more likely to continue in the future. In Mauritania, the military takeover of Aug. 6 has shattered the dreams of Mauritanians who wanted political change in their country to take place through free elections, not just the force of arms.
There are better ways to hold corrupt and inept leaders accountable. If circumstances make it impossible for a population to exercise their will through free and fair elections, there is the option of massive civil resistance. In such countries as the Philippines in 1986, Bolivia in 1981, Serbia in 2000, Mali in 1991, Chile in 1988, Czechoslovakia in 1989 and Ukraine in 2004, corrupt and autocratic regimes have been brought down nonviolently without leadership from the military or external forces. In these and other cases, ordinary people, using such nonviolent methods as strikes, boycotts, civil disobedience, mass demonstrations and the establishment of parallel institutions, expanded the political space available to them, fought for their rights and emerged victorious.
Such nonviolent civil resistance movements avoid not only the pitfalls of coups and foreign intervention but also provide a surer basis for sustainable democracy. Nonviolent civil resistance movements help correct the imbalance of power in a society by stimulating wide and diverse civilian participation, thereby decentralizing power away from a ruling elite and toward the people themselves.
The exercise of such “people power” can do much to break the cycle of coups and other non-democratic transfers of power that have afflicted Mauritania and other countries, and holds far greater promise for bringing about democratic and responsible government. We may even see it in Mauritania.
Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics and chair of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco. Hardy Merriman is a senior adviser to the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict.
U.S. Intervention in Bolivia
The alleged support by the United States of wealthy landowners, business leaders, and their organizations tied to the violent uprising in eastern Bolivia has led U.S. Ambassador Philip Goldberg’s expulsion from La Paz and the South American government’s demands that the United States stop backing the illegitimate rebellion. Goldberg had met with some of these right-wing oppositionist leaders just a week before the most recent outbreak of violence against the democratically elected government of Evo Morales, who won a recall referendum in August with over 67% of the popular vote.
U.S. subversion has assumed several forms since the leftist indigenous leader became president in 2005. For example, the U.S. embassy — in violation of American law — repeatedly asked Peace Corps volunteers, as well as an American Fulbright scholar, to engage in espionage, according to news reports.
Bolivia gets approximately $120 million in aid annually from the United States. It’s an important supplement for a country of nine million people with an annual per capita income of barely $1,000. Presidential Minister Juan Ramón Quintana has accused the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) of using some of this money to support a number of prominent conservative opposition leaders as part of a “democracy initiative” through the consulting firm Chemonics International. A cable from the U.S. Embassy in Bolivia last year revealed a USAID-sponsored “political party reform project” to “help build moderate, pro-democracy political parties that can serve as a counterweight to the radical MAS or its successors” (MAS stands for Movimiento al Socialismo, the party to which Morales belongs.). Despite numerous requests filed under the Freedom of Information Act, the Bush administration refuses to release a list of all the recipient organizations of USAID funds.
Decades of Intervention
The history of U.S. intervention in support for rightist elements in Bolivia is long. The United States was the major foreign backer of the dictatorial regime of René Barrientos, who seized power in a 1964 military coup. The CIA and U.S. Special Forces played a key role in suppressing a leftist peasant uprising that followed, including the 1967 murder of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, a key leader in the movement.
When leftist army officer Juan José Torres came to power in October of 1970, the Nixon administration called for his ousting. When an attempted coup by rightist general Hugo Bánzer Suárez was threatened by a breakdown in the plotters’ radio communications, the U.S. Air Force made their radio communications available to them. Though this first attempted takeover was crushed, Bánzer was able to seize power by August of the following year in a bloody uprising, also with apparent U.S. support. Thousands of suspected leftists were executed in subsequent years.
The United States largely supported Bánzer and subsequent dictators in the face of a series of protests, general strikes and other largely nonviolent pro-democracy uprisings, which eventually led to the end of military rule by 1982 and the coming to office of the left-leaning president Hernán Siles Zuazo. The United States refused to resume economic aid, however, until the government enacted strict neoliberal austerity measures.
Democratic Bolivia
A series of center-left and rightist civilian governments ruled the country over the next 20 years, most of which were corrupt and inept and none of which could come close to meeting the basic needs of ordinary Bolivians, who — with the exception of the Haitians — are the poorest in the Western hemisphere. Despite the restoration of democracy, the strict austerity programs pushed by the United States and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) resulted in the Bolivian people, more than two-thirds of whom live in poverty, having little say in the decisions that most impacted their lives. Furthermore, even though the majority of the population is indigenous, the country’s leaders continued to be white or mestizo (of mixed-race heritage).
The 2005 election of Evo Morales, a left-wing activist and the first indigenous leader in the nearly 500 years since the Spanish conquest, marked a major shift in Bolivia’s politics. His commitment to a radical reform of the country’s inequitable social and economic system has proven to be even more critical than his racial and cultural identity.
To understand Bolivian sensitivities to U.S. aid and its conditions, as well as concerns regarding U.S. intervention, it is important to look at what happened to Bolivia’s first leftist government, which governed back in the 1950s.
Undermining the 1952 Revolution
In 1952, a popular uprising against a rightist military regime led to the left-leaning nationalists of the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) coming to power promising political freedom and radical economic reform. As with Morales and MAS, his political party, that revolutionary government had strong support from militant worker and peasant political movements. And, also like today, the new government’s policies were strongly nationalistic, particularly in regard to the country’s natural resources, in which U.S. investors had substantial interests.
It wasn’t long, however, before the United States forced a dramatic shift in the regime’s priorities.
With its landlocked location, dissipated gold reserves, increased costs of production and imports, and huge trade deficits, Bolivia’s revolutionary regime couldn’t counter the economic power of the United States. U.S. aid wasn’t enough to improve the standard of living in Bolivia, but it did manage to make the country more dependent. The Bolivian Planning Board noted that “rather than an impulse to improvement, the aid has represented a means only of preventing worse deterioration in the situation as it existed.”
The ruling MNR recognized that it couldn’t afford to anger Washington. Their fear stemmed not just from the threat of direct intervention (like what took place in Guatemala against the nationalist Arbenz government less than two years later), but also from the fear of economic retaliation, not an unimportant concern given Bolivia’s dependence on the U.S. to process its tin ore and provide needed imports.
Dependency
Indeed, it was clear from an early stage of the revolution that the economic weakness of Bolivia, combined with the economic power of the United States, allowed the U.S. to establish clear parameters for the revolution. For example, the United States forced Bolivia to pay full compensation to the wealthy foreign owners of recently nationalized tin mines rather than use the funds for economic development. The Petroleum Code of 1955, written by U.S. officials and enacted without any public debate or alterations by Bolivian authorities, forced the Bolivian government to forego its oil monopoly. Bolivia was then forced to sign an agreement to further encourage U.S. investment in the country. It was due only to this desperate need for an additional source of foreign exchange and pressure from the U.S. government that the once strongly nationalistic MNR agreed to these concessions.
The following year, the U.S. took more direct authority over Bolivia’s economy by imposing an economic stabilization program, which the Bolivian government agreed to, according to U.S. officials, “virtually under duress, and with repeated hints of curtailment of U.S. aid” (This quote is from Inflation and Development in Latin America: A Case History of Inflation and Stabilization in Bolivia, a book by George Jackson Eder.). The program, which bore striking resemblance to the structural adjustment programs which have since been imposed on dozens of debt-ridden countries in Latin America and elsewhere, consisted of the devaluation of the boliviano; an end to export/import controls, price controls and government subsidies on consumer goods; the freezing of wages and salaries; major cutbacks in spending for education and social welfare; and an end to efforts at industrial diversification.
The result, according to U.S. officials which forced its implementation, “meant the repudiation, at least tacitly, of virtually everything that the Revolutionary Government had done over the previous four years.” It not only redirected the economic priorities of the revolution, particularly its efforts at economic diversification, but altered the revolution’s political structure by effectively curbing the power of the trade unions and displacing socialist-leaning leaders of the MNR.
In the end, the United States was able to overthrow the Bolivian revolution without having to overthrow the government.
Structural Adjustment
In many respects, U.S. policy towards Bolivia proved to be a harbinger for future U.S. domination of Latin America in this age of globalization, where the so-called “Washington consensus,” backed by U.S.-supported international financial institutions, created a situation where even wealthier Latin American countries had as few choices in choosing their economic policies as did impoverished Bolivia during the 1950s.
This has begun to change, however. Thanks in part to Venezuela’s oil wealth and the willingness of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, in the name of Latin American solidarity, to help its poorer and financially-strapped neighbors, a number of Latin American governments have had their debts reduced or eliminated. The strengthening of regional trade blocs and increased trade with Europe and China has also made it easier for South American nations to wean themselves from dependency on the United States.
Under Morales, Bolivia has attempted to strengthen the Andean Community of Nations and the signing last year of a “People’s Trade Treaty” with Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba is indicative of the desire to strengthen working economic and political alliances outside of direct U.S. influence in order to be better able to stand up to Washington.
As a result, Morales and the MAS seem better positioned to withstand economic pressure from the United States. Unlike the MNR in the 1950s, Morales comes out of a popular mass movement of the country’s poor and indigenous majority, which is very different than the predominantly white middle-class leadership of reformist officers under the previous government. Combined with economic support from oil-rich Venezuela and Morales’ efforts at strengthening its economic relationships with Bolivia’s Latin American neighbors, MAS has made it possible for the Bolivians to resist buckling under the kind of pressure imposed by the United States a half-century earlier.
The Current Uprising
It’s this very ability to better withstand the kind of economic pressures the United States had until recently been able to exert, either directly or through international financial institutions, which has led to recent violence in Santa Cruz and elsewhere in the wealthier white and mestizo-dominated eastern sectors of the country. As a result of the reduced leverage of their friends in Washington, which had previously enabled them to rule the country, certain elite elements now appear willing to violently separate themselves and the four eastern provinces in which they are concentrated.
With much of Bolivia’s natural gas wealth located in the east, and taking advantage of the endemic racism of its largely white and mestizo population against the country’s indigenous majority, now in positions of political power for the first time, these right-wing forces appear ready to either bring down Morales or secede from the country. Earlier this year they sacked and burned government buildings, murdered government officials and supporters, attacked journalists, sabotaged a key natural gas pipeline, and renounced any allegiance to Bolivia’s democratically elected government.
While the leadership of the Organization of American States and virtually every Latin American president has condemned the uprising the U.S. government has not, adding to concerns that United States may indeed have a hand in the violence.
The apparent triumph of the neoliberal model of globalization in the early 1990s and the resulting hegemonic domination by the United States over poorer countries — for which Bolivia served as the prototype 40 years earlier — made it appear as if the days of cruder forms of U.S. interventionism in Latin America were a thing of the past.
Recent events in Bolivia, however, may be a frightening indication that this is no longer the case.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-zunes/us-intervention-in-bolivi_b_127528.html
The U.S., Bolivia, and Dependency
Much to the chagrin of the Bush administration, Bolivian president Evo
Morales has been going to great lengths to separate his country from
its economic dependence on the United States. His efforts to strengthen
the Andean Community of Nations and the recent signing of a “People’s
Trade Treaty” with Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba indicate the desire
of Bolivia’s Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party government to stand
up to Washington by strengthening working economic and political
alliances outside of direct U.S. influence.
Bolivia currently receives $120 million in aid annually from the United
States, an important supplement for a country of nine million with a
per capita income of barely $1,000 annually. Presidential Minister Juan
Ramon Quintana has charged the U.S. Agency for International
Development with using some of this money to support prominent
conservative opposition leaders, as part of a “democracy initiative”
through the consulting firm Chemonics International.
A cable from the U.S. Embassy in Bolivia was recently revealed which
described a USAID-sponsored “political party reform project” to “help
build moderate, pro-democracy political parties that can serve as a
counterweight to the radical MAS or its successors.” Quintana warned
that “if U.S. cooperation does not adjust itself to the politics of the
Bolivian state, the door is open” for them to leave the country.
To understand Bolivian sensitivities to U.S. aid and its conditions, it
is important to look back to what happened to a previous leftist
government in that country which instead adjusted its politics to the
politics of U.S. cooperation.
The MNR Revolution
In January 1954, while United States officials in Washington were
developing plans to overthrow a left-leaning nationalist government in
Guatemala, a very different policy had been developing toward the
leftist Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) then ruling
Bolivia. U.S. officials acknowledged that some level of radical reform
was necessary in that country which might require challenging certain
elite interests that had been on good terms with the U.S. government.
At first glance, it could appear that the approach the Truman and
Eisenhower administrations took in handling Bolivia’s revolutionary
government represented an unusually enlightened episode in a history of
unwarranted U.S. intervention against nationalist movements in the
hemisphere. Indeed, it is sometimes cited as a positive manifestation
of the Good Neighbor Policy, which respected the national integrity of
Latin American nations and pledged to resolve differences without use
of military force.
On closer examination, however, the U.S. policy toward the MNR
government appears to be simply an alternative form of intervention.
The United States demonstrated its ability to profoundly influence the
policies of the ruling party in Bolivia, manipulate the republic’s
balance of forces, and take advantage of the economic relationship
between the two countries as a means of achieving U.S. foreign policy
goals short of a direct overthrow of the government.
The U.S. government’s relative tolerance of the Bolivian revolution was
made possible in part by a realization that the United States might be
able to steer the revolution away from a more radical direction due to
Bolivia’s extreme economic dependency on the United States and other
outside powers. State Department officials also judged that the balance
of forces within the factionalized MNR could be co-opted in the
direction of U.S. strategic and economic interests.
Bolivia during the 1950s demonstrated how such dependency could
determine the success or failure of a revolution. Perhaps most
significantly, U.S. policy toward Bolivia in that period served as an
important precedent for future policy by the United States, other
Western powers, and their allied international financial institutions
to ensure that Latin American and other Third World nations pursue
foreign policies and domestic economic priorities in line with Western
interests.
The U.S. Response to the Revolution
When the MNR came to power in a bloody uprising in April of 1952, some
alarm bells went off in Washington. Of particular concern was the
ideological orientation of the party, which was explicitly
revolutionary and nationalist and contained an influential left wing.
In addition, there was the fear among U.S. policy makers that heavily
armed peasant and worker militias, subjected to strong Marxist
influence, could end up controlling the country by force.
The popularity of the MNR government, the systematic dismantling of the
armed forces, and the eroded political power of the oligarchs gave the
United States little leverage with which to build an alliance with
traditionally conservative political forces to compel a change in
government, which was how the United States had frequently dealt with
other Latin American countries undergoing nationalist upheavals and
leftist challenges.
Like today, the gross inequality of Bolivian society had given rise to
influential and militant worker and peasant political movements. And,
also like today, the new government’s program was strongly nationalist,
particularly in regard to the country’s natural resources, in which
U.S. investors had substantial interests. Yet, it was not long before
the United States was able to force a dramatic shift in the regime’s
priorities.
With its landlocked position, dissipated gold reserves, increased costs
of production and imports, and huge trade deficits, Bolivia’s
revolutionary regime had little to counter the economic power of the
United States. From almost the beginning, the MNR’s pragmatic wing
recognized that no Bolivian revolution could alienate Washington. Their
fear stemmed not just from the threat of direct intervention, but also
from the fear of economic retaliation”not an unimportant concern given
Bolivia’s dependence on the United States to buy its tin and provide
needed imports. As a result, there was a lot of pressure from within
the MNR to moderate their policy and vigorously pursue reassuring the
United States through diplomatic channels.
Truman administration officials recognized Bolivia’s precarious
situation. Rollin Atwood, director of the State Department’s Office of
South American Affairs, noted how dependent “the politically articulate
portion of the population” was upon the mining industry, which was in
turn dependent on Great Britain and the United States.1 Unlike the
import of coffee from Guatemala, which was controlled by private
companies, purchases of Bolivian tin for the strategic stockpile came
directly from the U.S. government. This made the use of trade policies
as leverage in gaining political objectives all the easier.
The Compensation Issue and Dependence on Exports
The decision to expropriate, rather than confiscate, the mines”despite
immense pressure from the miners and other Bolivians for the latter
option”was directly related to concerns by the MNR that they had to
acknowledge that at least some form of compensation was necessary,
otherwise they feared that the United States would label them communist
and deny them foreign aid. Tin exports accounted for 70% of Bolivia’s
foreign exchange earnings and 90% of the government’s revenue and the
United States bought over half of Bolivia’s tin exports.2 As Assistant
Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Willard Thorp had initially
informed Acheson, the United States had enough of a stockpile to
outlast Bolivia should negotiations drag out and that no matter what
the price or arrangement for tin, “We will almost certainly get the
Bolivian tin eventually. They have no other place to sell it.”
Thorp acknowledged that leaving Bolivia with no other option was quite
deliberate: “By building the Texas City smelter and buying Bolivian tin
for many years, we have discouraged the Bolivians or any other country
from constructing a tin smelter to use the Bolivian concentrates. By
preventing private purchase in the United States and remaining out of
the market for so long, we have prevented competition from determining
the price of tin. We have, in effect, used our stockpile to force the
price down, since in the absence of the stockpile we could never have
held out as long as we did.”3
Based on this economic power, the United States forced Bolivia to the
negotiating table. Bolivian president Victor Paz Estenssoro announced
that “The United States told us that they could not buy tin from us on
a long-term basis unless we made an agreement with the North American
stockholders.” Given the nation’s dependency on tin sales, the new
government acceded.4
Unlike Chile’s copper or Venezuela’s oil during that period, Bolivia’s
leading natural resource was not directly controlled by some foreign
corporation. However, given that tin ores are worthless without tin
smelters, and since all such refineries were abroad, the level of
dependency was at least as serious.
Moreover, the United States was the only country capable of processing
Bolivian tin since Bolivia had no smelting capability of its own and
the only non-U.S. smelter capable of accepting the low-grade Bolivian
ore”located in Great Britain and partly owned by a former mine owner
whose mine had been seized”refused to accept it.5
Jose Nunez Rosales, as vice president of a government-run mining
company, stated that Bolivia agreed to compensate U.S. stockholders
“only because Bolivia had to eat.”6
The leading Bolivian left-wing party went on record to denounce the
agreement as “Yankee imperialism” which they argued was attempting to
“starve Bolivia into submission.”7 An important MNR ideologue, Carlos
Montenegro, publicly accused the United States in 1954 as attempting to
“foster the oligarchy and enslave the popular classes for the benefit
of Wall Street.”8
By conditioning foreign aid on compensation for tin mines, the U.S.
government forced the revolutionary leadership to give in to demands
that resulted in depleting government resources.9 At a critical point
in the nation’s effort to become more self-sufficient, the U.S.
government forced Bolivia to use its scarce capital not for its own
development, but to compensate the former mine owners and repay its
foreign debts.
The Bolivian Economy and the Impact of U.S. Foreign Aid
By January 1953, the British Embassy could report to the Foreign Office
that President Paz Estenssoro, “was getting a lot of help and advice
from the Americans and knew when to bend his knee.”10 Thus, it was
clear from an early stage of the revolution that the economic weakness
of Bolivia combined with the economic power of the United States
allowed the latter to establish clear parameters for the revolution.
U.S. influence over Bolivia was enhanced greatly when, between March
and July 1953, the price of tin dropped by one-third.11 The Bolivians
were desperate for large-scale financial assistance. In a memo to
President Dwight Eisenhower, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles
argued that additional loans for Bolivia should be further postponed
until there was a clearer view of the country’s political direction and
payments prospects.12
In preparation for a meeting with Bolivian Foreign Minister Walter
Guevera, Dulles was advised by Assistant Secretary of State for Latin
America John Moors Cabot that he let the foreign minister know that
Bolivia’s chances of receiving aid would be enhanced by carrying out
the following actions:
(a) To dispel strong suspicions, still held by some sectors of American
opinion, that the Bolivian Government is dominated by communist
influence;
(b) To reach a prompt and just final settlement of claims arising from
the nationalization of mining properties in which there is an American
interest;13
Following a U.S. threat to withhold further aid until perceived
radicals were removed from the government, Paz announced cabinet
changes in late October 1953, shifting the government’s ideological
composition to the right. As a result, a State Department official
observed that “the Embassy is under the definite impression that the
action of the United States Government in furnishing food grants to
Bolivia has begun to pay dividends.”14
Bolivian Minister Guevera confirmed to U.S. officials in Washington
that U.S. aid was responsible for placing pro-United States elements
“in a position of dominance.”15 Similarly, a National Intelligence
Estimate noted that the MNR government had become increasingly friendly
to the United States due to U.S. support of the regime.16
By this point, the Embassy could begin to influence some government
appointments, even for relatively minor posts. For example, by November
1953 the State Department could report that the appointment of an
alleged communist to teach at the newly-opened Military Academy was
canceled when the U.S. embassy voiced its objections.17 Assured of his
influence, Ambassador Edward J. Sparks could confidently predict that
“the Embassy expects the MNR Government progressively to limit the
opportunities for the Communist parties …”18
In addition to using the threat of aid withdrawal to push the Bolivian
government into taking a stronger anti-Communist stand and establishing
tentative compensation arrangements with former mine owners, the United
States also insisted that U.S. aid must be supervised by U.S. officials
at all levels.19
This aid was not enough to improve the standard of living in
Bolivia”then, as now, South America’s poorest country”but it made the
nation more dependent. A report of the Bolivian Planning Board noted
that “Rather than an impulse to improvement, the aid has represented a
means only of preventing worse deterioration in the situation as it
existed.”20
As a result, in subsequent years U.S. influence could be brought to
bear for greater economic concessions as well. For example, the
Petroleum Code of 1955, written by U.S. officials and enacted without
any public debate or alterations by Bolivian authorities, forced the
Bolivian government to forego its oil monopoly.21 Offers by the Soviet
Union to assist Bolivia with its nationalized oil industry were met by
a threatened withdrawal of U.S. aid.22 Similarly, the United States and
Bolivia signed an agreement in 1955 to encourage foreign investment.23
It was due only to this desperate need for foreign exchange and
pressure from the U.S. government that the once strongly nationalistic
MNR agreed to these concessions.24
In 1954, the United States took more direct authority over Bolivia’s
economy with the appointment of George Jackson Eder to take charge of
an economic stabilization program. Eder himself conceded that the MNR
government agreed to this decision “virtually under duress, and with
repeated hints of curtailment of U.S. aid.”25
Eder was executive director of the Stabilization Commission, every
member of which had to be ” persona grata to the U.S. embassy.”26 The
program, which bore striking resemblance to the Structural Adjustment
Programs which have since been imposed on dozens of debt-ridden
countries in Latin America and elsewhere, consisted of the devaluation
of the boliviano; an end to export/import controls, price controls, and
government subsidies on consumer goods; the freezing of wages and
salaries; major cutbacks in spending for education and social welfare;
and an end to efforts at industrial diversification.27
Assistant Secretary of State Richard Rubottom, in reference to a
Bolivian development plan supporting peasant farmers, said “We had to
tell the Bolivian Government that they couldn’t put their money into it
and we weren’t going to put ours into it.”28
Though nominally a technical adviser, Eder, a strong advocate of
monetarism, believed that Bolivia would be better off by leaving the
economy entirely in the hands of private enterprise. He was contracted
and paid by the U.S. government on the behest of the International
Monetary Fund to acquire direct administrative control of the
economy.29 This gave the U.S. government unprecedented power to control
the course of the Bolivian revolution.
Eder has written a detailed account of how he”as an agent of the U.S.
government”was able to implement a program that in his own words “meant
the repudiation, at least tacitly, of virtually everything that the
Revolutionary Government had done over the previous four years.” He
further described how his goal was to convince the new MNR
administration that stabilization would only be possible through a
total transition to a free market economy.30
Furthermore, Eder insisted that state-owned enterprises should be
returned to private hands, that compensation was to be guaranteed in
the event of any future nationalizations, and that all price controls
be repealed.31 His prescription for the favorable investment climate he
believed necessary was that the Bolivian government had to offer a
stable political environment, a strong currency, and labor conditions
that minimized the risks of any interference from labor or political
leaders.32
The effect of Eder’s prescriptions was not only to re-direct the
economic priorities of the revolution, particularly its efforts at
diversification of production, but to alter the revolution’s political
structure by effectively curbing the power of the trade unions and
displacing socialist-leaning leaders of the MNR. The MNR went so far as
to allow labor representatives into the government only if their unions
supported the stabilization program.33 Under the U.S.-encouraged and
subsidized reconstituted military, hostile union militias could by then
be neutralized.
The resulting split in the MNR dramatically reduced its mass base,
making the leadership even more dependent on U.S. financial and
political support.34 The MNR leadership, feeling threatened by the
movement’s left wing and facing resistance by the betrayed miners,
turned increasingly toward the resurrected military, and even sent an
elite army unit to the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas for
counterinsurgency training.
It became virtually impossible, then, for the MNR to balance its
independence, beliefs in the redistribution of wealth, and its
“anti-imperialist” rhetoric with the realities of dependency,
exacerbated by the economic crisis of 1956-57. The increasingly
alienated and apathetic peasantry, manipulated by competing political
factions, was too powerless to challenge this dramatic shift to the
right.
In addition to various programs in agricultural development,
construction, technical assistance, and food aid, the U.S. government
also provided direct financial support of the general budget. In less
than 10 years, Bolivia had gone from a threatening revolutionary regime
to “the model for the Alliance for Progress.”35 Indeed, by the end of
the decade, U.S. aid programs to Bolivia were the largest in Latin
America and the highest per capita in the world, growing from $1.5
million in 1953 to $22.7 million in 1959.
The Bolivian revolution turned to the right under the presidency of
Siles Zuazo from 1956-1960 and continued the pattern under Paz
Estenssoro’s second term beginning in 1960. The massive popular base of
support which had previously defended the MNR from right wing attacks
and traditional conservative elements evaporated. By the time the army
seized control in 1964, there was little to stop it.
The End of the Revolution … and the Beginnings of a New One
In the end, the United States was able to overthrow the Bolivian
revolution without having to overthrow the government. The nation’s
high level of dependency made it possible for the United States to
steer the course of the revolution in a direction more compatible to
U.S. interests in Bolivia and the hemisphere.
The move was facilitated by the predominantly middle-class orientation
of the MNR and the inability of its more radical factions to ever
completely dominate the party. While the revolution succeeded in
undermining much of the old order through its breakup of the hacienda
system and its nationalization of the tin mines, it never succeeded in
really developing a new order to take its place. This made it possible,
in the words of Anthony Freeman of the State Department’s Bolivia desk,
for the United States “to channel the revolution in constructive
directions.”36
The United States chose a path of influencing the direction of the MNR
through large-scale financial support to the revolutionary government.
Indeed, U.S. influence over the MNR was actually greater than prior to
the revolution, since the old ruling class”tied to the tin
barons”maintained conflicting interests with the United States over the
price of tin.37 The U.S. National Security Council saw the successful
handling of the Bolivian situation as a model for making support of the
United States a criterion for aid.38 The United States would exploit to
the fullest this model in its future relations with countries in Latin
America and elsewhere.
In many respects, U.S. policy toward Bolivia proved to be a harbinger
of contemporary U.S. policy toward Latin America in the present age of
globalization. The so-called “Washington consensus,” backed by
U.S.-supported International Financial Institutions, has served as the
axis to institutionalize economic leverage to the extent that more
overt forms of intervention to advance strategic or economic interests
are no longer necessary.
U.S. policy toward Bolivia in the 1950s has been considered a major
foreign policy success. And though the final outcome of United States
policy was not as dramatic as what transpired in Guatemala during that
same period, the impact on the people of Bolivia”in terms of the human
costs of living within a system where once-promised social, economic,
and political rights were subsequently denied to the majority of the
population”was no less severe.
With the globalization of the economy, most Latin American countries
now have as few choices in choosing their economic policies as did
Bolivia back then. Perhaps the greatest significance of the U.S. role
in the taming of the Bolivian revolution is that it proved a training
ground for developing the model for what was to come throughout the
hemisphere.
The government of Evo Morales, representing a popular mass base of
support from the country’s poor and indigenous majority, is very
different than the largely white, middle- class leadership of the MNR.
Similarly, economic support from oil-rich Venezuela and its efforts at
strengthening its economic relationships with its Latin American
neighbors and with Europe, also make it far less likely that today’s
government will buckle to the kind of pressure imposed by the United
States a half century earlier.
At the same time, unless and until Washington’s policies toward Latin
America are successfully challenged from within the United States,
there are real limits as to how much Bolivia’s government can improve
the economic conditions of its people.
End Notes
1. Memorandum by the director of the State Department’s Office of
South American Affairs (Atwood) to the Secretary of State NA
724.00/1-1453.
2. Stephen Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America: The Foreign Policy of
Anticommunism, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988,
p. 79.
3. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952-1954, Volume IV: The
American Republics, p. 486.
4. Christopher Mitchell, The Legacy of Populism in Bolivia: From the
MNR to Military Rule, New York: Praeger, 1977, p. 55.
5. Rebecca Scott, “Economic Aid and Imperialism in Bolivia,” Monthly
Review, Volume 24; Number 1 (May 1972) p. 53.
6. Foreign Service Despatch, From: Rowell To: Department of State,
April 30, 1953 NA 724.00 (W)/4-3053.
7. Foreign Service Despatch, From: Rowell To: Department of State,
April 30, 1953 NA 724.00 (W)/4-3053.
8. Quoted in C. H. Weston, “An Ideology of Modernization: The Case of
the Bolivian MNR”, Journal of Inter-American Studies, Volume X, Number
1 (January 1968), p. 97.
9. Susan Eckstein, The Impact of Revolution: A Comparative Analysis of
Mexico and Bolivia, London: Sage Publications, 1975 p. 45.
10. British Foreign Office Records, Relations with Bolivia, Minutes FO
#AX1051/1, from Mr. Robinson, Jan. 8, 1953.
11. Report by Chief of Mission to Director of Mutual Security, Foreign
Service Despatch, From: Amb. Sparks To: Department of State, July 14,
1953 NA 724.5-MSP/7-1453.
12. Dulles papers, Eisenhower Library, October 13, 1953.
13. Memorandum, Cabot to Dulles, Subject: “Briefing for Call by
Bolivian Foreign Minister,” November 19, 1953 NA 724.5-MSP/11-1953.
14. Foreign Service Despatch, From: Rowell, American Embassy in La Paz,
To: Department of State in Washington, Nov. 4, 1953 NA 724.13/11-453.
15. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952-1954, Volume IV: The
American Republics, p. 542.
16. Ibid.
17. Office Memorandum, From: OSA-W. Tapley Bennet, Jr. To: ARA-Mr.
Cabot Subject: “Evidence of Non-Communist Character of Bolivian
Government,” December 7, 1953 NA 724.00/12-753.
18. Foreign Service Despatch, From: Sparks, American Embassy in La Paz,
To: The Department of State in Washington, #258, Subject: “Opposition
Views on the MNR Government,” October 23, 1953 NA 724.00/10-2353.
19. Bernard Wood, “Foreign Aid and Revolutionary Development: The Case
of Bolivia, 1952-75,” Ottawa: School of International Affairs of
Carleton University, 1969, p. 10.
20. Cited in Wood, op. cit., p. 24.
21. Whitehead, Lawrence W. 1969. The United States and Bolivia: A Case
of Neo-Colonialism Oxford, U.K. Haslemere Group Publications, p. 11.
22. Scott, op. cit., p. 54.
23. Cole Blasier, The Hovering Giant: U.S. Response to Revolutionary
Change in Latin America 1910-1985, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1985 p. 78.
24. Robert J. Alexander, The Bolivian National Revolution, New York:
Rutgers University Press, 1958 pp. 168-169.
25. George Jackson Eder. Inflation and Development in Latin America: A
Case History of Inflation and Stabilization in Bolivia, Ann Arbor:
Bureau of Business, Research Graduate School of Business
Administration, University of Michigan p. 479. He further described
himself as “an invited, but scarcely welcome, guest of the Bolivian
Government.” p. ix.
26. Ibid., p. 64.
27. Scott, op. cit., p. 55. As an example of Eder’s authority, no new
bank notes could be issue by the Central Bank and no credits could be
granted to the government or any government agency without Eder’s
consent. All bills of an economic nature passed by Congress had to be
turned over to the commission, who would decide whether or not the
president should veto it.
(Eder, op. cit., pp. 91-93, 95).
28. Hearings on Mutual Security Act of 1960, U.S. House of
Representatives, Committee on Foreign Affairs, 86th Congress, Second
Session, (1960), p. 847.
29. James Dunkerley, Rebellion in the Veins: Political Struggle in
Bolivia, 1952-82, Thetford: The Thetford Press, 1984 p. 86 .
30. Eder, op. cit., pp. 87-88.
31. Scott, op. cit., p. 55.
32. Eder, op. cit., p. 695.
33. Mitchell, op. cit., pp. 15-19.
34. Scott, op. cit., pp. 56-57.
35. Cole Blasier, “Introduction” to Victor Andrade, My Missions for
Revolutionary Bolivia, 1944-1962, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1976 p. xv .
36. Scott, op. cit., p. 53.
37. Whitehead, op. cit.
38. OCB Central File 091.4 Latin America (File #3) (3), Feb. 3, 1955,
Progress Report on NSC 5432/1, “United States Objectives and Courses of
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