Word: bolivian
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Thus ended ten days of imprisonment in the dingy tin miners' union hall at Siglo, Veinte, 135 miles from the Bolivian capital of La Paz. Until the end, there was no certainty that the men - pawns in a power struggle between Bolivia's moderate President Victor Paz Estenssoro and its leftist Vice President Juan Lechin - would get out alive. Even after Lechin backed down, many of the rebellious miners whom he leads seemed in a mood to set off a civil war in the bleak Andean nation. They demanded that Lechin appear personally before them to explain...
There the captives sat last week -Martin and three other Americans, a Dutchman, a German and eleven Bolivians - frightened and endangered pawns in a medieval power struggle high in the Bolivian Andes. Dark-featured Indian women, wives of rebellious tin miners, stood guard over them in a shabby union hall at the 14,000-ft.-high Siglo Veinte mine, 135 miles from La Paz. The women cradled tommy guns and tucked dynamite caps beneath their bulging petticoats. On the floor below, just a bullet's zing through the wooden boards should fighting break out, 50 cases of dynamite were...
...private militia, and proceeded to featherbed the nationalized mines with 6,000 unneeded workers. The miners called him "El Maestro"-but the once profitable mines became a shambles, losing money at the rate of $8,500,000 a year. Lechin's miners elected him president of the entire Bolivian Workers Federation. By 1960, too powerful to be ignored any longer, Lechin was made Vice President on the ticket with Paz and started plotting to undercut the President himself...
Full Assistance. The U.S. Government was outraged. Secretary of State Rusk fired off a wire to Lechin holding him personally responsible for the hostages' safety. An angry President Johnson immediately offered the Bolivian government "full assistance"-whatever it wanted, including arms and men-to secure the prisoners' release. In Bolivia there was talk of helicopter-equipped U.S. Army Special Forces troops standing by in Panama, ready to fly to Bolivia for a lightning rescue...
Fearing the effect of such a U.S. offer on the already aroused miners, the Bolivian government quickly denied that any U.S. arms aid was requested-or needed. President Paz ordered 3,000 troops to encircle the mine area, then made his own position clear: there would be no exchange of prisoners, and the miners must release their captives. But neither Paz nor the miners would give in. To send the army in to rescue the hostages, Paz feared, might bring on their deaths and plunge the nation into bloody civil...