Word: lech
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Siles accused Paz of personalisimo. At election time, Siles joined Juan Lechín, leftist boss of the tin miners, in a hunger strike, hoping to dramatize his thesis that Paz was becoming a dictator. When that failed, he set out to organize an opposition...
...weeks before, Paz's enemies, led by Juan Lechín, leftist boss of the country's tin miners, had withdrawn from the elections, urging all voters to abstain or cast blank ballots in protest. Two days before the vote, Lechín and Hernan Siles Zuazo, onetime President (1956-60) and a former Paz supporter, went on a hunger strike hoping to marshal public opinion against the President. But on voting day, abstentions and blank votes ran only 20% or so, and the hunger strikers soon started eating again...
...best Lechín could do was call his tin miners off the job. By the morning after the election, most of the country's tin production had shut down. Paz coolly shrugged it off. "The strike," he said, "will last only three or four days because the miners don't want to lose their production bonus." Sure enough, three days later, the miners were back...
...Lechín and Siles then announced the formation of a "National Revolution ary Front" to unite most forces, both left and right, in opposition to Paz. If it lasts, the Front will be the first sizable, organized political opposition in Bolivia since the 1952 revolution. But Paz remained unexcited. "I don't believe we are going to have a continuing political problem," he said. Referring to his former political allies, he added: "Some people are necessary for the early part of a revolution, others for a later stage. When the revolution enters the construction period, these people aren...
Replacing Lechín on the M.N.R. ticket stirred up an unexpected storm. Paz hand-picked lackluster Senate President Federico Fortún Sanjinés as his new running mate, thereby offending several prominent right-wing M.N.R. leaders, whose vice-presidential choice was General René Barrientos Ortuño, 44, Bolivia's crewcut, U.S.-trained air force commander. Unmoved by their protests, Paz was all set to send Barrientos into semi-exile as ambassador to London, a classic Bolivian ploy for settling intraparty disputes. Then, late one night last month, Barrientos was mysteriously ambushed and shot...