Víctor Paz Estenssoro

President of Bolivia (1952-1956, 1960-1964, 1985-1989)

• Born: October 2, 1907
• Birthplace: Tarija, Bolivia
• Died: June 7, 2001
• Place of death: Tarija, Bolivia

Paz Estenssoro governed Bolivia in two very different styles. He first was a moderate revolutionary who fostered nationalist policies favoring the poor. Later in life he emerged as a supporter of business by cutting taxes, favoring international business interests, and generally advocating for a free market.

Early Life

Víctor Paz Estenssoro (VEEK-tohr pahz ay-stayns-SOHR-oh) was born in the southern Bolivian city of Tarija to an upper-middle-class family. His father was of Argentinian background. Despite his class origins, Paz identified himself early on with populist politics. He was educated in Tarija, Oruru, and in the political capital of La Paz.

As Paz entered adulthood and began to mature politically, the Bolivian political and military establishment was being humiliated by its ineffectual performance in the Chaco War with Paraguay (1932-1935), which cost the lives of over 65,000 Bolivians. The exposure of the weaknesses of the dominant order left a gap for a new generation to exploit. Paz became one of the leading figures of a rising group of young leaders that included Hernán Siles Zuazo, who was to be a peer and rival of Paz’s through his career; Juan Lechín Oquendo, perhaps Bolivia’s greatest union leader; Wálter Guevara Arce, a brilliant economist; and Lydia Gueiler Tejada, one of the few women active on Bolivia’s public political scene, who briefly assumed the presidency in 1979. Paz’s story, in other words, is also that of a whole generation of Bolivian leaders who brought their nation’s political development in line with that of the rest of the world in the twentieth century.

As a kaleidoscope of autocrats passed through the Bolivian presidency, Paz built a local political base in Tarija, with the sponsorship of the ruling regime, and planned to occupy a more central role on the political stage. This opportunity came in 1941, when Paz helped found the National Revolutionary Movement (Movimiento Nacionalista Revoluciononario, or MNR), a quintessential Latin American populist party that advocated land reform and greater political participation by peasants and working-class Bolivians. The movement gained wide support among the people but was hamstrung by circumstances pertaining to World War II, which Bolivia belatedly entered as a U.S. ally near the end of 1943.

The United States suspected that Bolivia’s newly installed president, Gualberto Villarroel, had fascist sympathies, and the populist rhetoric of the MNR seemed to have vaguely organicist and corporatist overtones. Thus Paz and his allies were kept out of the government. The Bolivian establishment feared the MNR because of its brutal repression during the middle of 1949, a crackdown perceived by many as a civil war. This repression was counterproductive for the government, though, as Paz’s support grew. In Bolivia, however, it was difficult for those who did not own property to vote. Paz ran again in 1951, garnering a large share of the votes. However, the results were countermanded by Mamerto Urriolagoitia, the last of the old Bolivian political order. Urriolagoitia soon succumbed to popular pressure, and the MNR came to power in 1952 with Paz as president.

Life’s Work

The MNR’s control of the government was the key event in twentieth century Bolivian history, marking a decisive break with the past. Immediately upon assuming power, Paz both fulfilled his platform’s promises and secured his political base by extending the voting franchise to all Bolivians, even those who could not read or write. Some of his actions, such as his redistribution of land from large plantation owners to peasants and his nationalization of the tin industry, threatened not only the entrenched business elites of Bolivia but also outside interests, especially the United States, which again regarded Paz with suspicion, this time as a leftist.

Paz, though, ruled in a democratic fashion, albeit with charismatic and populist overtones that led many to suspect he aspired to form what would effectually be a single-party state. His government was unprecedented, as it heralded the cultural emergence of Bolivia’s indigenous and impoverished peoples, many of whom were wholly or partially of Quechua or Aymara descent. Bolivian writers and artists also began to write with a new vigor and freedom.

Constitutional term limits prevented Paz from seeking reelection in 1956. He was succeeded by Siles Zuazo, who gave him the prestigious post of ambassador to the United Kingdom to preserve his dignity, but also to keep him off the local scene. In 1960, Paz triumphantly returned to Bolivia and would again seek reelection (by this time, his relationship with Siles Zuazo had acquired a lasting bitterness).

Whereas the MNR had preciously served as a catch-all party attracting the support of both moderates and radicals, Paz’s second period in office assumed a more leftist tincture, with the firebrand Oquendo as his vice president. Further pressure from the left was applied by the Cuban-backed guerrilla movement led by Che Guevara , although Paz, with U.S. support, opposed and sought to quell the insurgency. The instability did not impress Bolivia’s still right-leaning military and corporate elite, who were alarmed by what they saw as drift and chaos in the MNR regime. This feeling of alarm was accentuated when Paz tried to break Bolivian political precedents by running for reelection against constitutional term limits. Though Paz tried to placate the military by replacing Oquendo with a more moderate running mate, he had sealed his political fate. In 1964, Paz was ousted by the military.

Bolivia was ruled by the army for the next fifteen years, most of those years under the leadership of Hugo Bánzer Suárez. During this period, Paz was considered nothing more than a figure of the past whose time had come and gone. The MNR revolution had ended ingloriously and inconspicuously, and Paz was no more than a footnote to history. However, the collapse of military rule in the 1980’s, and the economially disastrous decline in the value of commodity and natural resources during that period, prompted a reorientation in Bolivian political affairs. Paz and Siles Zuazo, both veterans of the Bolivian political wars, reentered the scene.

Siles Zuazo was elected in 1980 after the military finally caved in to the election results and allowed him to assume office in 1982. Paz, who finished second in the election and took his place as leader of the opposition, pressured Siles into calling an early election in 1985, which Paz won. At the age of seventy-eight, Paz returned to power.

Paz governed now as a free market reformer, favoring liberal, capitalist economic policies. While some leftists reviled Paz for betraying the ideology that had earlier sustained him politically, others were impressed by how Paz had the flexibility to adopt a new set of policies. The centerpiece of Paz’s new economic plan was the permanent layoff of tens of thousands of tin-mine workers in the same industry that Paz nationalized thirty years before. Much of the practical implementation of Paz’s policies was undertaken by the planning minister, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, whose forced resignation as president in 2003 would, ironically, signal the end of the free market policies put into place in Paz’s final term as president.

Significance

At the beginning of his last presidential term, Paz already had a legacy in the eyes of many Bolivians, who looked upon him with nostalgia because he was a leader who cared for the poor. By the time he stepped down from the presidency in 1989, he had lost much of his luster. Still, at his death in 2001, he was eulogized for his significant impact on Bolivia’s history.

When populist candidate Evo Morales was elected in December, 2005, as Bolivia’s first leader who was of primarily indigenous descent, to some it seemed the next step in the process of democratization that Paz had first launched and, critics argue, seemed to have forgotten in his later years. It is perhaps ironic that Morales would be a leader who countered Paz’s promotion of free market reform and procapitalist sympathies.

Bibliography

Arnade, Charles W. The Emergence of the Republic of Bolivia. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1957. A leading historian of Bolivia gives a concise and informative account of the significance of Paz ’s initial surge to power in 1952.

Burt, Jo-Marie, and Philip Mauceri, eds. Politics in the Andes: Identity, Conflict, Reform. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004. A valuable perspective on Paz and the MNR, juxtaposing it to movements in neighboring countries that have comparable social and ideological backgrounds.

Castañeda, Jorge. Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara. New York: Knopf, 1997. This biography of the Argentine-born guerrilla leader contains background on the moderate-left political order opposed by Guevara.

Grindle, Merilee S., ed. Proclaiming Revolution: Bolivia in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. This anthology is the best source for placing Paz’s career in the context of political and intellectual history. Edited by the director of Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies and notable for taking into account the ideological platform of the MNR.

Klein, Herbert S. A Concise History of Bolivia. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Takes a more specialized approach than does Charles Arnade, whose work is somewhat outdated. Also has thorough coverage of the later phase of Paz’s career.