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The Bolivian Revolution at 60: Politics and Historiography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 May 2013

JAMES DUNKERLEY
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Abstract

The 60th anniversary of the Bolivian Revolution of 1952 led by the MNR provided an opportunity to review a Latin American political experience of disputed importance in the light of the government of the MAS under Evo Morales since 2006. This essay reappraises the historiography of 1952 from the perspective of MNR officialism and from critical positions, particularly those associated with indigenismo or Katarismo. Bolivia hoy, an influential collection of essays edited by René Zavaleta Mercado in 1983, is identified as a key moment in changing interpretations of the 1952 revolution.

Spanish abstract

El 60 aniversario de la Revolución Boliviana de 1952 liderada por el MNR ofreció una oportunidad para revisar una experiencia política latinoamericana de cuestionada importancia a la luz del gobierno del MAS encabezado por Evo Morales desde 2006. La historiografía de 1952 es reconsiderada desde la perspectiva del oficialismo del MNR y desde posiciones críticas, sobre todo aquellas asociadas con el indigenismo o el katarismo. Se identifica Bolivia hoy, una colección influyente de ensayos editada por René Zavaleta Mercado en 1983, como un parteaguas clave en el cambio de interpretaciones de la Revolución de 1952.

Portuguese abstract

O 60° aniversário da Revolução Boliviana de 1952, liderada pelo MNR, ofereceu uma oportunidade para reavaliar uma experiência política latino-americana cuja importância foi contestada à luz do governo do MAS encabeçado por Evo Morales desde 2006. A historiografia de 1952 é avaliada da perspectiva do oficialismo do MNR e de posições críticas, em especial daquelas associadas ao indigenismo ou katarismo. A Bolivia hoy – influente coletânea de ensaios editada por René Zavaleta Mercado em 1983 – é identificada como momento-chave na mudança de interpretações da Revolução de 1952.

Keywords

BoliviaBolivian National RevolutionMovimiento Nacional RevolucionarioMovimiento al SocialismoEvo MoralesKatarismoBoliviaRevolución de 1952Movimiento Nacional RevolucionarioMovimiento al SocialismoEvo MoraleskatarismoBolíviaRevolução de 1952Movimiento Nacional RevolucionarioMovimiento al SocialismoEvo Moraleskatarismo
Type
Commentary
Information
Journal of Latin American Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 2 , May 2013 , pp. 325 - 350
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

1 El Diario, 11 April 1952.

2 Página 12 (Buenos Aires), 16 Jan. 2012.

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9 Space restrictions preclude an assessment of the essentially Trotskyist critiques of the processes ‘led’ by the MNR and MAS. In the 1950s this critique possessed some political salience at the national and international levels; 60 years on, much less so. For such interpretations, see Lora, Guillermo, A History of the Bolivian Labour Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977)Google Scholar; some translated extracts appear in ‘Bolivia: The Revolution Derailed? The Crisis of 1952 and the Trotskyist Movement’, Revolutionary History, 4: 3 (1992). See also John, S. Sándor, Bolivia's Radical Tradition: Permanent Revolution in the Andes (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2009)Google Scholar; and Webber, Jeffery R., From Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Press, 2011)Google Scholar. The traditional MNR rebuttal of Trotskyism within and beyond its own ranks was pithily expressed by Walter Guevara Arze: ‘Lora's thesis – a worker-peasant government, dictatorship of the proletariat – was an idiocy from the perspective of practicality. Imagine if Lora had been president and set up that worker-peasant government. How long would it have lasted in a country that imported far more than now? Where would the goods have come from? From foreign ports … There wouldn't be any need for them even to prohibit trade. A locomotive would simply break down, and there would be no flow of flour for three or six months. No food for the people. Was such a government ever going to survive?’ (Hoy, 14 Jan. 1996).

10 According to Víctor Hugo Cárdenas, one of its early leaders, Katarismo ‘evokes the struggle of Tupak Katari … Distinct from indigenismo (a creole ideology designed to integrate the indigenous population into national society through mestización) and the class reductionism of Marxism and the ethnic reductionism of Indianism (an anti-western ideology that considers the “Indian nation” the only social force of change), the ideas of katarismo were developed by Aymara and Quechua intellectuals … to the end of transforming the internal colonial conditions of the country’: Barnadas, Josep María et al. (eds.), Diccionario Histórico de Bolivia, vol. 1 (Sucre: Grupo de Estudios Históricos, 2002), p. 1136Google Scholar.

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22 Bigenho, Michelle, Sounding Indigenous: Authenticity in Bolivian Musical Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 26CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In a marvellous study, Henry Stobart deconstructs a dry-season takis (charango song) from Macha, northern Potosí, with an ear to the impact of 1952 on indigenous musical form: see Stobart, , Music and the Poetics of Production in the Bolivian Andes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 64Google Scholar. During the 1950s and 1960s Raúl Shaw Moreno, from Oruro, was one of Latin America's leading exponents of the bolero song form, but Fernando Ríos has shown how even this mainstream genre resisted MNR efforts to harness it for popular endorsement: see Ríos, , ‘Bolero Trios, Mestizo Panpipe Ensembles and Bolivia's 1952 Revolution’, Ethnomusicology, 54: 2 (2010), pp. 281–317CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Mercado, René Zavaleta, Lo nacional-popular en Bolivia (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1986), pp. 11–12Google Scholar. This posthumously published work draws here on the ideas of Antezana, Luis H., ‘Sistema y procesos ideológicos en Bolivia (1935–1979)’, in Mercado, René Zavaleta (ed.), Bolivia hoy (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1983), pp. 60–84Google Scholar.

24 Sue Serra Iamamoto, ‘O nacionalismo boliviano em tempos de plurinacionalidade: revoltas antineoliberais e consituinte (2000–9)’, Master's thesis, Universidade de São Paulo, 2011, pp. 97, 116–7.

25 Hylton, Forrest and Thomson, Sinclair, ‘The Chequered Rainbow’, New Left Review, 35 (Sep.–Oct. 2005), p. 45Google Scholar; see also Hylton, and Thomson, , Revolutionary Horizons: Past and Present in Bolivian Politics (New York: Verso, 2007), p. 80Google Scholar.

26 Otero, Daniela, Collana: conflicto por la tierra en el Altiplano (La Paz: Tierra, 2003)Google Scholar; Albó, Xavier, Movimientos y poder indígena en Bolivia, Ecuador y Peru (La Paz: CIPCA, 2008), pp. 30–1Google Scholar; Goudsmit, Into, ‘Praying for Government: Peasant Disengagement from the Bolivian State’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 25: 2 (2006), pp. 200–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Carmen Soliz, ‘Beyond the Supreme Decree: Agrarian Reform and Local Politics in Bolivia, 1953–1970’, unpubl. paper, Department of History, New York University, 2012.

27 Eder, George Jackson, Inflation and Development in Latin America: A Case Study of Inflation and Stabilization in Bolivia (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1968)Google Scholar; González, René Ruiz, La administración empírica de las minas nacionalizadas (La Paz: Juventud, 1980)Google Scholar. For Sánchez de Lozada's strategic analysis, see Minería y economía en Bolivia, vol. 2 (La Paz, 1984), pp. 97–104.

28 Edward Rowell to Washington, 13 Jan. 1954, US National Archives, State Department, 724.00/1-1354.

29 Pittari, Salvador Romero, ‘La revolución de 1952: el mito y el hecho’, Temas Sociales, 24 (2003), p. 29Google Scholar.

30 La Razón, 9 April 2002.

31 Malloy, James, Bolivia: The Uncompleted Revolution (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970)Google Scholar, p. 336. While the MNR was still in office, sympathetic US academics stressed its reformist, social democratic qualities, not least to stave off a full Cold War offensive by Washington of the type that succeeded so well against Guatemala in 1954 and failed so spectacularly against Cuba from 1960: see Alexander, Robert J., The Bolivian National Revolution (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1958)Google Scholar; and Patch, Richard, ‘Bolivia: The Restrained Revolution’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 334: 1 (1961), pp. 123–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Molina, Fernando, Evo Morales y el retorno de la izquierda nacionalista (La Paz: Eureka, 2006), pp. 51–2Google Scholar.

33 Debray, Régis, Praised Be Our Lords: The Autobiography (London: Verso, 2007), p. 111Google Scholar.

34 Zavaleta, René, 50 años de historia (La Paz: Plural, 1992), p. 46Google Scholar.

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36 Pulso, 25–31 May 2007. A compelling portrait of an economic universe rarely registered in the academic literature is given in Diego Zavaleta Reyles, ‘The Evolving Structures of Ethnic Appeasement in La Paz, Bolivia’, PhD thesis, University of Oxford, 2011.

37 Hoy, 10 May 1994.

38 Mayorga, J. Antonio, Gonismo, discurso y poder (La Paz: Plural, 1996)Google Scholar, p. 100.

39 Klein, Herbert, ‘Social Change in Bolivia since 1952’, in Grindle, and Domingo, (eds.), Proclaiming Revolution, pp. 232–58Google Scholar; see also Klein, , ‘The Historical Background to the Rise of the MAS, 1952–2005’, in Pearce, Adrian (ed.), Evo Morales and the Movimiento al Socialismo in Bolivia: The First Term in Context, 2006–2010 (London: Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2011), pp. 27–62Google Scholar; Kelley, Jonathan and Klein, Herbert S., Revolution and the Rebirth of Inequality (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980)Google Scholar.

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41 New York Times, 23 Feb. 1962.

42 ¡América se Pronuncia! (La Paz: Secretaría de Informaciones, 1953).

43 El Diario, 10 April 1959. Three days earlier the New York Times (7 April 1959) had editorialised, ‘This is a truly crucial moment for the Bolivian Government … The IMF is prepared to help if the Government stands pat on its promise to eliminate the commissary drain. The United States, which has been contributing one-third of the Bolivian Government's budget, is prepared to resume its aid – but only if the Government satisfies the IMF … So what it boils down to is, who controls Bolivia, the Siles Zuazo Government or the miners?’

44 Calleja, Mario Torres, Condiciones políticas nacionales y la Revolución de Abril de 1952 (La Paz: MNR, 1961), p. 18Google Scholar.

45 ‘Don't do what we have done. Make your revolution a democratic one. We're in different times and the people want profound change without war’: quoted in Sivak, Martín, Evo Morales (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 69Google Scholar. Harold Dilla, ‘Cuba: la gobernabilidad y la democracia en el ocaso de una revolución’, in Tenemos pechos de bronce, p. 116.

46 Knight, Alan, ‘The Domestic Dynamics of the Bolivian and Mexican Revolutions’, in Grindle, and Domingo, (eds.), Proclaiming Revolution, pp. 54–90Google Scholar; for an earlier comparative review, see Blasier, Cole, ‘Studies of Social Revolution: Origins in Mexico, Bolivia and Cuba’, Latin American Research Review, 2: 3 (1967), pp. 28–64Google Scholar.

47 Rolando Cordero Campos, ‘Economía y política en el cambio democrático mexicano’, in Tenemos pechos de bronce, p. 95.

48 El Diario, 6 and 28 July 1954.

49 From the 1970s, UMSA issued Historia through the Carrera de Historia and Estudios Bolivianos through the Instituto de Estudios Bolivianos; the Sociedad Boliviana de Historia published the ‘biannual’ Historia y Cultura. In a remarkable personal initiative, Josep Barnadas single-handedly published Historia Boliviana throughout the 1980s. In 2002 Barnadas edited the two-volume Diccionario histórico de Bolivia, which is the most useful reference work on the country's history, both republican and colonial. In the 1990s the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar issued several theme-based issues of DATA, no. 3 of which (1992) was entirely dedicated to reviewing 1952. In addition to Fin del Siglo, the Coordinadora de Historia was responsible for El Siglo XIX: Bolivia y América Latina (Lima: Institut Français des Etudes Andines, 1997), and several issues of the journal Historias thereafter. Several intermittent journals, such as Autodeterminación and T'inkazos, contained frequent original historical material. Under the leadership of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, the Taller de Historia Oral Andina (Andean Oral History Workshop, THOA) was instrumental in promoting indigenous history from the mid-1980s: see Stephenson, Marcia, ‘Forging an Indigenous Counterpublic Sphere: THOA in Bolivia’, Latin American Research Review, 37: 2 (2002), pp. 99–118Google Scholar.

50 Gunnar Mendoza was director of the Archivo y Biblioteca Nacionales de Bolivia (National Archive and Library of Bolivia, ABNB) from 1944 until 1994. In 1995 the first of a series of ABNB Anuarios was dedicated to his memory. The leadership of subsequent directors – Barnadas, René Arze Aguirre, Marcela Inch and Ana María Lema – has been notably enlightened. In 1971 Alberto Crespo Rodas and a team from UMSA established the Archivo de La Paz in order to save documentation of the departmental superior court from being sold to a paper company. In recent years the Archivo became an integral part of training UMSA historians, flourishing under the directorship of Rossana Barragán.

51 For Carlos Mesa Gisbert (vice-president, 2002–3; president, 2003–5), the importance of 10 Oct. 1982 remains undervalued by intellectuals and the populace at large: see La Razón, 6 Aug. 2011. Mesa is one of Bolivia's most active public intellectuals and a scrupulously detailed historian: see his Presidentes de Bolivia (3rd edition, La Paz: Gisbert, 2003). Also see de Mesa, José, Gisbert, Teresa and Gisbert, Carlos Mesa, Historia de Bolivia (2nd edition, La Paz: Gisbert, 1998)Google Scholar; this was a successful popular history, albeit lacking the illustrative flair of Crespo, Alberto, Fernández, José Crespo and Solares, María Luisa Kent, Los bolivianos en el tiempo (2nd edition, La Paz: Instituto de Estudios Andinos y Amazónicos, 1995)Google Scholar.

52 ‘I don't know what Bolivia is because I don't know her history and I am like those Mayas at the ruins who have not the slightest idea who created them and how – we are a country without memory and only History can show us, in the most objective manner, our reality’: Sánchez de Losada, Visiones de fin de siglo, p. 143.

53 Ultima Hora, 30 April 1979; MNR, Así Fue la Revolución and Visiones sobre la Revolución (La Paz: Plural, 2002)Google Scholar. The foundation was established after Cajías’ death in 1996 by his nine children, several of whom have energetically combined political activism and historical scholarship. It would not be invidious to select here the examples of Lupe, who has focused on the revolutionary period with one standard and one novelised biography of political enemies – Historia de una leyenda: vida y palabra de Juan Lechín Oquendo (La Paz: Amigos del Libro, 1998), and Morir en mi cumpleaños (La Paz: Los Tiempos, 2011) on Oscar Unzaga de la Vega of the FSB – and Magdalena, who served as minister of education between 2007 and 2010 and has written scholarly studies of coca and the mining community of Huanuni.

54 ‘Quemar el archivo: un ensayo en contra de la historia’, Temas Sociales, 24 (2003), pp. 367–402.

55 New York Times, 13 April 1962. In April 1962 the Dirección Nacional de Informaciones published Bolivia: 10 años de revolución under the editorship of Jacobo Libermann, whose combination of prose, photos and statistics was a much more professional edition than Fellmann's Album. Then there is a 40-year official silence until the far more agile and expressly non-partisan sponsorship of Tenemos pechos de bronce, which includes a variety of excerpts from independent studies, including one by the present author. Josep Barnadas, who evidently thought Libermann's book a piece of pure propaganda, noted a ‘tridecadal silence’ in Historia Boliviana, 11: 2 (1982), which contains responses by Xavier Albó, Herbert Klein, Jean-Pierre Lavaud, Jorge Ovando Sanz and René Zavaleta to a questionnaire on 1952 as well as full articles by Jerry Knudson, Gustavo Rodríguez and James Malloy. This, in my view, was the first scholarly publication to treat 1952 as history rather than actualité.

56 Temas Sociales, 24 (2003), pp. 71–83.

57 Ibid., p. 26.

58 See Cusicanqui, Silvia Rivera, Oprimidos pero no vencidos: luchas del campesinado aymara y qwechwa, 1900–1980 (La Paz: UNRISD, 1984/2003)Google Scholar. A more expansive (and polemical) vision is given in her paper, ‘La raíz: colonizadores y colonizados’, in Albó, Xavier and Barrios, Raúl (eds.), Violencias encubiertas en Bolivia (La Paz: La Mirada Salvaje, 1993)Google Scholar, where Rivera prefers the terms ‘horizonte’ and ‘ciclo’ to periodise forms of internal colonialism (pp. 30–3). All these texts were based on serious prior ethnohistorical research: see Rivera, , ‘El Mallku y la sociedad colonial en el siglo XVII: el caso de Jesús de Machaca’, Avances, 1 (1978), pp. 7–27Google Scholar; and ‘La expansión del latifundio en el altiplano boliviano’, Avances, 2 (1978), pp. 95–118. For her subsequent work, see Rivera, , ‘Liberal Democracy and Ayllu Democracy in Bolivia: The Case of Northern Potosí’, Journal of Development Studies, 26: 4 (1990), pp. 97–121Google Scholar; Bircholas (La Paz: Mama Huaco, 1991); and Violencias (re)encubiertas en Bolivia (La Paz: CIPCA, 2010); and Farthing, Linda, ‘Everything's Up for Discussion: A 40th Anniversary Discussion with Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’, NACLA Report on the Americas, 40: 4 (2007), pp. 4–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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60 Platt, Tristan, Bouysse-Cassagne, Thérese and Harris, Olivia, Qaraqara Charca: Mallku, Inka y Rey en la provincia de Charcas (La Paz: Plural, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hylton, Forrest, Serulnikov, Sergio, Patzi, Félix and Thomson, Sinclair, Ya es otro tiempo el presente: cuatro momentos de insurgencia indígena (La Paz: Muela del Diablo, 2003)Google Scholar. For a critique of the imputation of a ‘culture of insurrection’, see Postero, Nancy, ‘Andean Utopias in Evo Morales's Bolivia’, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 2: 1 (2007), p. 19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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62 Forrest Hylton, ‘Reverberations of Insurgency: Indian Communities, the Federal War of 1899, and the Regeneration of Bolivia’, PhD thesis, New York University, 2010, p. 154.

63 Sologuren, Ximena Soruco (with Plata, Wilfredo and Medeiros, Gustavo), Los barones del Oriente: el poder en Santa Cruz ayer y hoy (Santa Cruz: Tierra, 2008)Google Scholar; and Soruco, , La ciudad de los cholos: mestizaje y colonialidad en Bolivia, siglos xix y xx (Lima: Institut Français des Etudes Andines, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

64 Rivera, Oprimidos, p. 23.

65 Ibid., p. 61.

66 Ibid., p. 109.

67 Albó, Movimientos, pp. 39–41; Rivera, ‘La Raíz’, p. 34.

68 Soto, César, Historia del Pacto Militar-Campesino (La Paz: CIPCA, 1994)Google Scholar.

69 Rivera, ‘Liberal Democracy’, p. 105.

70 Albó, Movimientos, p. 47. Albó is far more respectful of Víctor Hugo Cárdenas’ profile and far less dogmatic about the first Sánchez de Lozada administration than many commentators: see Albó, ‘The “Long Memory”’, p. 27; and Y de Kataristas a MNRistas? (La Paz: CEDOIN, 1993). On a purely ethical level, it is hard to distinguish between the outrage visited upon Morales by creole ‘justice’ (expulsion from Congress in 2002) and that directed at Cárdenas by ‘customary justice’ (an attack on his family home in Huatajata in 2010), although the latter's Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Katari (Túpac Katari Revolutionary Movement, MRTK) was also denied proper parliamentary representation by the electoral court in 1989.

71 Hale, Charles R., ‘Mistados, Cholos and the Negation of Identity in the Guatemalan Highlands’, in Gotkowitz, Laura (ed.), Histories of Race and Racism: The Andes and Mesoamerica from Colonial Times to the Present (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 254–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

72 Albó, Movimientos, pp. 49 ff., assigns much more importance to the LPP in the rise of the cocaleros and MAS than does the mainstream Left. The TIPNIS road controversy of 2011–12 brought some recognition of the dilemmas of a purely denunciatory discourse. For a rural view, see Grisaffi, Thomas, ‘We Are Originarios… “We Just Aren't from Here”: Coca Leaf and Identity Politics in the Chaparé, Bolivia’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 29: 4 (2010), pp. 425–39CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; for an urban ethnography, see Lazar, Sian, El Alto, Rebel City: Self and Citizenship in Andean Bolivia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

73 Canessa, Andrew, ‘Todos Somos Indígenas: Towards a New Language of Political Identity’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 25: 2 (2006), pp. 241–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gamboa, Franco, ‘Bolivia y una preocupación constante: el indianismo, sus orígenes y limitaciones en el siglo XXI’, Araucaria, 22 (2009), pp. 125–51Google Scholar; Ardaya, Gloria, ‘La crisis política en Bolivia’, Umbrales, 19 (2009), pp. 23–46Google Scholar. There is a rich Bolivian literature on ideas about race. In addition to the work of Ximena Soruco (see note 63) and the collection edited by Laura Gotkowitz (see note 71), see Salmón, Josefa, El espejo indianista en Bolivia, 1900–1956 (La Paz: Plural, 1997)Google Scholar; and ‘Una historia del pensamiento indianista Ukhamawa Jakawisaxa’, Revista de Indias, 244 (2008), pp. 115–38; and Lucero, José Antonio, Struggles of Voice: The Politics of Indigenous Representation in the Andes (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

74 Raúl Madrid, ‘Politics, Socioeconomic Status, and Indigenous Identity in Latin America: The Bolivian Case’, available at www.vanderbilt.edu/lapop/bolivia/2004-boliviancase.pdf. The debate over mestizaje and the design of the 2012 census preoccupied Salvador Romero up until his death in April of that year: see La Razón, 5 Jan. 2012; Ukhamawa Noticias, ‘Bolivia: mestizaje es no-identidad’ (2012), available at http://ukhamawa.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/bolivia-mestizo-es-no-identidad.html; and Roberto Laserna, ‘Cuoteo étnico? No tatay’, available at www.oocities.org/laserna_r/cuoteoetn.html.

75 ‘The “Long Memory”’, p. 30.

76 Rivera, Bircholas; Barragán, Rossana, Espacio urbano y dinámica étnica: La Paz en el siglo XIX (La Paz: Hisbol, 1990)Google Scholar; and ‘Más allá de lo mestizo, más allá de lo Aymara: organización y representaciones de clase y etnicidad en La Paz’, América Latina Hoy, 43 (2006), pp. 107–30; Howard, Rosaleen, ‘Beyond the Lexicon of Difference: Discursive Performance of Identity in the Andes’, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 4: 1 (2009), pp. 17–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

77 Gordillo, José, Campesinos revolucionarios en Bolivia: identidad, territorio y sexualidad en el Valle Alto de Cochabamba, 1952–1964 (La Paz: Plural, 2000), p. 28Google Scholar; see also Gordillo, (ed.), Arando en la historia: la experiencia política campesina en Cochabamba (La Paz: Plural, 1998)Google Scholar.

78 Gotkowitz, Laura, A Revolution for Our Rights: Indigenous Struggle for Land and Justice in Bolivia, 1880–1952 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

79 Luis H. Antezana J., ‘Prólogo’, in Rivera, Oprimidos, p. 13, emphasis added.

80 Regalsky, Pablo, ‘Political Processes and the Reconfiguration of the State in Bolivia’, Latin American Perspectives, 37: 3 (2010), pp. 38, 40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

81 In 1961 the New York Times (26 Oct.) reported that ‘the state oil company had been selling gasoline at prices that were below its costs’. In 2011 the Economist (8 Jan.) reported that ‘petrol prices in neighbouring countries are between two and three times as high as in Bolivia’.

82 ‘We soon realized … that the budgetary key lay in the price of oil’: Sachs, Jeffrey, The End of Poverty: How We Can Make It Happen in Our Lifetime (London: Penguin, 2005), p. 93Google Scholar. For a critical survey of contemporary economic management, see Tsolakis, Andreas, The Reform of the Bolivian State: Domestic Politics in the Context of Globalization (Boulder, CO: First Forum, 2011)Google Scholar.

83 Antezana, ‘Sistema y proceso ideológicos’. The use that this chapter and Rivera's make of the analysis by Jean-Pierre Faye and Ernst Bloch of the rise of Nazism in the 1930s is an intellectually rich issue that deserves fuller consideration. Suffice it to say that Ernst Roehm, leader of the Sturmabteilung, and Klaus Barbie, head of the Gestapo in Marseille, spent time in Bolivia.

84 Whitehead, Laurence, ‘National Power and Local Power: The Case of Santa Cruz de la Sierra’, in Rabinowitz, Francine and Trueblood, Felicity (eds.), Latin American Urban Research, III (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1973), pp. 23–46Google Scholar; Barragán, Rossana, ‘Hegemonías y “Egemonías”: las relaciones entre el estado central y las regiones (Bolivia, 1825–1952)’, Iconos, 34 (2009), pp. 39–51Google Scholar; and ‘Oppressed or Privileged Regions? Some Historical Reflections on the Use of State Resources’, in Crabtree and Whitehead (eds.), Unresolved Tensions, pp. 83–103; Prudén, Hernán, ‘Santa Cruz entre la pos-guerra del Chaco y las postrimerías de la Revolución Nacional’, Historias, 6 (2003), pp. 41–63Google Scholar; Gustafson, Bret, ‘Spectacles of Autonomy and Crisis: or, What Bulls and Beauty Queens Have to Do with Regionalism in Eastern Bolivia’, Journal of Latin American Anthropology, 11: 2 (2006), pp. 351–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

85 Soruco, Los barones del oriente, p. xix.

86 Sparks to Washington, 23 Oct. 1953, USNA 724.00/10-2353; Greenlee to Washington, 30 April 2006, Cable 06LAPAZ886, Wikileaks.

87 Lehmann, Kenneth D., Bolivia and the United States: A Limited Partnership (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Siekmeier, James F., The Bolivian Revolution and the United States, 1952 to the Present (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Dorn, Glenn J., ‘Pushing Tin: U.S.–Bolivian Relations and the Coming of the National Revolution’, Diplomatic History, 35: 2 (2011), pp. 203–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thomas C. Field, ‘Conflict on High: The Bolivian Revolution and the United States, 1961–1964’, PhD diss., London School of Economics, 2010; and ‘Ideology as Strategy: Military-Led Modernization and the Origins of the Alliance for Progress in Bolivia’, Diplomatic History, 36: 1 (2012), pp. 147–83. For a recent appraisal of the important British relationship with Bolivia in the revolutionary period, see Olivia Saunders, ‘Britain and the Bolivian Revolution, 1946–1956’, PhD thesis, University of London, 2011.

88 Zavaleta, Bolivia hoy, p. 19.

89 Archondo, Rafael, ‘Breve biografía política de Evo Morales’, Umbrales, 19 (2009), p. 117Google Scholar.