The Bolivian Crisis: Tin, Blood, and Revolt
The workers and peasants of Bolivia have overthrown a tyrannical state and set their hands to building a new order. They will tolerate neither foreign reaction nor domestic Bonapartes—whether in frock coat or uniform.
—Tristan Marof
May a nation determine its own destiny? May a people assert sovereignty over the powers of finance and industry—whether national or international? Bolivia has answered: yes. And we will assist them—firmly and without shame—in proving that answer true.
—David Toro
The old government wanted us to do its dirty work—to shoot miners, to raid villages, to call peasants “bandits” so the landlords could sleep easy. They wanted the army to be the enemy of the nation.
But the nation is not the palace. The nation is the people who work. If we serve the people, we serve Bolivia. If we serve the old order, we betray her. The Worker and Peasant Army will not rest until the republic is defended from every threat—foreign and domestic.
—Germán Busch
They called us subjects. They called us children. Now we will see if they can still call us that when we stand together.
-Santos Marko T’ula
What binds worker and peasant is not only hatred of a class. It is the shared discovery that another life is possible. In the ayllu, capitalist modernity wounded but did not finish its work; in the mine, the communist future appears as necessity. Bolivia is the meeting of these two times.
—José Carlos Mariátegui
Bolivia—if we let you be crushed underfoot, then every curse we have hurled at imperialism will turn into self-indictment. We will have confessed, before the whole world, that we were unworthy of 1919.
—M.N. Roy
A new fleet of unprecedented proportions is the only means of protecting American interests and the American nation from the metastasizing red contagion.
—Arthur Vandenberg
Let the sentimentalists call it ‘policing.’ We call it geometry. The sea is the one frontier a republic can truly finish—if it has the will to lay steel across the map.”
—Admiral William V. Pratt
We must not be drawn into adventures. But we must also not permit the sabotage of international order under the banner of ‘self-determination.
-Austen Chamberlain
The poor have a right not only to bread, but to dignity—and dignity requires that a people not be governed as a mine to be drained.
-Pope Francis
Bolivia is far away. And yet tonight it is closer than the factory gate.
-Berlin Radio Collective
The Government of the United States cannot recognize seizures undertaken under coercion and disorder.
-U.S. State Department Circular
Background
In 1930, it appeared as if the world-order had stabilized. The rate of economic expansion had steadily increased, bringing a period of relative labour peace to the main capitalist powers. The socialist governments had implanted themselves more firmly in the European heartland, and domestic crises were increasingly resolved on the political plane. But the apparent peace at the multiple centers of the world-system masked a deeper tension on the periphery.
Everywhere outside the core of the capitalist world-system, the question was the same: on what basis, and on what terms, to establish relations with the socialist bloc? In the early 20s, Britain experienced a nearly unprecedented export boom off the collapse of trade with continental Europe and a weakening pound. Following the conclusion of the Stockholm Conference, the resumption of limited trade with the capitalists permitted a general rise in the prices of commodities and eased recovery. Yet by 1928, the Atlantic Union had begun seeking new ways to constrict the socialist bloc’s access to food, credit, and strategic raw materials. Pressure was placed on key trading and diplomatic partners to restrict exchange with the socialists. Decisions had to be made.
In the final two years of the 1920s, there was no general crisis of overcapacity in the capitalist core. But in select commodities—those whose marginal buyers now sat behind the new inter-bloc curtain—prices began to slip, then lurch. Under American pressure, Bolivia’s oligarchic leadership, custodian of one of the world’s great tin streams, agreed to suspend exports to the socialist bloc, reassured that Atlantic purchasers would absorb the surplus. They were reassured, and then abandoned. British capital expanded output in the Federated Malay States, and when La Paz returned in 1929 to reopen talks with the Europeans, it discovered that the bloc had already secured a long-term arrangement elsewhere—this time through Chile, whose own political realignment made it a more pliable hinge.
Fiscal Crisis, Repression, and the Approach to Revolution
Bolivia’s fiscal structure was oriented around customs duties and export rents. Once dependent on silver for revenue, large mining interests had transitioned to tin just before the 20th century began. Falling tin prices therefore turned into a general fiscal crisis of the state, and from there into a crisis of legitimacy. The government—republican in form, but controlled by oligarchic mining and landowning interests—responded to falling revenues with austerity. Municipal budgets were cut and the salaries of civil servants were slashed. The mining houses, frequently staffed by men of the same families as those who ran the state, responded with the predictable measures: wage cuts, layoffs, a transition to scrip, and a demand for “security” from the state.
Over a few months, tens of thousands of miners were laid off, cutting off the livelihood for communities many times their size. Food prices relentlessly increased even as workers were forced to accept company paper. Conditions in the mines grew deplorable as maintenance budgets were cut and workers lost whatever bargaining power they once possessed. Amidst this general immiseration, memories of the old “social war” arose. Bolivia had never been at its forefront; the mines were notoriously difficult to organize. But desperation, and the harsh shock of dislocation, now provided sufficient impetus. Propaganda circulated and men organized. Given the conditions, this frequently involved violent picketing, occupations, and targeted slowdowns.
A strike in the mines was not merely an industrial dispute; it was an assault on the republic’s capacity to pay its debts, import food, and keep the officer corps loyal. Nonetheless, miners did not have the means to create a revolutionary situation on their own: they were a small minority of the overwhelmingly rural nation’s population, and they were concentrated in a single geographic region. They were thus positioned to pose a serious threat to the state, but not to bring it down.
The true majority of the Bolivian nation were the indigenous communities, gathered together into over two dozen different peoples. Historically mistreated, excluded from civic life, and living across Bolivia’s rural hinterlands, they cultivated their own political bodies. The basic unit was the ayllu assembly, a participatory-democratic community body. The ordinary business of ayllus was to adjudicate local disputes—many of which revolved around land and debt—and to coordinate mutual aid. They also possessed a loose, overlapping confederal structure built up less through bureaucracy than through traditional obligations: visiting delegates, shared festivals, and traveling circuits of barter and seasonal labour.
The downturn in 1929–1930 placed a number of stressors on indigenous communities. Landlords tightened rents, lenders hiked interest rates, and debt peonage returned, even if as an “informal” rather than legally sanctified relation. Pongueaje, the forced labour extracted from indigenous peasants by large landowners, intensified as credit dried up. When the ruling coalition in La Paz chose to increase taxes on landlords, these were almost entirely passed along to tenants in the form of both in-kind transfers and increased labour obligations, worsening the cycle of debt peonage. Indigenous self-organization picked up rapidly in this period, and under the guidance of the Peruvian socialist and IntRevMar adviser José Carlos Mariátegui, Marof worked tirelessly to deepen the Bolivian Union of Revolutionary Marxists’ links with indigenous communities, pursuing a “miner–peasant” alliance.
Over 1930, itinerant organizers were recruited who spoke Quechua and Aymara, and “defense committees” formed between miners’ councils and local ayllu assemblies. Proletarian miners and indigenous communities found a shared enemy in an increasingly repressive state, and pooled their resources to better resist the employers’ offensive. However, coordination was improvised and often tense; the alliance was not a fusion between two differing life-worlds but a defensive pact against landlords, creditors, and state violence. The Bolivian Union of Revolutionary Marxists acted less as a hub than as a facilitator of these activities, providing translators and organizers. It was also crucial in ensuring the flow of weapons from radical Chilean labour unions into Bolivia during the early 1930s.
Around the same time, the revolutionary situation in Bolivia was recognized by IntRevMar, which chose to detach a “South American Council” from the larger “Latin Council,” placing Mariátegui at its head. An important anti-colonial and socialist theorist, Mariátegui had provided the theoretical justification for a strategy of indigenous–proletarian joint organization. He had originally hoped to implement it in Peru; conditions in Bolivia, however, had turned out to be more propitious. He advocated tirelessly for assistance to the Bolivian Union of Revolutionary Marxists, which had now grown into a genuine mass party.
The growth of workers’ and peasants’ organizing was unique in its national peculiarities, but unmistakable in its basic structure. The Bolivian elite saw in it many of the same patterns as 1919, but reassured itself that the army was still loyal. It is true that the military had not experienced the half-decade of bloodletting that was the Great War. But it was exposed to a perhaps greater danger: the presence, right across the border, of two anti-imperialist military dictatorships speaking an increasingly egalitarian language of nation, development, and community. The left-caudillo regimes in Chile and Argentina had been successful both in providing the military with unprecedented social prestige and in ensuring a basic modicum of social peace. For junior officers contemptuous of oligarchic backroom politics in La Paz, this provided a standing temptation that was difficult to ignore.
The army had already shown signs of resentment at being repeatedly deployed as strikebreakers and “transport guards.” Equally concerning to many junior officers was violent disorder in the countryside, prompted by large landowners recruiting militias among their sons and other local notables to spread terror in rural areas. By the middle of 1930, a consensus was crystallizing among junior officers that the state was rotting and the army was being used to prop up a broken structure.
The Army of Potosi and The Bolivian Revolution
Matters came to a head when a major strike wave broke out in Potosí, with workers demanding an end to company scrip and—unusually—the disbanding of nearby landowners’ militias that had been used to terrorize indigenous communities. For the first time, a mining strike named the broader countryside as part of its battlefield. Mines were occupied in short order, and an initial attempt at a military crackdown backfired after several miners and a sympathetic priest were shot dead. When a detachment under Germán Busch was sent to the Potosí mines, he used the opportunity to arrest the officers who had previously fired on the miners, declaring them “traitors to the nation of Bolivia.” This prompted a general crisis of command within the army as junior officers refused to move against Busch.
The breakdown in military authority gave the signal for urban workers and artisans to join the strike wave. The fiscal crisis of the state had now become a general crisis of legitimacy. The Bolivian government’s control over its own repressive powers was rapidly slipping away.
Improvised organs of proletarian power sprang up across the mining towns, and sympathetic junior officers formed “discipline councils” to prevent the army from splitting into gangs. The government still retained control of La Paz, though strikes among workers had paralyzed many key transport and communication junctions.
The moment of decision arrived in August, when an army of miners and discontented soldiers marched to La Paz from Potosí under Busch’s command. The government was reassured that the soldiers there would prevent the capture of the city, but on August 14th—when a pitched battle or siege looked overwhelmingly likely—David Toro and a clique of junior officers in La Paz ordered the arrest of the senior military leadership and invited Busch’s army into the city. Toro understood that if La Paz became a slaughter, the army would fracture for good, and the officer corps would be dragged down with the failing regime. The government leadership was quickly imprisoned and a military junta announced.
At first, international observers likened the events to those in Argentina and Chile seven years earlier: an unsettling precedent, but not one that would fundamentally challenge the international system. In truth, however, the military was in a structurally different situation. It had risen to power on the back of proletarian and peasant resistance to the state. Small, and still riven by internal divisions, it could not repudiate that support without threatening its position.
On the 18th, Tristan Marof—leader of the Bolivian Union of Revolutionary Marxists—was invited into the new government, and a promise was made to recognize a federal indigenous Ayllu Congress as a “co-equal” pillar of the new state. This transformed the international perception of events: no longer a mere military coup, it was now a workers’ and peasants’ revolution.
Toro was named head of the National Emergency Junta, but he immediately faced distrust from both Busch and Marof. Each saw in him the familiar Bonapartist temptation: the officer who speaks the language of necessity in order to make himself the state. To hedge against this, Busch was appointed commander of the armed forces, while Marof received broad economic authority and responsibility for liaison with the indigenous congress—now chaired by Santos Marko T’ula, the Aymara organizer whose networks had done as much as the mines to make August possible.
Marof, hoping to cement the revolutionary nature of the new state, quickly drafted a series of resolutions defining the new Bolivian government as a “Socialist Republic of Workers and Peasants,” lauding the Bolivian masses for establishing “the first foothold of the new socialist future in the New World.” This was but the first step in a perhaps inevitable confrontation with the continental hegemon.
At the end of August, American commercial property began evacuating from Bolivia, and news arrived of American diplomatic pressure on Chile, with demands for an “inspection regime.” The government retaliated by nationalizing American commercial property. Simultaneously, local potentates and landlords—alarmed by events in La Paz—began raising an army. The young socialist republic would soon have decisions to make and a revolution to defend.
Bình luận
0