At six in the morning on April 9, 1952, Radio Illimani announced that the revolution had triumphed. It was premature. By afternoon, nine army regiments had sealed off La Paz from El Alto and were demanding unconditional surrender. The man who had organized the rising fled to the Chilean embassy, convinced the rebels were out of ammunition.

He was wrong. Over two days of street fighting, a barracks conspiracy became a popular insurrection. By April 11, the armed forces had surrendered — not to the carabineros, but to the hastily armed units of factory workers, miners, and townsfolk who now held the capital and were making demands no one in the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement, or MNR, had bargained for. For a brief and extraordinary moment, everything was possible.

What happened next is the subject of this article.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, Bolivia was governed by what Bolivian historiography would later christen the “Rosca”: an alliance between the great tin barons —Simón Patiño, Mauricio Hochschild, and Carlos Víctor Aramayo, known as “the Big Three”— and the old landowning oligarchy of the highlands and valleys. This was not a national bourgeoisie in the classical sense, but something closer to a transmission belt: Patiño, the most powerful of the three, controlled forty per cent of national production by the 1920s and, on the eve of the revolution, was responsible for ten per cent of world tin output.1 He controlled mines, smelters abroad, banks, and a network of corporate boards stretching from La Paz to London and New York; his personal wealth was valued at £70 million by Fortune magazine at his death in 1947.2 The ore came out of Bolivian soil, but decisions about its fate —where it would be smelted, at what price it would be sold, and what share of the proceeds the country might receive— were made in offices thousands of miles away. In practice, Bolivia functioned as an export enclave disguised as a republic.

The other pillar of the Rosca was the latifundio, whose history bore the dull weight of decades of dispossession. The distribution of land inherited from the colonial period and consolidated after independence had steadily bled Indigenous communities (ayllus) of their communal lands, especially following the “disentailment” laws of the late nineteenth century, which allowed Creole and mestizo landowners to absorb vast tracts of communal territory under the banner of liberal progress. By 1950, a handful of proprietors controlled the overwhelming majority of arable land, while the Indigenous peasant masses—more than two-thirds of the population—lived under servile relations: the colonato system, pongueaje, unpaid labor in exchange for a subsistence plot, scarcely distinguishable from feudal serfdom. The result was a country split between two historical eras at once: a mining enclave of relatively modern technology, foreign capital, railways, and advanced machinery floating atop a countryside organized according to almost colonial relations of production. The Rosca’s control of the press completed the picture: Aramayo owned La Razón, Hochschild held a controlling interest in Última Hora, and Patiño possessed a large share in El Diario.3

In the frozen heights of Catavi, Siglo XX, Huanuni, and Llallagua—mining camps situated more than 4,000 meters above sea level—tens of thousands of workers were concentrated. Many were peasants expelled from haciendas or migrants from impoverished communities, subjected to a form

of exploitation that combined twentieth-century machinery with conditions bordering on the medieval: twelve-hour shifts, starvation wages paid partly in company scrip redeemable only at company-owned stores, silicosis that consumed lungs within a few years, and a mortality rate that turned every shift into a gamble.

This working class did not arrive at political consciousness through any prior social-democratic tradition; Bolivia never possessed a mass workers’ party of that kind. Its organization was forged on much harsher and bloodier ground: that of massacres. The Uncía massacre of 19234 and, above all, the Catavi massacre of 1942, when the army, under the government of Enrique Peñaranda, opened fire on striking workers and left dozens of corpses lying in the snow, became etched into working-class memory as the moment when the regime, without intending to, revealed its true face to those who had still harbored doubts about it.

The Chaco War (1932–1935) against Paraguay was, on its own terms, a senseless war: nominally fought over territories mistakenly believed to be rich in oil, but in reality shaped by the competing interests of Standard Oil and Royal Dutch Shell, which respectively backed Bolivia and Paraguay.6 Bolivia, despite its much larger population, suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of a smaller, less well-equipped country. It fell victim to the corruption, incompetence, and criminal negligence of a high command largely tied to the Rosca, as well as to a disastrous logistical system that sent Indigenous soldiers from the highlands—many of whom did not even speak Spanish—to die of thirst in the Chaco wilderness. Many more were killed by illness and thirst than by Paraguayan bullets.7

Bolivia lost the war and paid an enormous price: some 250,000 men were sent to the front, a very high proportion of all those aged between 17 and 50 in a population of barely two million. Of these troops, over 50,000 were killed and 20,000 captured.7 Yet what returned from the Chaco was not merely a defeated army: it was an entire generation of young officers, middle-class intellectuals, and soldier-peasants who had witnessed firsthand the rot of the oligarchic regime, its utter contempt for the lives of the poor, and the country’s blatant subordination to foreign oil interests. That “Chaco Generation” returned with something broken inside it and became, almost unintentionally, the seedbed of virtually every political current that would dominate Bolivia in the following decades—from the nationalism of the MNR to the first organized Marxist cells.

Between 1936 and 1939, in step with other experiments in “military socialism” that emerged across Latin America in the aftermath of wartime crises (notably in Peru and Paraguay itself), the governments of David Toro and Germán Busch attempted a form of top-down nationalism: the partial nationalization of Standard Oil’s assets (1937), corporatist rhetoric, and efforts to co-opt the labor movement through labor legislation that was, on paper, among the most advanced in Latin America. Busch even went so far as to proclaim—and later suspend, in a gesture revealing the experiment’s real limits—a labor code recognizing the right to unionize.

These governments could be described as forms generated by social contradiction before the social force capable of filling them with content yet existed: a military Bonapartism that spoke the language of anti-imperialist nationalism without touching the material power of the Rosca, which continued to control exports, banking, and ultimately the country’s productive apparatus. Busch’s suicide in 1939—under circumstances that were never clarified and likely connected to his frustrated confrontation with the tin barons—marked the failure of this path and the return, under Peñaranda (1940–1943), of a civilian government openly identified with the Rosca and unequivocally aligned with Washington in the midst of the Second World War.

The Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario, MNR) was founded in 1941, drawing its first cadres almost entirely from the “Chaco Generation” — young officers, lawyers, journalists, and provincial professionals who had returned from the war convinced that the old oligarchic order was not merely unjust but structurally incapable of building a viable nation.8 Its founders, figures like Víctor Paz Estenssoro, came overwhelmingly from the provincial middle class rather than from the traditional Creole aristocracy of La Paz. The party’s early ideology was an often contradictory blend: economic nationalism aimed at the tin barons and foreign oil companies, a rhetoric of national unity that sought to transcend class conflict rather than sharpen it, and — in its earliest years — an ambiguous relationship to the corporatist and authoritarian currents then fashionable across much of Latin America and Europe.

What made the MNR dangerous to the Rosca, however, was not its ideological coherence but its timing and its target audience. Unlike the PIR, the MNR did not arrive at the Catavi massacre burdened by an international line that required it to find excuses for the government. It denounced the killings immediately and in unambiguous terms, and in doing so it began to do something the traditional left had largely failed to do: speak directly to miners and workers in the language of national humiliation and betrayal that the Chaco War had seared into an entire generation. The MNR’s brief participation in the 1943 Villarroel government — which it would later disown,

reclaim, and mythologize in turns — gave it its first real taste of state power, and its first real exposure to the limits of trying to manage, rather than confront, the underlying contradictions of the tin economy. By the time of the 1952 revolution, the MNR would arrive as the dominant political force, but one whose relationship to the working class it claimed to represent remained, from its very founding, fundamentally instrumental.

The massacre at Catavi in 1942 should have been, by any straightforward class logic, the moment that pushed every organization claiming to represent the workers into open opposition to the Peñaranda government. Instead, the Left Revolutionary Party (Partido de Izquierda Revolucionaria, PIR) — founded in 1940 and thoroughly aligned with Moscow’s Popular Front line9 — found itself in the grotesque position of defending, or at least refusing to condemn, the very government whose troops had just gunned down striking miners.

The reasoning, such as it was, followed directly from the Comintern’s wartime framework: with the world divided between the Axis and the Allies, any government nominally aligned with Washington and London counted, almost by definition, as part of the “democratic” camp against fascism. Peñaranda’s Bolivia, dependent on US loans and exporting tin to the Allied war effort, fit this bill regardless of what it did to its own workers. For the PIR, criticizing Peñaranda too sharply risked weakening the “anti-fascist” front and, by extension, playing into the hands of Berlin and Tokyo — an argument that, applied to a massacre of indigenous miners in the Bolivian highlands, had the texture of a bad joke even to many of the PIR’s own members. The party’s leadership went so far as to characterize the MNR — which had denounced the massacre forcefully — as a vehicle for “Nazi-fascist” infiltration into the labor movement, forming a bloc with the traditional right and the US embassy on the basis of the regime’s “dictatorship” and “rejection of democracy.”10

This was not simply opportunism, though it was certainly that too. It reflected a deeper structural problem: a party whose program was calibrated in Moscow according to the needs of Soviet diplomacy, not according to the concrete balance of class forces in the Bolivian altiplano. The PIR could mobilize real working-class cadres — it had genuine roots among miners and urban workers

— but its strategic compass pointed permanently outward, toward a geopolitical chessboard on which Bolivia was a pawn, never toward the immediate, local, and entirely legible fact of soldiers firing on strikers. Catavi 1942 thus became, for a layer of militant workers and young radicals, the moment the PIR’s claim to represent the revolutionary left collapsed under its own contradictions — and it is no accident that this is precisely the moment when both the POR and the MNR began to find a hearing among miners who, until then, had looked to the PIR.

The Revolutionary Workers Party, or POR, was born in exile, not despite that fact, but because of it, by two figures united by mutual necessity, divided by everything else.

Gainsborg’s family had not merely served the Bolivian state; in many ways, they had built it. His great-grandfather, Miguel María de Aguirre, served as Minister of Finance under five successive presidents, from Sucre to Achá, administering the finances of the republic for nearly four decades after independence. His grandfather, Nataniel Aguirre, wrote Juan de la Rosa, the foundational novel of Bolivian literature. His father represented that same state as consul in New York, where José was born in 1909.11

He began his activism in the Communist Party at twenty, organizing students and union members. At the outbreak of the Chaco War in 1932, he adopted a defeatist stance for which he was arrested and exiled to Chile.12 In Santiago, he joined the Chilean Communist Party under the pseudonym “Max Fernández,” aligning with the Trotskyist-leaning faction of Manuel Hidalgo, where he built the nucleus of what would become Bolivia’s first Trotskyist organization.

In June 1935, his group merged with Tristan Marof’s Tupac Amaru in Córdoba to form the POR.13 Aguirre returned to Bolivia to build the party from within, while Marof remained in exile.

After the military-socialist coup of May 1936, the government of David Toro offered Aguirre a position in the newly created Ministry of Labour. He accepted (the POR was barely a year old and Aguirre was twenty-six) — a decision that revealed a tension that would haunt Bolivian revolutionary politics for decades: the difficulty of maintaining independent working-class politics in the face of a nationalist government that spoke the language of the left. Four months later, with the regime’s anti-communist turn, he was deported.14

With Toro’s fall in 1937, he returned to Bolivia, at the same time as Marof. The reunion was not a reconciliation. At the POR’s Second National Conference in October 1938, two irreconcilable lines clashed: Marof’s vision of a multi-class party — which in practice meant subordination to some fraction of bourgeois nationalism — and Aguirre’s insistence on a Leninist-Bolshevik party with genuine working-class independence. The majority sided with Marof. Unable to reach agreement, they scheduled a new conference to resolve the question.

Before the day the conference took place, on October 23, 1938, Gainsborg went to an amusement park with Alberto Canedo and Hugo Jordán in La Paz, and, after getting in the ferris wheel, in what was described as an act of “youthful euphoria,” took out the security bar. After the wheel started moving, Canedo and Jordán were able to grab hold of the structure, but Gainsborg fell, and even with the assistance of paramedics, passed away two hours later. He was 29 years old.15

One of those attending his funeral was Hernán Siles Suazo (one of the future founders of the MNR), and even his class enemies mourned him. La Razón — the newspaper of the liberal oligarchy — published a tribute titled “To the memory of José Aguirre Gainsborg, the fighter who did not know how to hate.” The poet Yolanda Bedregal wrote: “you gave yourself to death like a child.” Guillermo Lora, who would inherit what Aguirre had started, mourned that the founder of the POR had died “in full youth, when his mind was beginning to bear the fruits of vital fullness.” Bolivia’s revolutionary left had lost its most rigorous mind to a ferris wheel.16

If Gainsborg brought the program, Marof brought something harder to institutionalize: a continental reputation built across two decades of exile, expulsion, and agitation from Paris to New York to Buenos Aires. The miners knew his name. The students read his books. His slogan — Mines to the state, lands to the people — had been circulating in Bolivian political life since the 1920s, simple enough to fit on a banner, radical enough to get him deported from four countries. Mariátegui, who recognized something essential in him, called him “Don Quixote of American politics and literature.”17 It was meant as a compliment. It was also a diagnosis.

What Marof could not provide was what Gainsborg had insisted upon: organizational discipline. The dispute that surfaced at the 1938 conference was not incidental. Marof wanted a broad popular party — one that could absorb the indigenist currents, the nationalist left, and the radicalized middle class without demanding programmatic subordination. Gainsborg wanted a Bolshevik Party that derived its strength precisely from refusing that breadth. With Gainsborg dead and the question unresolved, Marof drew his conclusions: in 1939 he founded his own Partido Socialista Obrero Boliviano, which grew quickly because it was everything the POR had refused to become.18

The trajectory of the PSOB illustrated the logic Gainsborg had identified. A party organized around a personality rather than a program follows that personality wherever it goes — and by the late 1940s, Marof had gone somewhere that would have been unthinkable in the cafés of Montparnasse: into the offices of the Bolivian state, as private secretary to Presidents Hertzog and Urriolagoitia.19 Don Quixote had found his windmill, and mistaken it for a government.

Following Gainsborg’s untimely death and Marof’s estrangement, the POR entered a “larval” stage, existing but struggling to grow into a mass party. There are hardly any records of its activities and members, but the party would return to the radar after recruiting a young cadre.

Recruited by the POR in 1942 at the age of 20 while studying law in Cochabamba,20 the local POR cell would later suffer state repression, so Lora would move to Oruro where he would begin to radicalize the miners of the region (he would say sarcastically that we should thank the police, because that persecution allowed them to make contact with the mining proletariat).

In 1943, the POR began organizational work in several mining centers of the high plateau, mainly Oruro, Uncía, Llallagua and Catavi, influencing local unions, and winning over activists and grassroots delegates.

In June 1944, the Villarroel government and its MNR civilian partners convened the founding congress of the Federación Sindical de Trabajadores Mineros de Bolivia (FSTMB) in Huanuni — not as a concession to the working class, but as a maneuver to build a labor structure they could control against the Stalinist CSTB, which had aligned itself with the Rosca under the banner of wartime democratic unity. The congress was called by a Patiño-group union; neither the organizations of Oruro nor those of Catavi-Siglo XX had any part in the initiative.21 Juan Lechín — a movimientista operator whom Lora describes as the “surprising exception” among delegates otherwise rooted in the actual mining communities23 — positioned himself at the center of the new federation, and by the second congress in Potosí a year later had maneuvered Emilio Carvajal, the FSTMB’s true founder, out of the leadership entirely.24 As Lora noted, it matters little who organizes the workers, since once mobilized they conclude by finding their own path.22 The POR’s influence was real and growing, but it was won in the years that followed, in the mining camps of the altiplano, cadre by cadre. The founding table in Huanuni belonged to the MNR.

It was Lora who, in November 1946, drafted the document that would make Bolivia famous in the annals of revolutionary socialism: the Theses of Pulacayo.25

The FSTMB — the Bolivian miners’ federation, which by then encompassed some 60,000 members

— held an extraordinary congress in the mining town of Pulacayo that November. The congress adopted Lora’s document as its official programmatic foundation. The Pulacayo Theses were, in essence, a direct application of Trotsky’s Transitional Program to Bolivian conditions. They proclaimed the permanent revolution as the political perspective of the Bolivian proletariat, argued that the democratic and national tasks of the revolution could only be completed under the leadership of the working class, demanded workers’ control of the mines, and called for the

formation of workers’ and peasants’ militias. While the Stalinist parties across Latin America were subordinating workers to bourgeois “anti-fascist” alliances, the Bolivian miners had voted, formally and democratically, for a Trotskyist program. Lechín, who had raised only timid objections to the Theses during the congress, found himself overnight transformed in the press into a fearsome revolutionary and the greatest enemy of the reaction.26

The impact of Pulacayo was immediate. Here was proof that Trotskyism was not merely a sect of intellectuals but could take root in a genuine mass movement of the exploited. The POR-FSTMB alliance produced concrete electoral results: in 1947, a Miners’ Parliamentary Bloc elected Lora himself and Juan Lechín Oquendo to parliament, along with several other deputies. Lora, the Trotskyist theoretician, and Lechín, the charismatic mass leader of the mines, became the twin poles around which the revolutionary left would organize.

It is worth dwelling on Juan Lechín, because his figure represents both the possibilities and the limits of the entire period. Lechín was not a Trotskyist. He was a left-nationalist, organically connected to the worker base of the MNR, gifted with the kind of magnetic authority that only emerges from decades of shared struggle. His relationship with the POR was always a complex alliance of convenience and genuine sympathy rather than programmatic agreement. The POR needed Lechín’s mass base; Lechín needed the POR’s theoretical clarity. For years, this partnership functioned. Its limits would only become fully apparent in the crisis of 1952.

The Villarroel government (1943–1946) was, from the outset, an awkward marriage of convenience. It brought together a faction of young military officers organized in the secretive lodge RADEPA — itself a product of the Chaco’s bitter lessons about national humiliation — and the MNR, which supplied the civilian cadres and the only coherent program on offer. The result was a government that spoke, for the first time at the level of the state, the language of indigenous and worker grievance: it convened the first National Indigenous Congress in 1945, formally abolishing some of the worst features of the pongueaje system on paper, and it maintained — at least rhetorically — the posture of a government that had broken with the Rosca.

In practice, the break was far less clean than the rhetoric suggested. Washington, suspicious of any government with MNR participation and still smarting from wartime anxieties about Axis sympathies in the region, refused to recognize Villarroel for over a year. The tin barons, for their part, had not lost their grip on exports, financing, or the press; what they had lost was their accustomed monopoly on the state’s public face. This created a peculiar situation: a government that talked like an enemy of the oligarchy while leaving the oligarchy’s economic base largely

untouched, depending for its survival on a military faction whose loyalty was conditional and whose repressive instincts, when threatened, proved entirely intact, as miners and political prisoners would discover at various points during these years.

The end came with brutal symmetry to the regime’s own contradictions. In July 1946, a popular uprising in La Paz — driven by a coalition that included students, teachers, artisans, and elements of the traditional parties Villarroel had alienated, but conspicuously not led by the organized miners — stormed the presidential palace. Villarroel was killed and his body hanged from a lamppost in the Plaza Murillo. This image that would become, for the MNR, both a founding trauma and a usable myth: proof, in its telling, of the oligarchy’s capacity for savagery against anyone who challenged it, even half-heartedly. The MNR itself was driven underground or into exile, its leadership scattered across Argentina and Chile. At the same time, the Rosca reclaimed the presidency through a sequence of conservative governments under the loose banner of the so-called “Sexenio” (1946–1952).

The Sexenio governments — beginning with Tomás Monje Gutiérrez and continuing through Enrique Hertzog and, after his resignation, Mamerto Urriolagoitia — represented the Rosca’s attempt to turn back the clock. Still, they did so in a country that had already been irreversibly altered by the Chaco, by Catavi, and by the brief experience of a government that had at least spoken their grievances aloud. The contrast between the rhetoric of the recent past and the restoration now underway did not escape the miners, and the result was a period of escalating confrontation rather than the quiet return to normalcy the oligarchy had hoped for.

Hertzog’s government faced repeated strikes and unrest, but it was under Urriolagoitia — who assumed the presidency outright in 1949 after Hertzog’s resignation — that the underlying tension reached its sharpest point. The 1949 civil war, in which the MNR attempted an armed uprising from its strongholds in several departments, was crushed, but only after weeks of fighting that revealed both the depth of MNR support outside the capital and the limits of the Rosca’s ability to govern through force alone. The repression that followed — mass arrests, deportations of MNR and POR militants alike, and a tightening of control over the mining unions — had the characteristic quality of a ruling class that knew, on some level, it was no longer simply managing dissent but postponing an outcome it could not ultimately prevent.

It was against this backdrop — an oligarchy restored in form but hollowed out in substance, a working class that had tasted both repression and the rhetoric of liberation, and an MNR radicalized by exile and armed defeat — that Urriolagoitia’s government called the 1951 elections, in which the MNR’s presidential ticket (with Paz Estenssoro still in exile) won a plurality of the vote. The

Rosca’s response — annulling the results and handing power to a military junta under General Hugo Ballivián — would prove to be the final miscalculation, setting the stage for the events of April 1952.

In May 1951, Víctor Paz Estenssoro of the MNR — still in exile after the failed Villarroel period — won the presidential election with a plurality of the vote, running on a vague but unmistakably anti-Rosca platform with the open backing of the FSTMB and large sections of the urban poor. The outgoing president, Mamerto Urriolagoitia, faced with the prospect of an MNR government, did what the Bolivian oligarchy had always done when the ballot produced an inconvenient result: he handed power to the Army. A military junta under General Hugo Ballivián annulled the election outright, in an act so blatant that it became known, with the particular black humor Bolivians reserve for their own history, as the Mamertazo.

For eleven months, the Ballivián junta ruled by decree, banning the MNR, jailing or exiling its leaders, and attempting — with conspicuous lack of success — to suppress a labor movement that had tasted, in a single free election, just how much support it actually commanded. The MNR’s underground apparatus inside Bolivia, deprived of its exiled national leadership, fell increasingly under the influence of figures who were prepared to organize an armed insurrection rather than wait for another stolen election: above all Hernán Siles Zuazo, the MNR’s vice-presidential candidate, and Juan Lechín Oquendo, the leader of the miners’ federation, who straddled — productively and, for the POR, troublingly — the line between the nationalist party and the revolutionary labor movement.

The spark, when it came, was almost accidental: a planned MNR-Carabinero rising scheduled for later in April was brought forward after the regime got wind of the conspiracy. On the morning of April 9, fighting broke out in La Paz between the Carabineros, who had armed themselves and large numbers of civilians from the police arsenals and the Army garrisons loyal to the junta. What had been planned as a relatively contained barracks revolt became, within hours, a general insurrection, as factory workers, students, and residents of the popular neighborhoods of La Paz poured into the streets armed with whatever the Carabineros could hand them, with news of the revolt reaching the mining centers of the altiplano and the south.

By April 11, the Ballivián junta’s forces had collapsed. Antonio Seleme, the Minister of the Interior who had organized the Carabinero side of the rising, briefly declared himself president before

fleeing to the Chilean embassy days later, having discovered — as the traditional politicians who attempted to ride the MNR’s coattails would discover again and again over the following years — that the movement he thought he was leading had a momentum of its own. On April 15, Víctor Paz Estenssoro flew back from exile in Buenos Aires to assume the presidency he had won at the polls eleven months earlier and that the armed workers of La Paz, Oruro, and the mining centers had now won for him a second time, by force.

What the MNR inherited was not, in any conventional sense, a state. The national Army had ceased to exist as an effective institution; its remnants, some 5,000 men, were disarmed and confined to barracks, while the country’s actual armed force consisted of an estimated 50,000–100,000 armed workers and peasants organized into militias under control of the unions. The mines were under direct workers’ control, their administrators having fled or been expelled. The customary instruments of bourgeois order — police, army, the civil bureaucracy of the Rosca-aligned parties

— were, for the first time in the country’s history, simply not available to the new government as instruments of rule.

Into this vacuum stepped the Central Obrera Boliviana, founded on April 17, 1952 — eight days after the insurrection began — as a single national federation uniting the miners’ union, the railway and factory workers, the teachers, and within months a peasant federation that would grow, under COB and MNR sponsorship, into a mass organization of its own. The COB was not merely a trade union confederation in the ordinary sense. It possessed its own armed militias, separate from and in practice often stronger than the rump Army; it claimed, and for a period exercised, veto power over government legislation touching labor and the mines; and under the doctrine that came to be called cogobierno (co-government) it placed its own leaders directly inside the cabinet, most importantly Juan Lechín, who became Minister of Mines and Petroleum while remaining the head of the FSTMB and the COB’s most powerful figure.

For roughly two years, Bolivia possessed, openly and acknowledged by all sides, two centers of state power existing side by side: the formal government of the MNR, headed by Paz Estenssoro and Siles Zuazo, resting on the party’s electoral mandate and its control of the presidency and the (largely notional) civil administration; and the COB, resting on the armed militias, the unions, and direct control of production in the nationalized mines. The MNR’s own ministers privately acknowledged that they governed only with the COB’s permission — Siles Zuazo himself would later describe the period as one in which the government’s authority extended exactly as far as the COB chose to let it.

The two great structural reforms of the revolution emerged directly from this balance of forces. On October 31, 1952, the government nationalized the holdings of Patiño, Hochschild, and Aramayo, creating the state mining corporation COMIBOL — a measure the MNR’s own program had not originally envisioned in such sweeping terms, and which was driven through under pressure from a COB that had, in practice, already expropriated the mines on the ground months before the decree made it official. The following August, the Agrarian Reform Decree formally abolished the pongueaje system of unpaid indigenous labor service and began, however unevenly, the redistribution of hacienda land — a process that, again, the peasant unions and militias in Cochabamba and elsewhere had in many places already begun on their own initiative, occupying haciendas and driving out landlords before any decree existed to legalize what they had done.

It was precisely at this point — at the moment when the working class held more direct power than at almost any other moment in Latin American history short of Cuba — that the Tesis de Pulacayo and the politics it embodied faced their decisive test. The test exposed a fault line that ran through the POR itself.

The POR’s analysis of the situation was, in its essentials, correct, and remarkably prescient. Guillermo Lora and the party’s leadership argued from the outset that the MNR represented the nationalist wing of the Bolivian bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie: a layer that had ridden the workers’ insurrection to power but whose fundamental interest lay in stabilizing capitalist property relations, securing American economic assistance (on which, given the collapse of tin prices and the country’s near-total dependence on a single export, Bolivia would rapidly become dependent), and disarming the militias that constituted the real power in the country.

This was not a step toward workers’ power but its opposite: it was a mechanism for absorbing the COB’s leadership into responsibility for a bourgeois government’s decisions, trading the appearance of power (ministerial portfolios) for the substance of it, which was the question of which class controlled the armed force of the state.

And yet the POR did not, in the end, draw from this analysis the conclusion that the situation demanded: an open struggle for the COB to break with the MNR entirely and constitute itself as an alternative government; a soviet, in essence, with its own armed militias as the nucleus of a new state apparatus, posing directly the question of power that the Tesis de Pulacayo itself had identified as the central question six years earlier. Instead, the POR oscillated. Some of its cadres entered the COB’s leadership and even, for a period, occupied ministries themselves, on the theory that revolutionary influence could be exercised from within the co-government; others maintained a

more orthodox opposition but lacked the organizational weight, against Lechín’s enormous personal authority over the miners, to translate “critical support” into an actual fight for an alternative leadership of the COB. The party that had written the most coherent revolutionary program of any Latin American labor movement in the twentieth century found itself, at the one moment when that program’s central demand was a concrete possibility rather than a rhetorical formula, without the will to pose it.

The MNR, for its part, used the time this hesitation bought it with ruthless patience.

Over the following years, with American economic aid increasingly the government’s lifeline, the militias were gradually disarmed or absorbed into a reconstituted Army; an Army that the MNR rebuilt, with U.S. training and equipment, specifically as a counterweight to the COB it had once depended on. By 1956, under a stabilization plan drafted with the assistance of an American economic mission, the government was breaking miners’ strikes with troops once again. By 1964, the Army that cogobierno had allowed to be rebuilt overthrew the MNR itself in a coup led by René Barrientos — a coup the COB’s militias, by then disarmed and demoralized, were no longer in any position to resist.

What the cogovernment had postponed, the IMF settled. By 1956, the MNR government of Hernán Siles Zuazo, confronted with the collapse of tin prices and a currency in free fall, signed the Stabilization Plan drafted with the assistance of an American economic mission and conditioned on Fund orthodoxy: wage freezes, the elimination of state subsidies on food and transport, and a sharp curtailment of COMIBOL’s budgetary autonomy. Siles Zuazo went so far as to stage a hunger strike of his own, fasting publicly in La Paz to shame the unions into accepting the cuts. The miners, whose dynamite and rifles had put the MNR in the Palacio Quemado in the first place, watched their real wages collapse for the second time in a decade, this time at the hands of the party they had armed.

The stabilization could not have been imposed at all had the militias of 1952 still possessed the cohesion they had shown on the roads to Oruro. They did not. The MNR had spent four years quietly rebuilding precisely the institution the insurrection had dissolved, training a new officer corps under U.S. military assistance programs and slowly re-arming an Army whose only function, in the new dispensation, was to stand as a counterweight to the COB that had created the conditions for the MNR’s own survival. When René Barrientos, formerly Paz Estenssoro’s own vice-president, seized power in 1964 and consolidated it after Paz’s ouster the following year, he inherited an Army built for exactly this purpose and used it without hesitation: the mining camps were occupied, union

leaders jailed or exiled, and the wage and workplace gains of the revolution rolled back piece by piece. The Tesis de Pulacayo had warned, in 1946, that the national bourgeoisie could not be trusted to defend what an armed proletariat had won; by 1965 the warning had become an inventory of losses.

It was under Barrientos that the regime found its most consequential foreign collaborator. Klaus Barbie — the former Gestapo chief of Lyon, who had escaped Europe through the American-run “Rat Line” and settled in Bolivia in 1951 under the alias Klaus Altmann28 — had by the mid-1960s cultivated close relations with Bolivian military intelligence following the 1964 coup.29 Barbie contributed to the counterinsurgency effort that hunted down Che Guevara’s column and culminated in his execution at La Higuera on October 9, 1967.30 His career in state terror outlived Barrientos, finding its fullest expression under Hugo Banzer’s 1971 coup and its logical conclusion in the 1980 García Meza putsch, where Barbie organized fascist paramilitary units from Italy and Germany to execute Bolivia’s 189th coup, with financing from cocaine trafficker Roberto Suárez.31 By then the line between counterrevolutionary terror and the cocaine trade had ceased to exist. It was only with García Meza’s collapse that Barbie lost state protection and was extradited to France in 1983, convicted of crimes against humanity in 1987, and dying in prison in 1991.

Barbie died in a French prison having outlived by decades the revolution he had helped destroy. He was not the only one. Juan Lechín — the man whose name appeared alongside Lora’s on the Pulacayo Theses — lived long enough to receive, in May 2000, from Hugo Banzer, returned to power this time by ballot rather than by tank, the Cóndor de los Andes en Grado de Gran Cruz, Bolivia’s highest state honor

— bestowed by a former dictator upon the man who had once signed, on behalf of fifty thousand miners, a program for the overthrow of the Bolivian state.27

The Bolivian Revolution of 1952 was not a failure of the working class. The miners who descended from the highlands with dynamite and rifles, who dismantled an army, who built in eight days a labor federation that held the real power of the state — did exactly what revolutionary classes are supposed to do. The COB was not a symbol. It was, for a brief and extraordinary moment, the skeleton of a different kind of state, one that had never existed before in Latin American history and would not exist again.

The POR was decisive in building the class consciousness that made that moment possible. It failed to convert that consciousness into political power at the decisive moment. Those are two different things, and confusing them has cost the left dearly wherever it has made the mistake.

What followed — the IMF stabilization, Barrientos, Barbie, the slow disarmament of the militias, the cocaine coup of 1980 — was not inevitable. It was the price of a hesitation. The Theses of Pulacayo had identified, six years before the insurrection, exactly the trap that cogobierno represented: that a working class that places its organized power at the service of a bourgeois government does not thereby gain influence over that government: it gives that government the time it needs to rebuild the instruments of its own survival. The MNR used that time. The COB did not.

Bolivia 1952 remains, for the revolutionary left, neither a defeat to mourn nor a victory to celebrate, but something harder to metabolize: a revolution that reached the threshold and stopped. The program existed. The class existed. The moment existed. What was missing was the decision to act on what was already known.

Notes

1. James Dunkerley, Rebellion in the Veins: Political Struggle in Bolivia 1952–1982 (London: Verso, 1984), 9–10.
2. Dunkerley, Rebellion in the Veins, 10.
3. Dunkerley, Rebellion in the Veins, 14.
4. Guillermo Lora, Historia del Movimiento Obrero Boliviano, Tomo 2: 1900–1923 (La Paz: Los Amigos del Libro, 1969).
5. Lora, Tomo 2.
6. This interpretation, standard within the Latin American anti-imperialist left, was first systematized by Arturo Frondizi, Petróleo y política (Buenos Aires: Editorial Raigal, 1954), and developed further by Sergio Almaraz Paz, Petróleo en Bolivia (La Paz: Los Amigos del Libro, 1958). The thesis remains the dominant popular account of the war’s origins, though some historians, notably Rafael Archondo, have disputed the centrality of oil company interests, emphasizing instead Argentina’s own ambitions to import Chaco petroleum.
7. Dunkerley, Rebellion in the Veins, 28–29.
8. Dunkerley, Rebellion in the Veins, 32.
9. Dunkerley, Rebellion in the Veins, 32.
10. Dunkerley, Rebellion in the Veins, 33.
11. Andrey Schelchkov, “Aguirre Gainsborg, José,” Diccionario Biográfico de las Izquierdas Latinoamericanas

(Buenos Aires: CeDInCI, 2020), https://diccionario.cedinci.org/aguirre-gainsborg-jose/.

1. Schelchkov, “Aguirre Gainsborg.”
2. Schelchkov, “Aguirre Gainsborg.”
3. Guillermo Lora, Historia del P.O.R., Tomo 1 (La Paz: Masas, 1960), 120.
4. Grecia América Gonzales, “Muerte de José Aguirre Gainsborg, líder del trotskismo boliviano,” Página Siete (La Paz), republished at Historias Bolivia (blog), October 2018, https://historias-bolivia.blogspot.com/2018/10/muerte-de-jose-aguirre-gainsborg-lider.html.
5. Lora, Historia del P.O.R., Tomo 1, 120. The tribute in La Razón and Bedregal’s verse are quoted in Lora, ibid.
6. José Carlos Mariátegui, “La aventura de Tristan Marof,” Variedades (Lima), March 3, 1928, cited in Ricardo Melgar Bao and Horacio Tarcus, “Navarro Ameller, Gustavo Adolfo (Tristan Marof),” Diccionario Biográfico de las Izquierdas Latinoamericanas (Buenos Aires: CeDInCI, 2019), https://diccionario.cedinci.org/maroff-tristan/.
7. Melgar Bao and Tarcus, “Navarro Ameller.”
8. Melgar Bao and Tarcus, “Navarro Ameller.”
   
9. Hernando Severiche, “Guillermo Lora,” Marxists Internet Archive, 2009, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/lora/biografica/severiche-2009.htm.
10. Guillermo Lora, Historia del Movimiento Obrero Boliviano, Tomo 4: 1933–1949 (La Paz: Los Amigos del Libro, 1980).
11. Lora, Tomo 4: “importa poco quién organice a los trabajadores, pues éstos, una vez movilizados, concluyen por encontrar su propio camino.”
12. Lora, Tomo 4: “Si se exceptúa el sorprendente caso de Lechín, los delegados que asistieron a la reunión eran elementos realmente entroncados en el movimiento minero.”
13. Lora, Tomo 4. On Lechín becoming Executive Secretary and Carvajal’s removal, see ibid.
14. Lora, Tomo 4. For the full text of the Theses, see Guillermo Lora, ed., Tesis de Pulacayo (La Paz: Masas, 1946).
15. Lora, Tomo 4: “Lechín, que opuso tímidos reparos en la aprobación de la Tesis de Pulacayo, pasó a figurar como un temible revolucionario.”
16. Agencia de Noticias Fides, “Banzer entregará condecoración a Lechín,” ANF, May 1, 2000, https://www.noticiasfides.com/nacional/sociedad/banzer-entregara-condecoracion-a-lechin-229175.
17. Tom Bower, Klaus Barbie: Butcher of Lyons (London: Corgi, 1985), ch. 10.
18. Bower, Klaus Barbie, ch. 10: “After the 1964 military coup by General René Barrientos, Barbie’s relations with influential army officers rapidly intensified.”
19. Bower, Klaus Barbie, ch. 10.
20. Bower, Klaus Barbie, ch. 11.