by EMILY ACHTENBERG
This past April 9, the anniversary of Bolivia’s National Revolution of 1952 came and went as usual—with no official recognition and scarcely a mention in the domestic press. This historic event, in which workers and peasants overthrew an entrenched oligarchy of tin barons and landholders, was the first successful revolution in Latin America after Mexico, and is viewed by most contemporary scholars as a transformative moment for Bolivia (and Latin America).[1]
Still, successive Bolivian governments—including the leftist government of Evo Morales—have relegated the episode to the dustbin of history. A look back at the earlier revolutionary experience helps to explain this seeming paradox—and also reveals how the events of 1952 have profound and continuing relevance for the present.
The Revolution of 1952 is closely associated in Bolivia’s popular consciousness with the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR), the political party that led and inherited it.[2] The immediately precipitating factor was the military’s annulment of the presidential elections of 1951, which the MNR candidate had won by a landslide. Armed workers, led by the militant miners union, joined with dissident national police and MNRistas in a three-day urban insurrection, routing the military junta from La Paz. In the rural highlands, peasants aided by miners occupied vast estates and instituted self-help land reform.
Faced with the prospect of a serious popular uprising, the moderate MNR leadership (dubbed “reluctant revolutionaries” by historians) quickly instituted a series of reforms that, for their time and place, were truly transformative. The army, which had virtually disintegrated, was replaced by peasant and worker militias. The mines owned by Bolivia’s three great tin barons were nationalized under COMIBOL, the new state mining company. The Bolivian Workers Central (COB), a powerful new confederation of organized peasants and workers, effectively functioned as a co-government for the mining sector with veto power over key policies. The COB’s secretary-general was appointed Secretary of Mines.
…
But by the mid-1950s, the MNR had called a halt to, and partially reversed, its radical reforms—thanks in large part to U.S. counter-revolutionary pressures (which were not unwelcome by the party’s conservative wing). In response to falling tin prices and a deepening economic crisis, the MNR signed a long-term contract obligating the United States to purchase Bolivia’s tin, and accepted massive U.S. aid. By 1960, Bolivia was the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid in Latin America, at the highest level per capita in the world. One-third of Bolivia’s budget was financed directly by the United States.