Trailblazer Diplomat:. Bolivian Ambassador Victor Andrade Uzquiano's Efforts to Influence U.S. Policy, 1944-1962

Abstract

As has been well-documented by scholars, the United States has often been hostile to revolutionary change in Latin America.1 Washington has used threats of force, behind-the-scenes negotiating with the Latin American armed services, covert action, and military might (or a combination of these techniques) to try and punish or force from power Latin American revolutionaries it thought were an ti-United States, procommunist, or advocating policies that restricted United States influence in their countries. Yet when the Bolivian Revolution triumphed in 1952, United States officials gave aid to the revolutionaries. How to explain the sole time the United States has extended economic aid over a sustained period to a revolutionary government? Historians are split over the question. One school of thought argues that the United States wished to control the political and economic development of the Andean nation.2 A second interpretation argues that the United States gave economic aid to Bolivia fearing that if the Bolivia's Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (Revolutionary National Movement, or MNR, which by the 1940s was a political party and the ruling party after 1952) fell, a virulently left-wing, anti-United States government would come to power.3 Put more positively, Washington leaders astutely decided upon supporting a reformist “third force” in the Andean nation, one that lay between extreme conservatism and left-wing radicalism. Still other scholars have highlighted the role of Milton Eisenhower, who was an important advisor on Latin American affairs to his brother, the U.S. president. Milton Eisenhower took a well-publicized trip to South America in 1953 that included a stop in Bolivia; there he met the new revolutionary leaders. Upon his return he argued that aid was necessary to support the revolutionaries.4