Word: bolivian
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...back in 1868, so the story goes, Queen Victoria settled the Bolivia problem in her own imperious way. General Mariano Melgarejo, the Bolivian dictator of the day, had urgently invited the British Minister to attend a reception in honor of the general's new mistress. When the diplomat frostily declined, the affronted dictator had him tied aboard a donkey, facing aft, and trotted him three times around the main square of La Paz. The minister fled home and told Queen Victoria of the outrage. "Where is Bolivia?" the Queen demanded. A map was brought and the Queen was tactfully...
...mountain republic of Bolivia was back on the map as never before in its obscure but violent 127-year history. Climaxing a long and bloody struggle, a new revolutionary government had nationalized the country's three big tin companies and placed their mines under a new, government-run Bolivian Mining Corp. It was the most important act of nationalization in Latin America since Mexico seized the foreign oil companies in 1938. For better or for worse, it made the nationalist government of President Victor Paz Estenssoro the most important since SimÓn Bolivar founded the republic...
...willing to risk biting off the hand that feeds them. Tin pays for 50% of the food that they must now import from abroad. It is the foundation of their teetering economy, source of 80% of their foreign exchange and almost half of their government revenue. And for years Bolivian tin-and Bolivia itself-has been dominated by the three expropriated companies: Patiәo, Hochschild, Aramayo...
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...