Word: paz
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...novelty in the remote Andean republic, which has averaged better than one a year since its liberation from Spain in 1825. Men the world over remember its 1946 rebellion, and the photographs of Dictator Gualberto Villarroel hanging from a lamppost (which is still a tourist attraction in La Paz). Last week, the heirs of Villarroel, fanatical members of the totalitarian Movement of National Revolution (M.N.R.), clawed their way back...
Into the Streets. On the appointed day, gunfire and cries of "Viva la revolution!" pierced the early-morning quiet of La Paz (pop. 350,000). M.N.R. partisans invaded public buildings, set up barricades, passed out guns. Seizing La Paz's most powerful radio station, they fooled at least part of the populace by announcing a "total and bloodless victory." But only part of the army joined them; at the last minute, top commanders swung their forces behind the junta government of General Hugo Ballivián. Bringing reinforcements from outlying towns, the government counterattacked with planes, artillery and mortars...
...angry men of M.N.R., seasoned street fighters, were powerfully bolstered by Bolivia's national police and tin miners flocking in from the mountains. They fought on in La Paz's working-class quarter. Most of the army's reinforcements were green conscripts with no passion for politics, no taste for bloody infighting. At a first-aid post where 350 casualties were treated in a few hours, an Indian mother squatted beside her dead soldier son's body and wailed: "What had my poor guagua (baby) to do with all this...
...estimated killed and 6,000 wounded, army leaders signed a ceasefire. M.N.R. leaders proclaimed their triumph from the palace balcony. Then many of the battle-grimed revolutionaries, followed by weeping women, marched to Mass through the cobbled streets, behind the image of the martyred Christ, in La Paz's traditional Good Friday procession...
When Perón closed down Buenos Aires' La Prensa a year ago, Editor Alberto Gainza Paz fled the country. But 75 other La Prensa newsmen who refused to work for the Peronista successor to the paper were not so fortunate; they had to stay in Argentina. By last week, on the anniversary of the paper's death, Perón's systematic campaign to blacklist and starve out the staffers had become a ruthless object lesson to other newsmen...