The 1952 Revolution

by José Villa

Part 19

The Peasant Uprising

The insurrections of 1936, 1946 and 1952 as well as the civil war and the great struggles undertaken between the end of the Chaco War and 1952, had the cities and mines of Bolivia as their arena. At that time at least 70% of the population lived in the country. The peasants lived on the margins of the national economy, did not vote and had little direct part in politics.

The peasant masses spoke Amerindian languages and the great majority were illiterate. Their main relations of production were still based on serfdom. The Indians had to pay the cacique in labour, products or money.

Villarroel had been demagogic in his calling of the congress of the indigenous peoples. The peasant masses were gradually awakening. When the army of the rosca collapsed the Indian tenants organised themselves and a few months after April 1952, a strong movement of land occupations broke out – mainly in the valleys of Cochabamba and Titicaca which had trading links with the cities. These movements were not guided by Marxist ideology. The MNR immediately took them over.

“The only substantial incident of ‘communist’ influence involved the POR, which under the direction of its erstwhile leader Warqui had established something of a presence among the peasants of Ucureña. This was soon to prove ephemeral and had only been made possible by supporting a faction in conflict with the leader of the regional confederation over financial questions.” (106) (Rebellion in the Veins, Dunkerley, Verso, pp.70-71.)

Once the peasant mobilisations for land began to get under way the POR succeeded in attaining great influence in the convulsed valley of Cochabamba. In 1953 it correctly launched the slogan of occupation of the land and expropriation of the latifundiae. However its agrarian programme did not go beyond the limits of the bourgeois democratic revolution.

When a peasant receivers a plot of land he becomes a petit- bourgeois. Competition and the operation of the market results in some small proprietors becoming rich and turning into bourgeois farmers, buying lorries or tractors, acquiring new land and hiring labourers while others lose their plots and sink into the proletariat. Land does not deal with all the peasantry’s problems and neither dos it mean that there will be a great increase in the supply of farming produce to the country. There must be electricity, mechanisation and modernisation of the agricultural sector as well as an improvement in communications and means of exchange.

In order to achieve the latter industry and the banks must be expropriated and placed under the control of the workers and small peasants. Thereby the peasants can more easily get credit and urban products. The expropriation of the rich and the nationalisation of large scale transport will mean investment in agriculture, lower transport costs and lower prices for goods traded between town and country. By eliminating the private distributors and middlemen and being in direct contact with their markets, the peasants will get better terms for their trade. The state monopoly of foreign trade will allow the agricultural sector to be protected and provided with goods at subsidised prices.

In order to do this it is vital that the revolution spreads internationally and it must try to control the main cities, banks and factories in the region. A workers state should try to encourage the peasants to develop associated forms of large scale production voluntarily. But such collective farms will inevitably fail if the revolution remains isolated in one country and a backward one at that.

Three more important problems for the peasant are education, culture and political democracy. Plans for literacy campaigns and education could only be carried out on the basis of substantial sums obtained by confiscation from the rich and by a general mobilisation of educational volunteers (something that the MNR did not want to do.)

Even now in Bolivia the majority of the population not only still live in the countryside but still speak Quechua, Aymara and other Amerindian languages. In order to try to integrate them into modern society and the struggle for socialism, the proletariat must unconditionally defend the right to national self-determination for these nationalities before the bourgeoisie. That should entail a struggle for the official recognition of the Amerindian languages so that the great majority of Bolivians can develop their own culture or be educated or examined in their own mother tongue. If a strong feeling for autonomy or separation emerges, the proletariat should struggle for the right of these nationalities to opt for that course but also to persuade them that the best course is that of a soviet region or republic in the framework of a socialist federation. The POR did not raise any slogan favouring self-determination of the Indian nationalities. When, decades later, it did so, it clothed itself in populism and idealised the obscurantist pre-Columbian religion.

The MNR introduced adult suffrage. The illiterate Bolivian peasants were able to vote for the first time. The POR did not make either that demand or the one for an Constituent Assembly. Later it demanded that illiterates be eligible for election and that the proletariat have a preferential vote.

The POR did not demand the expropriation of industry and credit in order to put them under workers control. It programme was limited to a bourgeois and national framework. The way to realise it was to put pressure on the ‘comrade President’, Paz.

“While we all waited for the government to make its position clear on the problem of the latifundia while taking up the hopes of the exploited masses, President Paz Estenssoro answered our worries with the needs of the Indian, of labour and sacrifices.” (107) (LO, 29.6.52, p.4.)

Once more the POR pinned its hopes on Paz. What was needed was to alert the masses constantly that the entire MNR was not interested in carrying out an agrarian revolution.

One of the personalities most supported by the POR was Ñuflo Chavez, one of the leaders of the MNR left wing, who had worked very closely with the POR and, in spite of being a rancher’s son, had been put in charge of peasant matters by the COB and was peasant’ minister. “The Minister of Peasant Affairs has forbidden the Federation to collect dues. Is this the way to encourage organisation in the countryside?” (108) (LO, 6.2.53, p.1) Once more the POR was surprised that its friend was inconsistent and pleaded with him to be consistent. The minister should have been denounced for wanting to disorganise the peasantry in order to moderate and regiment it.

Eventually the MNR adopted an agrarian reform that failed to pull the agricultural sector out of its backwardness. “between 1954 and 1968 only about eight million of some 36 million hectares of cultivated land changed hands. After two years 51% of the latifundia in La Paz, 49% in Chuquisaca and 76% in Oruro had been affected, but in Tarija the figure was 33% in Santa Cruz 36% and in Cochabamba only 16%, the national total being 28.5%.” (109) (Dunkerley, Verso, p.73.)

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