At a time when the left-wing Morales administration in Bolivia has seen a profound rift with the United States, involving the expulsion of an ambassador, the exit of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and, finally, the winding up of operations by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) operations in the country, it is a worthwhile exercise to examine some of the roots of anti-American feeling in this Andean republic. Thomas Field’s book provides us with a wealth of detail and careful analysis of U.S.–Bolivian relations at a critical moment in this long-problematic relationship.
From Development to Dictatorship covers a fairly narrow time-span: from the launch of the Alliance for Progress in 1961 to the coup that toppled Bolivian President Víctor Paz Estenssoro in November 1964, bringing to power General René Barrientos. On the one hand, it centers on the relationship between Paz’s second government (1960–64) and Washington, mediated by two successive U.S. ambassadors, Ben Stephansky and Douglas Henderson; on the other hand, it examines the unraveling of the MNR (Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucioario) alliance, the steady deterioration in relations between the Paz administration and Bolivia’s militant mineworkers (specifically the miners’ union at Bolivia’s [then] most important tin-mining complex at Siglo XX), and the reconfiguration of the Bolivian armed forces under the aegis of the Alliance for Progress.
Field seeks, first of all, to debunk the idea that the Alliance for Progress was a development initiative that was somehow free of ideology and strategic considerations designed to foster U.S. interests in Latin America (or elsewhere). While talking loftily about economic and social progress, the Alliance of Progress, Field argues, persuasively that it had little or nothing to do with promoting democracy. Coming at a time when the Cold War was at one of its most intense phases, particularly in the wake of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the Alliance for Progress is seen as a mechanism to push back communism wherever it reared its head.
Bolivia became a textbook case of how this was to be done, evidently involving significant attention on the part of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, and particularly their Secretary of State Dean Rusk. In addition to interviewing many of those involved, Field has examined in detail the diplomatic exchanges between the U.S. embassy in La Paz and the State Department for these years. U.S. concern about “Castro-communism” in Bolivia comes out loud and clear from this plentiful documentation, less so any nuanced understanding of the nature of the Bolivian Left a decade after the 1952 National Revolution.
At the heart of the book lies the so-called Plan Triangular, ostensibly a tripartite initiative involving the United States, West Germany, and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), to “restructure” Bolivia’s ailing tin-mining industry. In practice, it was a U.S.-led plan to destroy the left-wing mining unions and their combative leadership, seen in Washington as dangerously communist in their leanings. This plan was initially seen by the Kennedy administration as a precondition for development assistance to Bolivia, although the virulent opposition of the miners themselves meant that it did not quite turn out that way.
Apart from embassy personnel and the miners, the key personalities in this drama were President Paz himself, Juan Lechín Oquendo, and (toward the end) Hernán Siles Zuazo, the three main MNR leaders from 1952. Paz, Field argues, was consistently seen by Washington as the only figure capable of containing and ultimately defeating the miners and their leadership. The book, which correctly describes the authoritarian nature of MNR rule at the time, provides a blow-by-blow account of how the notoriously wily Paz was pushed by Washington into a position that would break the back of the MNR and forestall any possibility that Lechín, Paz’s vice president, would succeed him.
The price paid for this pressure, though, was the political isolation of Paz from the MNR’s grassroots support and his progressive inability to call the shots. The book ends with the military coup of 1964 in which Airforce General René Barrientos, a flamboyant figure distrusted by the U.S. embassy, unceremoniously tossed Paz out of the Palacio Quemado and assumed power himself. A major preoccupation of the Alliance for Progress had been to build up the status of the Bolivian armed forces, effectively destroyed in the 1952 revolution, as the foot soldiers of “development” in “civic action” to build roads, construct schools, and the like. As Field shows, much of the money disbursed under the Alliance was military related.
Field’s lucid and scholarly account makes a significant contribution to the literature on this still rather underresearched period in Bolivia’s recent political history, helping us to understand the strength of anti-U.S. sentiment, not just on the left but within much of Bolivian society. Both in his text and copious footnotes, the author provides impressive detail on the convoluted politics of the time. Parallels emerge between the Paz administration of the 1960s and that of his successor as head of the MNR, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada—ousted as president in October 2003—also seen as a faithful ally of Washington. The denouements, however, proved rather different.
There are two additional critical comments that deserve mention. The first is that, arguably, the focus on the Plan Triangular and the attempt to crush the miners means that other aspects of the Alliance for Progress get rather short shrift. More could and should have been said about the process of development under way at this time in Santa Cruz, a key part of the 1940 U.S.-sponsored Bohan Plan that the postrevolutionary MNR governments sought to put into practice. Field refers at points to the emergence of right-wing opposition groups, specifically the Falange Socialista Boliviana (FSB), but fails to tell us much about how Santa Cruz was emerging as an economic powerhouse in these years. It was only a few years after the period under review that the cruceño Right took politics into its own hands with the 1971 coup by General Hugo Banzer Suárez.
The second comment is that Field could have contextualized the Bolivia story more broadly in developments elsewhere at the time in Latin America. Reference is made to Cuban activities in support of guerrilla movements, but Bolivia was by no means alone during this period in receiving the attention of Washington in its attempt to thwart left-wing movements. It would have been revealing to compare the activities of the Alliance for Progress in Bolivia with such initiatives elsewhere. This was, after all, the start of the period of military coups in other countries, beginning with the ouster of President João Goulart in neighboring Brazil (of which no direct mention is made).
Was the United States behind the Barrientos coup in Bolivia? Despite the close relations between Barrientos and the U.S. air attaché Colonel Edward Fox, Field thinks not. Ambassador Henderson, he argued, remained faithful to Paz until the end, and distrustful of the demagogic Barrientos. It was, he says, precisely the sort of technocratic, authoritarian government espoused by the Alliance for Progress and its operatives that helped, progressively, undercut the legitimacy of the Paz administration, opening the way for nearly two decades of military-dominated government.
