Word: lechin
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...from Bolivia, largely by absentee mine owners who took their wealth elsewhere. Bolivia's peasant revolution of 1952 led to the nationalization of the richest tin mines. But inefficient operation brought financial ruin. Mine machinery fell into disrepair. The demagogic leader of the tin miners' union, Juan Lechin, forced thousands of featherbedding new workers onto the government mine payrolls. Before nationalization, the mines produced 30,000 tons of tin each year; today they produce only 15,000 tons, at a loss of $10 million annually. The government-run railroads and the state oil company are also overstaffed...
...unpopular step of making the mines more efficient. The miners are well armed and defiantly opposed to wholesale dismissals. However, President Paz Estenssoro, the man who led the 195 2 revolution, realizes that his movement will fail unless Bolivia solves its problems, and soon. Even the tin miners' Lechin, now the nation's Vice President, may understand that time is growing short. Visiting in Washington six weeks ago, Lechin wept publicly when the Inter-American Development Bank granted Bolivia a $10 million loan...
...nationalized in 1952 are now losing Bolivia $9,000,000 a year, cannot fill their quotas under the inter national tin agreement even though they employ more men than ever. In his victory statement Paz Estenssoro called for "revolutionary order." But his incoming Vice President and revolutionary comrade, Juan Lechin, the Lebanese-descended onetime auto salesman who bosses the miners' un ion, will stand squarely in his way; Union Boss Lechin opposes firing unnecessary workers or demanding more production. Sooner or later, if he is to achieve his aims, Paz Estenssoro will presumably have to clash with Lechin...
...President Hernán Siles Zuazo, who has backed the program with everything from a hunger strike to threats to resign, and for George Jackson Eder, an old Latin America hand who left International Telephone & Telegraph Corp. to supervise Bolivia's National Monetary Stabilization Council. But Juan Lechin, executive secretary of the powerful workers' confederation, was looking out for labor and labor alone. At the confederation's second congress last week, he burst into an impassioned defense of the featherbedding privileges that the workers took for their own after bringing the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (M.N.R.) to power...
Guevara confessed himself a "partisan of free enterprise within the limits imposed by the nation's realities." Lechin answered with the ultimate insult: "Bourgeois!" Guevara then charged that Lechin, through a revolutionary manifesto, lad touched off the May 1949 attempt to seize the tin mines that ended with old-regime troops shooting down many miners. But it is an M.N.R. article of faith that the mines' tin-baron owners and the government they dominated provoked the massacre. Moving to the kill, Lechin got up a convention resolution denouncing Guevara for "inexact and tendentious statements." Siles, who could lose...