BOLIVIA-PARAGUAY: La Paz Switch

Even the 55-year-old squabble between Bolivia and Paraguay over the Gran Chaco must end some day. Last week it looked as if Paraguay, with one-third the population, one-eighth the area and one-twelfth the wealth of big Bolivia, had a chance to win. A combination of dumb Bolivian politics and smart Paraguayan tactics had lured Bolivia into making a terrible mistake.

Six times this year General José Felix Estigarribia’s little brown troopers tried to carry the Bolivian “Verdun,” Fort Ballivian, by assault. Six times they failed. Last July Estigarribia moved ostentatiously away to the north and made a great display of advancing on that front. At that point Bolivia blundered.

Bolivia’s politics are run from La Paz, the world’s highest capital (12,000 ft.) where the climate is always about the same as Norway’s spring and the hot little Chaco war is very remote and unpopular. The Liberal Party runs the cities and opposes the war; the Genuine Republican Party holds the countrymen of the hot lowlands and wants war to the finish. Genuine Republicans made Invalid Daniel Salamanca President while the Liberal bosses were electing a man of their own vice president, a beet-nosed banker named José Luis Tejada Sorzano. Last month another presidential election was approaching. President Salamanca, who had already lost one son in the War, wanted to elect a Genuine Republican successor and keep the war going. He was faced with the worst kind of campaign material: news of the great Paraguayan victories on the northern front. Since he had assured his countrymen again & again that Fort Ballivian was “impregnable,” he ordered his generals to take most of their troops out of Ballivian and run a rousing counteroffensive in the north. In a blaze of Bolivian victories last month, Salamanca’s candidate for President, Franz Tamayo, was elected.

Hardly had the Bolivian ballots been counted when the hosts of Paraguay suddenly reappeared before “impregnable” Fort Ballivian. This time they took it without trouble, along with 10,000 Bolivians and $3,000,000 worth of ammunition. This week they are slamming ahead through the Chaco, only 60 mi. from Bolivia proper.

Paraguay’s victory shattered Bolivia’s politics. Sick with dismay, President Salamanca could think only of firing his commander-in-chief. He set out for the Chaco front to do so but his intentions went ahead of him. Vice President Tejada had been on the wires. When Salamanca arrived, the army officers politely asked for and got his resignation. Back in La Paz Tejada had already made himself President, claiming that Salamanca had deserted. There was no doubt that Bolivia’s new President Tejada was in favor of “an honorable peace.”