The Fanned Spark

Both Bolivians and foreigners--analyzing the problems of making a workable economic and political unit out of landlocked, geographically fractured, 68% illiterate Bolivia--have for a century been prone, in moments of desperation, to wry variations of the we-give-up suggestion that the country and its headaches should be divided among its neighbors. This rueful jest, repeated by a U.S. official in La Paz and quoted in TIME's March 2 issue, was turned last week into the spark for three days of anti-U.S. violence.*

"Imperialism's Vile Claw." The day Bolivia's 670 copies of TIME arrived by air, they were taken by special order straight to the palace of President Hernan Siles Zuazo, whose ambassador in Peru, getting the magazine a day earlier, had alerted him. Siles made the story the topic of a six-hour Cabinet session, then issued a statement blasting the remark as "damaging to the national honor" and "absolutely inadmissable." The statement gave the Bolivian public to understand that the remark had been put forth as a serious proposal.

Next day Siles turned the magazines over to TIME's La Paz agent, but as the agent lugged them out of the palace he was waylaid by waiting members of the M.N.R. Youth--a Siles-supporting branch of the government's National Revolutionary Movement--and all the magazines were stolen. A day later two La Paz papers ran translations of the story, including the point that the remark was in jest, but the official government newspaper La Nacion banner-lined: TIME, THE FINGERNAIL OF IMPERIALISM'S VILE CLAW, OFFENDS BOLIVIA. Next morning 2,000 blue-jeaned high school students marched through downtown La Paz chanting "Down with imperialism!" and "Bolivia will not be a Yankee colony!"

Flag for Burning. That afternoon, ten minutes after Charge d'Affaires Wymberley Coerr (the embassy is between ambassadors) returned from delivering a note to the Foreign Ministry stating the U.S. position that there was "no evidence" that the statement was ever made, the demonstrators were back again. They were joined by a noisy, violence-bent band of Trotskyites,/- Communists and left-wing rabble-rousers of the government National Revolutionary Movement. (A big banner demanded the establishment of diplomatic relations with the U.S.S.R.) They burned the carefully hoarded copies of TIME on the doorstep of the seven-story building whose top three floors the embassy occupies, stoned windows, produced a homemade facsimile of the U.S. flag (with four-pointed stars) to burn on the smoldering ashes. Surging up to the U.S. Information Service Library a block away, they smashed more windows. "

President Siles appeared at the edge of the mob. He marched straight through, headed for M.N.R. headquarters two blocks away, and the crowd followed. There, from a balcony, he pleaded that "shouts do not solve anything, and violence is useless," but he denounced TIME's correspondent as a "journalist without scruples." Out of control, the rioters followed their leaders to stone Point Four's La Paz offices and smash 25 heavy trucks and pickups of the U.S.-Bolivian Roads Service. During one of the attacks, a 15-year-old student was killed.

Threatened Allowance. Next day, as U.S. citizens and embassy personnel waited behind police guards in a La Paz suburb to learn whether they were to be evacuated in Panagra planes standing by on Peruvian airfields. Siles called for another demonstration. Flanked by La Paz's archbishop, the armed forces chief and his Cabinet, he stood on a palace balcony before a throng of 25,000 which included a brass band. Again he called for calm, and again he was disobeyed. Led by Trotskyite Boss Victor Villegas, 200 men stormed police guarding the embassy. The police fired tear-gas shells, then pistols. A dentist was killed by a stray bullet. Then calm crept back to La Paz, but new violence broke out the next day in out-country Cochabamba and Oruro. Police drove off the Oruro mobs, but Cochabamba's U.S.I.S. Library was gutted. Final toll: two dead, 38 policemen injured, $50,000 damage in La Paz, $20,000 in Cochabamba.

The economic chaos that has soaked up $129 million in U.S. grants in six years without results went on. A year ago the International Monetary Fund told Siles that it would end its support if he did not close government-subsidized tin-mine commissaries where the coddled, politically powerful miners were buying meat, rice and other staples at less than cost--a typical rat hole for foreign funds. A few weeks ago the U.S., which sends Bolivia a bail-out allowance of $500,000 every fortnight, backed up the I.M.F. by demanding an end to commissary subsidies. Thus pressured, Siles announced that the commissaries had to go. The day the rioting ended, Bolivia's tin miners went on strike to protest Siles' action.

* The quotation appeared only in TIME's Latin America edition, which gives extra space to Hemisphere news.

/- Bolivia is the brightest jewel in the crown of the Trotskyite Fourth International, the "true," workers-of-the-world-unite Communists who oppose the Russian Reds. In 1956 elections, the Trotskyites drew 2,300 votes, .2% of the Bolivian total. The other major Trotskyite enclave: Ceylon.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.