Bolivia: Preventing Trouble Before It Starts

The sharp rap on the door of the La Paz hotel suite was impossible to ignore, even at 5 on a Sunday morning. Former Bolivian President Hernàn Siles Zuazo, 50, stumbled drowsily out of bed to answer the summons, and there stood half a dozen members of the government’s control político police. “You mean you’re going to arrest the chief of the revolution?” asked Siles. They were indeed. Two days later, Siles and 33 other, lesser Bolivians were unceremoniously air-expressed to exile in neigh boring Paraguay.

The regime of President Victor Paz Estenssoro accused Siles of plotting to overthrow the government, install himself at the head of a junta and assassinate Paz. Nonsense, retorted Siles from Paraguay. He insisted that no coup had been planned and that the Paz government was badly “confused.”

Usually far from confused, Paz is perhaps Latin America’s ablest President when it comes to anticipating and disarming trouble before it starts. While there was almost certainly no imminent plot in the works, Siles was clearly a worrisome problem for Bolivia’s President.

Friends & Fallout. Once, Paz and Siles were allies, together led the 1952 revolution that toppled the feudal tin-mining aristocracy and installed the National Revolutionary Movement that has ruled Bolivia ever since. Paz was President from 1952 to 1956, then turned over power to Siles for four years before becoming President again in 1960. In the early days, it was more or less a government by committee, no matter who occupied the presidential palace. When Paz decided to run again in last May’s election despite a tradition against consecutive terms, he and Siles fell out.

Siles accused Paz of personalisimo. At election time, Siles joined Juan Lechín, leftist boss of the tin miners, in a hunger strike, hoping to dramatize his thesis that Paz was becoming a dictator. When that failed, he set out to organize an opposition.

Bombs & Strikes. It was hardly a unified group, comprising disgruntled tin miners, a small group of right-wing Socialist Falange Party members, and anyone else with a grievance against Paz. But the malcontents did make trouble. The capital city of La Paz rocked to frequent bomb explosions, bridges were blown up, and in the eastern jungle area of Santa Cruz, Falange guerrillas took advantage of local unrest to kick up a series of bloody skirmishes with government troops. Last December the tin miners took 17 hostages (including four Americans) in a dispute over government arrests of two union leaders; two days before Siles and the others were seized, the miners kidnaped five more hostages to force pay boosts, gave them up only when Paz stationed an army unit near the mines. To top it off, 23,000 schoolteachers throughout the country went on strike. They wanted a raise from $31 a month to $39, and some threatened to put on a demonstration this Monday.

All this was likely to imply that Paz did not have full control of the country, and that would not do, especially with Charles de Gaulle expected early this week. Using the alleged coup as an excuse, Paz declared a 90-day state of siege, suspending all constitutional guarantees and banning public groups of more than three after 11 p.m. That done, the way was clear for De Gaulle, and Paz had once more firmly cinched his authority.