BOLIVIA: Left Turn

In the gloomy halls of La Paz’s Foreign Ministry, crammed with ornate furnishings of so many periods that it calls to mind an auction house, a hundred men and women gathered one morning last week to shake hands with Foreign Minister Walter Guevara. After almost four years of energetic service, Guevara, a longtime sociology professor and an outspoken friend of the U.S., was being forced out. Even more worrisome was the cause of Guevara’s fall: a plain left swerve by Bolivia’s ruling party, the National Revolutionary Movement (M.N.R.).

The grab-bag M.N.R., called Fascist until it seized power in a revolt in 1952, has two main factions: 1) moderate leftists, 2) Trotskyite doctrinaires. The Trotskyites, led by Juan Lechin, were kept in line by President Victor Paz Estenssoro and Foreign Minister Guevara, both moderates. Two weeks ago the M.N.R., in convention, chose another moderate, Vice President Hernan Siles Zuazo, as the party’s candidate for the forthcoming presidential elections. Then, as the convention went on, Guevara and Lechin began trading verbal blows from the floor.

Guevara confessed himself a “partisan of free enterprise within the limits imposed by the nation’s realities.” Lechin answered with the ultimate insult: “Bourgeois!” Guevara then charged that Lechin, through a revolutionary manifesto, lad touched off the May 1949 attempt to seize the tin mines that ended with old-regime troops shooting down many miners. But it is an M.N.R. article of faith that the mines’ tin-baron owners and the government they dominated provoked the massacre. Moving to the kill, Lechin got up a convention resolution denouncing Guevara for “inexact and tendentious statements.” Siles, who could lose the next election without Lechin’s support, signed it; so did Paz Estenssoro. Guevara had no choice but to resign.