Word: lechin
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...fate of the great tin mines, 72% foreign-controlled (in the U.S., Chile, Switzerland) and source of 80% of Bolivia's foreign exchange, is the revolution's No. 1 question. Paz ran in 1951 on a nationalization platform. His backer, Juan Lechin, Marxist mine labor leader who now holds the new office of Minister of Mine: and Petroleum, is on record that "the workers must equip themselves to run the mine: effectively without the assistance of the owners." Paz almost certainly still intends to nationalize the mines, but he apparently means to go slow. For one thing, recognition...
...opportunistic rabble-rouser with no clear-cut political faith, Ex-Miner Juan Lechin got control of the tin union during the wartime regime of Dictator-President Gualberto Villaroel. After Villaroel was hanged to a lamppost in 1946 and his Movement of Nationalist Revolution (M.N.R.) disrupted, Lechin was among the first to cheer the new democratic government. But he missed no chance to badger it with ever-mounting wage demands...
...regime struggled to keep alive, ambitious Juan Lechin gained strength through new or renewed alliances with resurgent elements of the totalitarian M.N.R., with Trotskyist and Communist-line unions. His powerful combine was responsible for much of the pressure that last month forced President Enrique Hertzog to take sick leave (TIME...
High-Cost Mines. The tin companies, who thought that the government leaned too far toward the unions, shared with Lechin responsibility for the outbreak at Siglo Veinte. When Hertzog, after prolonged arbitration, ordered a 40% wage boost for miners last month, the Patiño company refused to comply. Wage boosts, it insisted, would force the high-cost mines to shut down, cutting the country's one big source of income...
...week's end, after the government had said that Lechin could come back "when things return to normal," most of Bolivia was working again. Even the miners had begun to go back to the pits. The only important exceptions were U.S. and other foreign mine managers, who had been evacuated by plane after the fighting stopped. Many of them refused to return to their posts, leaving Bolivia short of the know-how needed...