Word: lechin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...miners in a desperate effort to trade them for two left-wing union leaders held for a long string of crimes. But more than the arrest of the two union leaders was involved: the miners were in open defiance of the government in La Paz. And their leader, Juan Lechin, 50, Bolivia's far-leftist Vice President, was using their grievances as a defiant bid for power against Victor Paz Estenssoro, Bolivia's constitutional President, who intends to run for re-election next...
...Both Lechin and Paz are members of Bolivia's ruling M.N.R. Party, and together they plotted the 1952 revolution that toppled the country's feudal tin-mining aristocracy. But once in power, Paz and Lechin swiftly became bitter rivals. As Minister of Mines, Lechin, who is part Arab and part Indian, styled himself a "Trotskyite Communist," turned the 40,000-man miners' union into his 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...
Last year when Paz gained the upper hand, Lechin chose semi-exile as Bolivia's Ambassador to Rome. Paz then set about reorganizing the nationalized mines that normally produce 90% of the country's export income. To win $35 million in foreign help (from the U.S., West Germany and the Inter-American Development Bank), Paz reformed the mine management, reduced the power of the unions, and boldly fired more than 1,000 unneeded miners...
Call to Revolt. Lechin hurried home from Rome to fight. In radio broadcasts to the tin miners, he accused Paz of selling out to the "imperialists." At a labor rally, under a banner proclaiming THE WORKING CLASS AGAINST THAT CALAMITY CALLED THE ALLIANCE FOR PROGRESS, Lechin announced his own presidential candidacy...
...night two weeks ago, police laid a roadside ambush for two longtime Lechin lieutenants, Federico Escobar and Irineo Pimentel, who were wanted on a series of charges ranging from embezzlement to manslaughter. After a blazing gunfight, the two union men were dragged off to jail. When word of the arrests reached the mines, raging workers surged through the streets, tossing sticks of dynamite into...