BACKGROUND OF FAILURE IN BOLIVIA

...The story of Standard Oil in Bolivia, and the part oil played in the Chaco War, does nothing to endear us to Bolivians...

...Because a Rockefeller heads an important United States agency dealing with Latin America, almost everything that agency does is suspect...

...For when the day comes that we are faced with genuine people's governments throughout Latin America, we may wish and wish too late that we had been better neighbors to the Latin-American people before they came to power...

...Growing Nationalism It is against this background, then, that we must look at the coup d'etat which overthrew Penaranda in December, 1943...

...The men who led the revolt have all been in Bolivia, and by now competent observers should know whether they mean what they say or whether they are mere tools—of Hitler or of Ramirez...

...Controlling as it does the amount of production, the price, the refining of tin, the cartel has been able to tell even its biggest customer, the United States, just what and where and how to buy...

...Incredibly rich in natural resources (the Spaniards took two billion dollars in gold out of its mountains...

...The admission of this truth would mean an overhauling of our whole Bolivian policy—and of our whole Latin-American policy as well...

...The small ruling class consists of those of white and mixed blood, divided into many warring factions, each of which wants to seize and hold power in order to benefit itself, its friends, and its backers...

...And the whole theory and practice of government by the few has nothing to do with democracy...

...Furthermore, Bolivian tin goes tax-free to England, while tin going to the United States must pay a Bolivian export tax...

...It is worth noting that the new Bolivian government immediately offered to sell us its entire quinine production—at our price...

...Not only was the revolution a complete surprise, but even now, a month later, the fog of confusion has not lifted...

...But surely a democratic country fighting a global war for a democratic world can only find support among the peoples of other countries...

...Liberal opinion in Bolivia has been increasingly aroused, while the actions of Boal and the State Department have convinced many Bolivians that the United States stands squarely on the side of the monied interests...

...Bolivia has always had a government of the few for the few...

...There are increasing numbers of Bolivians today who want their country run, not for the benefit of the United States or the Nazis or the mine-owners, but for the Bolivian people—all of them...

...On the moral, or propaganda, front our failure in Bolivia is even more apparent...

...The plight of the miners is really desperate...

...living costs in Bolivia are up some 1400 per cent since before the war, and although the United States has raised the price of tin to the record high of 60 cents a ton, real wages have gone down...

...Such a group might feel that since the United States and the mine-owners appear to have ganged up, they are justified in accepting Nazi help to attain their ends...

...The great majority of its people are Andean Indians, descendants of the Incas, doped, diseased, despairing, so far outside the framework of a modern economy that many of them do not see any money from one year's end to the next, so far outside the framework of the state that they do not even speak its language, much less read or write or vote...

...We still have no contract with Patino for raw tin...

...In spite of our desperate need for quinine we were not able to buy any from Bolivia while Penaranda was President...

...And not a minute too soon...

...it was all sold to Argentina—for re-sale to the Axis...

...and that it also announced its intention to proceed at once with the nationalization of Axis firms...

...Except for that, all our tin must twice cross the Atlantic, from Bolivia to England and back again to us...

...The man is Simon Patino, a half-Indian whose fortune today is estimated at between half a billion and a billion dollars, whose income far exceeds the entire governmental revenue of Bolivia...

...its lowlands are afloat with oil), it has produced one of the world's richest men while three-fourths of its people are worse off than they were at the time of the Spanish Conquest...

...It would probably be painful for the State Department to have to consider all those illiterate Bolivian miners as people...

...The plot discovered in 1941 was undoubtedly Nazi-inspired, although it is probable, too, that the government used it as an excuse to get rid of opponents on the Left as well as the Right...

...The United States has found that it is hard to be a good neighbor to a cartel...

...But it also announced that the new government would not continue to be a broker for the mine owners, and perhaps that is what alarms our diplomats...

...The industry of course is tin mining, which accounts for about 70 per cent of Bolivia's exports...

...nor does the fact that the State Department is supposed to have made a satisfactory settlement with Standard a condition of further loans...

...it is the most important source of tin remaining to the United Nations...

...One Man, One Industry Dominating the whole country, even more than do the incredible peaks of the Andes, is one man and one industry...

...Its government has been one of the most unstable in the world, including some 60 revolutions and about a dozen constitutions...

...Even though the refineries in Holland, France, and the Far East are in enemy hands, and the remaining ones in England are in constant danger of Nazi bombs, the United States has been permitted only one small smelter, recently built in Texas...

...Last December, when the Bolivian Congress was considering a labor law which would have given the miners sucl minimal rights as regular payment of wages and collective bargaining, the American ambassador, Pierre Boal, was bringing pressure to bear on the Bolivian President to prevent the passage of the code...

...so important is it that to the outside world Bolivia is tin...

...Rockefeller's most prominent assistants until his recent resignation was Joseph Rovensky of the Chase National Bank, a director and vice-president of Patino Mines and Enterprises, seems to simple Bolivians conclusive proof of where United States sympathies lie...

...So important are Patino's holdings (his control of over half of the Bolivian production is only a fraction of his total) that he is the dominant figure in the International Tin Cartel...

...State Department Alibi In spite of our failure to crack the tin cartel, the State Department has been very careful to play along with the Patino interests in Bolivia...

...Patino, who admires Hitler and did admire Mussolini and who was a financial backer of Franco, has never showed any particular friendliness toward the United States, even though he now finds it expedient to live in New York at the Waldorf-Astoria...

...As in other Latin-American countries there is a history of United States economic imperialism which all the Good Neighborly words in the world will not wipe out...

...The State Department justifies its actions on the ground that the important thing is the production of tin for the war...

...being dependent for our limited supplies on the smaller Bolivian producers...

...It is certainly within the bounds of possibility that this is what the new Bolivian government has done...

...It has been involved in two of the bloodiest wars on the South American continent, losing its nitrate provinces, and its Pacific port to Chile in the War of the Pacific, losing much of the oil-rich Chaco region to Paraguay in the recent Chaco War...

...There is no doubt that there is a good deal of Nazi sympathy in Bolivia—Penaranda, our supposedly great and good friend, did put Bolivia into the war as a magnificent gesture to climax Henry Wallace's visit, but he never got around to nationalizing the powerful Axis firms in Bolivia...

...Yet not only is the tin cartel still firmly in control but Bolivian production has slumped badly, due primarily to intolerable working conditions and a growing spirit of passive resistance on the part of the workers...

...But there is also in Bolivia, as in many other Latin-American countries, a strong and growing spirit of nationalism...

...It goes back to the enormous loans of the '20s for which Bolivia pledged half her annual revenue and along with which came a United States financial commission to supervise the collection...

...Where We Must Seek Support Faced with this complex and dangerous situation, our State Department has been more than usually baffled...

...There seems to be a vague hope in Washington that the fiasco of the premature recognition of the Ramirez government in Argentina can be redeemed by being tough with Bolivia...

...And the additional fact that one of Mr...

...and against this background the stoning of the United States embassy during the excitement does not appear as necessarily Nazi-inspired...

...In the meantime, Secretary Hull has called back for consultation, not Ambassador Boal, but our ambassador to Brazil—a fine commentary in itself...