Word: bolivia
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...stern-faced priests are tacked indiscriminately around the walls. The house has no water or sanitary facilities; the nearest public bath is six miles away, but Sabino and his wife have not visited it this year. The only sign of civilization that the second biggest tin mine in Bolivia has brought to Huanuni is a 25-watt lamp that hangs incongruously from the thatched roof...
...Bolivia is packed with such stark contrasts. It is a country of majestic mountain scenery and miserable human squalor, of tremendous natural resources and examples of their wretched neglect and abuse. To the west, condors soar over abandoned Spanish silver mines near icy, blue Titicaca, highest navigable lake in the world; in the remote east, ranchers graze their gaunt herds in a jungle reputed to be floating on oil. The Bolivian land itself is split in two-the barren, windswept uplands, fenced about by the snowy Andes; and the vast, green east, an unpopulated, trackless region of plains and jungle...
March to the East. Brutal as any contrast of geography or industry is the cultural chasm between Bolivia's Indians and the whites and mestizos of the cities. The Indians, the vast majority of Bolivia's 3,200,000 inhabitants, live quite outside the national economy, even speaking Aymara or Quechua instead of Spanish. At home on the high, forbidding plateau since before the time of the Incas, they have developed oversize lungs to be able to live and work, dance madly and play reed pipes, get drunk and breed children in the cold, thin air. Their wants...
...Cadillacs. Government officials, demanding emancipation from the tyranny of tin, urge Bolivians to look eastward to the regions where the Andes fall away in giant green gorges called yungas to the Amazonian jungles and Chaco plains. With the aid of a $26 million U.S. Export-Import Bank loan, Bolivia hopes to finish a highway linking the mountain cities with Santa Cruz, capital of the plains, by late 1953. Brazil and Argentina are busy building railroads across the Chaco (see map) to open the area to the Atlantic. Bolivian nationalists, sponsors of a "March to the East," talk paradoxically of luring...
...Villaroel's Finance Minister, Victor Paz Estenssoro, ran for the presidency from exile in Buenos Aires. He won, only to have the result set aside by an army junta that grabbed power. Egged on by the tin firms, the junta risked the collapse of Bolivia's tottering economy to wage a war of bluff with Stuart Symington, then head of RFC, trying to force him to buy Bolivia's tin for the U.S. near the Korea-scare price of $1.90 a Ib. Soon food ran short in Bolivian cities. Paz's nationalists shouted: "Bread...