Word: bolivian
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Starting at the turn of the century, when the world developed a ravenous tin appetite (for food containers, automobile bearings, welding), Simon I. Patiño. a cholo (half-Indian) from Cochabamba, parlayed an abandoned Bolivian tin mine into a fortune estimated at a cool $1 billion. His annual income used to surpass the government's. He formed a world cartel, bought heavily into Malayan tin, and lived abroad like an emperor, marrying his son Antenor to a niece of Spain's Alfonso XIII, his daughters to a French count and a Spanish grandee of such exalted lineage...
...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 whose rich soil could easily feed all Bolivia if the mountain Indians would only move there...
...half-million modern Bolivians bring these backward highlanders to the ways of the western world? Amid the faded red-tile roofs of La Paz (pop. 321,000), world's highest capital, rise such steel-and-glass skyscrapers as the 14-story University of San Andres. Shaggy llamas shuffle indolently to the side of the capital's steep, cobbled streets to make way for Fords and 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...
...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 for the People!" and raised him to power in a bloody revolt last April...
...make a go of his gamble, Paz needs foreign technicians, credits to buy supplies, peace with his miners, and a long-term contract for sale of Bolivia's tin. With huge private investments already under pressure in such neighboring countries as Venezuela, the U.S. cannot openly condone Bolivian nationalization. The RFC, which resumed buying Bolivian tin (at $1.17½ a Ib.) after Paz's revolution, stopped when nationalization occurred. Yet from a strategic standpoint, Bolivia's tin (only 20% of the world's nowadays, but the sole supply in the western hemisphere) is essential...