Word: villaroel
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...must disagree emphatically with your characterization of the President of Bolivia as a dictator. The late Gualberto Villaroel was not pro-Nazi; in fact, he was one of the few men in all Latin America who clung consistently to the view that the democracies would win World War II. Nor can I subscribe to the implication that Juan Lechin, the Minister of Mines, is a radical . . . Nevertheless, the entire story shows clearly that the Bolivian situation was approached objectively, and that an attempt was made to get at the facts and to appraise them without bias. Consequently, I cannot object...
After the last bitter defeat by Paraguay in the Chaco war (1932-35), Bolivians took up ideas of social revolution from both right & left. Marxist socialism penetrated the universities. Officers of the defeated army organized totalitarian dictatorships. One dictator, pro-Nazi President Gualberto Villaroel, was overthrown after World War II in a fashion so violent that all the world remembers him-hanged from a lamp post before his palace. The downtrodden tin miners, finding a leader of their own in a magnetic, Marxist-minded ex-soccer star named Juan Lechin, rallied to his union and fought bloody battles with company...
...Villaroel's Finance Minister, Victor Paz Estenssoro, ran for the presidency from exile in Buenos Aires. He won, only to have the result set aside by an army junta that grabbed power. Egged on by the tin firms, the junta risked the collapse of Bolivia's tottering economy to wage a war of bluff with Stuart Symington, then head of RFC, trying to force him to buy Bolivia's tin for the U.S. near the Korea-scare price of $1.90 a Ib. Soon food ran short in Bolivian cities. Paz's nationalists shouted: "Bread...