Word: pati
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...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...
Bolivians are united behind his action as they have not been in years. They are generally convinced that 1) the companies were bigger than the state, 2) the companies were draining away resources without investing the profits in Bolivia, and 3) the tin barons themselves, particularly the heirs of Patiño, were living lives of luxury in the outer world while scorning their own country...
...million offered as indemnification by the government. They denounce the government's recently presented "bill" for $505 million in unaccounted-for foreign-exchange funds as a brazen pretext for outright confiscation. They have not accepted the government's invitation to negotiate indemnification which would include Patiño's U.S. minority stockholders. Their apparent strategy is to wait until the stoppage of tin sales-through unofficial world embargoes or through the U.S. Government's refusal to buy-brings the regime down...
...army was all but destroyed by the April revolution and, with the country behind him, Paz is probably safe against any rightist coup for a year or more. But what will happen when the Bolivian tin miners discover that working for the government is sadly like working for Patiño? When the Paz regime was organized, a diplomat observed: "There is a time bomb in that cabinet, and his name is Juan Lechin." Now Minister of Mines as well as boss of the tin miners' union. Lechin is the second most powerful man in Bolivia...