Dead Condor

As it must to all men, death came last week to the youngest, most thoroughgoing dictator in the Western Hemisphere. At La Paz, loftiest capital of the Americas, sad-eyed, 35-year-old President Lieut. Colonel German Busch gave a birthday party in his home for his Japanese brother-in-law, Kovichi Seito. About 5:30 a.m.. a few minutes after the young Dictator had retired to an upper room, his guests heard a shot. They found German Busch with a bullet hole in his temple. Quick surgery failed to save him. Suicide, escape from nervous exhaustion induced by his labors for Bolivia's welfare, was the official explanation. No one came forward to suggest any darker explanation, but observers looked for a change in Bolivia's national direction with Colonel Busch gone. "Glory to President Busch! Long live Bolivia!" cried General Carlos Quintanilla, who, as Chief of Staff of the Army, took over as Provisional President and accepted Busch's Cabinet members' resignations, appointed new ministers.

"Condor of the Andes" was the style his countrymen gave this thoughtful, daring son of a German settler and Bolivian mother after he, in his late twenties, explored the wild Zamucos region. He served brilliantly in the Chaco War, afterwards was high in the military junta. When President Sorzano ruled too long by decree, Lieut. Colonel Busch was the Army's choice to supplant him. Last spring, banking on his enormous prestige with Bolivia's tea-colored masses, he declared a totalitarian State which he insisted derived from neither Germany nor Italy (TIME, May 8).

Financial mainstays of German Busch's new Bolivia were to be the properties of Standard Oil, which he confiscated in 1937, and of foreign mining interests. Capital to build Government-dominated tin foundries (the Bolivian mines of Tycoon Simon I. Patino produce about 15% of the world's supply) was being sought in Manhattan last week by Busch's Minister of Mines & Petroleum Dionisio Foianini, son of an Italian father and Bolivian mother, second husband of a girl from New Haven, Conn, whom a Bolivian artist took home with him from Yale. Senor Foianini offered no theory other than nervous suicide about the dead Condor last week. But he was deeply sad, and in a great hurry to fly home before General Quintanilla and other Army men should reorient Busch's Bolivia.

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