Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario Research Articles

Water for All: Community, Property, and Revolution in Modern Bolivia

Water for All: Community, Property, and Revolution in Modern Bolivia

Confronting Bolivia's "Lack of Demographic Capacity": Protonatalism in Post-Revolutionary Bolivia, 1950s-1970s

Después de llegar al poder en abril de 1952, el Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) buscó abordar los problemas económicos de Bolivia, en parte, a través de iniciativas que alentaban el crecimiento demográfico. Un informe de 1953 señaló que la subpoblación era una causa particular del limitado potencial económico de Bolivia. La solución a la “falta de capacidad demográfica” de Bolivia eran medidas de salud pública que reducirían las tasas de morbilidad y mortalidad y alentarían la reproducción para impulsar el capital humano del país. En este artículo se analizan las tendencias pronatalistas prevalentes en el gobierno del MNR, incluyendo eugenesia positiva y críticas al control de la natalidad, para demostrar la centralidad del crecimiento demográfico en la agenda política y económica del MNR. En un momento en que otros países latinoamericanos comenzaron a implementar medidas de control de la población como un camino hacia el crecimiento económico y la estabilidad política, como recomendaron los Estados Unidos y las organizaciones internacionales, Bolivia se desvió de los discursos mundiales sobre la sobrepoblación y abrazó el pronatalismo. Si bien el MNR adoptó algunas ideologías de desarrollo global asociadas con la modernización, rechazó el control de la población y refrenaba los debates hacia el crecimiento demográfico y la reorganización demográfica. Se casaron el pronatalismo con una agenda modernizadora y nacionalismo revolucionario, demostrando que las políticas del MNR eran fundamentalmente conservadoras en materia de reproducción y roles de género.

The Precinct of the Dead and Saints for the Nation: The Bolivian National Revolution and Gualberto Villarroel, 1943-1956

This article focuses on Major Gualberto Villarroel’s dictatorship in Bolivia (1943-1946), his murder, and the reanimation of his memory as a Bolivian national hero by the MNR party or Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (Nationalist Revolutionary Movement). This nationalist party forged out of the crucible of the Chaco War, between Bolivia and Paraguay during 1932-1935, was an important factor in Bolivian politics throughout the twentieth century and initially came to power through an urban insurrection in April 1952. The article specifically uses the case of Gualberto Villarroel to explore why some national heroes are missing from the La Paz cemetery, how the MNR chose to commemorate the Revolution of 1952 and Villarroel’s martyrdom for the MNR in 1946, and how the MNR used those events to colonize urban space, to shape collective memory, and to silence popular historical actors. The MNR’s choice in making Villarroel a martyr required a revision of historical reality.

La Paz's Colonial Specters: Urbanization, Migration, and Indigenous Political Participation, 1900–52

La Paz's Colonial Specters: Urbanization, Migration, and Indigenous Political Participation, 1900–52

Between Autonomy and Acquiescence: Negotiating Rule in Revolutionary Bolivia, 1953–1958

Abstract In January 1958, the townspeople of San Pedro de Buena Vista hunted down and killed peasant leader Narciso Torrico, sparking a wave of violence that provoked repeated state interventions in northern Potosí department, Bolivia. Encouraged by the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) state's rightward turn, local elites had regrouped to challenge revolutionary change. Meanwhile, José Rojas—a powerful peasant leader and key MNR ally—faced a crucial crossroads. Repeatedly tapped by state authorities to pacify San Pedro de Buena Vista, Rojas vacillated between asserting political autonomy and acquiescing to state power. While previous scholarship has viewed Rojas's relationship with the revolutionary state as clear evidence of the MNR's co-optation of Bolivian peasants, the events of 1958 provide a powerful counterpoint to this narrative. I argue that crucial intermediaries like Rojas evaded state agents' control in spite of their public support for the MNR, thus challenging the historiographical portrayal of peasant leaders' passivity in the postrevolutionary years.

Against a Continental Threat: Transnational Anti-Communist Networks of the Chilean Right Wing in the 1950s

AbstractDrawing on minutes, publications, diplomatic documents and the written press, I explore the transnational networks of the Chilean right wing within Latin America in the 1950s, especially around the four Congresses against Soviet Intervention in Latin America held in Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Lima and Antigua between 1954 and 1958. I argue that the Chilean right wing's participation in those networks alongside other Latin American like-minded actors was based on both its long local experience in fighting communism and its attachment to Cold War anti-communism. In these transnational spaces, some Chilean right-wingers gained recognition and prestige, as was the case with the conservative leader Sergio Fernández Larraín, largely thanks to his systematic denunciation of supposed Soviet penetration in the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR), then the ruling party in Bolivia.

Circular Conversations and Missed Opportunities: Hierarchies of Nutrition Expertise in Post-Revolutionary Bolivia

Chronic malnutrition was one of the health problems the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario tackled after the 1952 Bolivian National Revolution. Actors working on the local, national, and international levels had different definitions of nutrition, understandings of the problem, and proposed solutions. These debates demonstrate the existence of hierarchies of expertise; national officials deemed knowledge about nutrition produced outside of Bolivia more valuable than that created by Bolivians working on the local level. These hierarchies of expertise caused tensions, miscommunications, and circular conversations that stymied the development of effective and efficient national programs.

Bringing the Revolution to the Countryside: Rural Health Programmes as State‐Building in Post‐1952 Bolivia

Bolivia's Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (Revolutionary Nationalist Movement, MNR) took power in April 1952 via a popular social revolution. After 1952, the party implemented state‐sponsored modernisation projects, including extending rural public health programmes. The MNR used health programmes to change rural practices, cultivate political loyalty, and expand the state's political power. Yet rural indigenous communities were hardly passive recipients of these programmes. These communities often requested government services, and they borrowed the MNR's own political rhetoric to position themselves as worthy of state attention. Public health programmes increased access to rural health care, but they also allowed state officials and rural communities to negotiate the MNR's authority.

Liberating the people from their "loathsome practices:" public health and "silent racism" in post-revolutionary Bolivia.

After the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) took power in the 1952 National Revolution, the party expanded rural public health programs to address what early twentieth-century elites called the "Indian problem:" the idea that indigenous culture was an impediment to Bolivia's modernization. After 1952, the MNR used public health as a project of cultural assimilation, and state-sponsored health programs sought to culturally whiten the population by transforming personal habits. This essay analyzes the language with which health workers discussed the indigenous population to show that despite the regime's intention to move away from defining the rural population on racial terms, medical and political elites continued to define indigenous customs as an obstacle to progress and a remnant of an antiquated past.

From Open Door to Nationalization: Oil and Development Visions in Bolivia, 1952–1969

AbstractAfter the 1952 Bolivian Revolution, oil assumed an increasingly important role in Bolivia's economy and popular consciousness. Oil nationalists were deeply divided, however. While the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) regime sought economic modernization, labor and the Left also demanded major redistribution. These divisions influenced the multiple changes in hydrocarbon policy after 1952. An aversion to radicalization contributed to MNR leaders' 1955 decision to promote private investment in accordance with US wishes. Soon thereafter, a growing nationalist coalition challenged this open-door policy, culminating with the 1969 nationalization of Gulf Oil's properties by the military regime of Alfredo Ovando Candía. Ironically, though, the nationalization was driven partly by the same conservative logic that had animated the MNR's liberalization, in that Ovando favored nationalization as an alternative to redistribution. While tracing the rise and impact of Bolivian hydrocarbon nationalism, this case study also highlights common conflicts within resource nationalist coalitions and how those conflicts can influence policy decisions.

Constructing a New Bolivian Society: Public Health Reforms and the Consolidation of the Bolivian National Revolution

CONSTRUCTING A NEW BOLIVIAN SOCIETY: PUBLIC HEALTH REFORMS AND THE CONSOLIDATION OF THE BOLIVIAN NATIONAL REVOLUTION Nicole Pacino University of Alabama in Huntsville On January 5, 1956 Bolivia’s President, Vı́ctor Paz Estenssoro, addressed the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario’s (MNR) seventh annual national convention. While he celebrated the 1952 National Revolution ’s successes, focusing mainly on accomplishments in agrarian reform and nationalization of the country’s tin mining industry, he also warned that “enemies of the revolution” conspired against the MNR at every turn. For this reason, he claimed revolutionary policies for enhanced social welfare and greater economic prosperity were necessary to safeguard these triumphs. Protecting the revolution’s achievements meant moving beyond its first phase, which Paz explained addressed Bolivia’s severest economic inequalities. For the revolution’s longevity and increased national wellbeing , he argued it was time to advance to a new “stage of revolutionary construction.”1 As Paz explained, this “construction of a new Bolivian society” required “new fundamental labor” that would highlight the central concern of any democratic regime: a concern for mankind.2 This idea represented what Paz commonly called human capital, a notion that implicitly associated economic productivity, Bolivian workers, and national wellbeing with revolutionary citizenship.3 Healthy bodies were a prerequisite for this new form of citizenship, and the MNR’s concern for individual Bolivians represented their desire to create ideal citizens that were sanitary, educated, economically productive, and culturally Hispanic. By linking the MNR’s revolution to democratic politics through a concern for ordinary Bolivians, Paz voiced the opinion that individuals could be improved through state policies. To create better Bolivian citizens, Paz outlined a trifold plan: social change, education, and sanitary reform.4 In this way, he merged social inequality and health care with the MNR’s political and economic agenda and suggested Bolivians would become revolutionary citizens by reforming individual practices. When Paz identified “sanitary politics” as one of the three main targets of reform in his January 1956 speech, he made public health campaigns a revolutionary priority. These sanitation reforms focused on maternal and infant health, vaccination against disease, and malaria eradication; they were, in essence, about changing people’s lifestyles, controlling bodies, and preventing the spread of disease in order to make Bolivia more economically prosperous and culturally homogeneous. Improvements to national health, he claimed, would be achieved in two aspects: curative and C 2013 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 25 The Latin Americanist, December 2013 preventative. The curative component suggested the healing of already existing maladies. In this instance, the MNR’s curative policy focused on expanding rural maternal and infant health programs. Conversely, the preventative component, or what he also termed “prophylaxis,” implied protection against dormant diseases that could infect the national body. This preventative aspect focused on vaccination campaigns and what Paz called “one of the most ambitious projects”: malaria eradication.5 While scholars have thoroughly examined the MNR’s social revolution through its political and economic reforms, particularly nationalization of the mining industry, agrarian reform, and universal suffrage, the cultural politics of the revolutionary era have received little attention. Cultural politics, or how definitions of culture are mapped onto ideas of national identity and citizenship, are essential components of post-revolutionary state building projects.6 Paz’s phase of revolutionary construction referred to projects of state and nation building, forging a unified national identity, and expanding a public health infrastructure. In this way, he linked the revolution’s cultural politics to the MNR’s desire to both institutionalize (agree upon and enact reforms) and consolidate (generate public support) the National Revolution.7 Public health provides a unique lens for examining post-revolutionary cultural politics because healthy citizens and workers were the foundation of the MNR’s political and economic reforms. As Hubert Navarro, the MNR’s Director of Biostatistics, explained, “human capital is the most valuable and irreplaceable treasure a nation possesses, [therefore] the state has the primordial obligation to care for its citizens’ health.”8 Referring to Bolivians as human capital placed individuals, and their health, at the center of national discussions of political unification and economic development . Additionally, highlighting the state’s obligation to protect its...

The Truman Administration and Bolivia: Making the World Safe for Liberal Constitutional Oligarchy. Glenn J.Dorn. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2011.

The Truman Administration and Bolivia: Making the World Safe for Liberal Constitutional Oligarchy. Glenn J. Dorn. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2011.Bolivia is frequently compared to a beggar on a golden chair, an impoverished state possessing tremendous mineral resources. The silver mines of Potosi' once drew the Spanish to the heart of South America, but by the mid-twentieth century its tin resources were of far greater interest to the US, which was the world's largest consumer of this metal for cans, solders and alloys. Tin is central to Glenn Dorn's analysis of the relationship between the US and Bolivia during the sexenio, the six-year period between the lynching of military strongman Villarroel and the National Revolution of 1952, a seminal event that still reverberates through Bolivian politics.The book is structured as a series of chapters detailing the interactions between the Truman Administration and a rapid succession of Bolivian governments, all of which attempted to steer a middle course between reform and violent repression to protect the oligarchic order. Dependence on tin, which Augusto Ce'spedes named El Metal del Diablo, had stunted the growth of the economy as well as the civil society in this landlocked state. As long as the proverbial Bolivian beggar relied on his tin cup for foreign exchange, the fate of the nation lay in the hands of a small landowning elite, the rosea, dominated by the tin barons Aramayo, Hochschild and Patino. This feudal social structure, along with the humiliating defeat in the Chaco war, made fertile ground for opposition movements such as Paz Estenssoro's Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario, and for a rich crop of workers' associations and secret military lodges. The sexenio was the last stand of the rosea, but the attempt to stem the revolution would be futile without the support of the norteamericanos.The Truman Administration stepped clumsily into the seething cauldron of Bolivian politics. Its ability to understand the country was impaired by overblown fears of fascism, Peronism and communism, but also by the fact that the Americans kept a tin ear to the ground. Despite its ideological affinity for trade, the Truman Administration engineered a tin buyers' cartel with the British to supplant the producers' cartel of the interwar years. The US, represented by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), thereby circumscribed the Bolivian government's ability to mollify the mining camps with decreed bonuses and pay hikes. While speculating that a liberal constitutional oligarchy should have been near ideal as an ally and provider of tin, Dorn shows how Washington failed to develop a coherent policy, leaving the RFC to push the tin prices down regardless of the consequences. …

A White Elephant in Asphalt: The United States and Transport Policy in Bolivia, 1941-1951

In July 1946 a popular uprising deposed the military government headed by Major Gualberto Villarroel and ended the first regime in which the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) played a major role in attempting to reconstruct the political economy of Bolivia. Five years and eight months later the MNR led another popular uprising which deposed another despised military government and ushered in a far more radical process of reconstruction. The Bolivian National Revolution of 1952 was such an important event, not only in the history of the country but in the history of Spanish America as a whole, that the historiography of the intervening period, the sexenio, has focused on the route to that revolution. As conflicts became increasingly intense and violent in the mines, the cities, and the countryside, the ruling body was inevitably defined as a traditional, oligarchic, and reactionary regime, a mere instrument of the tin oligarchy of the large mining companies and their allies, known as the rosca,

Pushing Tin: U.S.-Bolivian Relations and the Coming of the National Revolution*

This work examines U.S-Bolivian relations in the years leading up to Victor Paz Estenssoro's National Revolution in 1952. Harry S. Truman's diplomats and national security planners sought to secure scarce tin for stockpiling and domestic consumption during the early Cold War, but unintentionally helped to destabilize three pro-U.S. Bolivian governments. U.S. efforts to drive down the price of tin, led by Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) chief Stuart Symington and Senator Lyndon B. Johnson but often opposed by the State Department, exacerbated Bolivian economic problems and created a climate in which Paz Estenssoro and his Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario could flourish. Although Truman did eventually intervene personally to resolve the standoff between the RFC and the Bolivians in the days before the National Revolution, he acted too late to avert one of the most significant Latin American social revolutions of the twentieth century.

Popular revolutionary nationalism in Bolivia (Ideological formations and transformations, 1930 - 1955)

SUMMARY This article analyses the processes of construction of the Bolivian popular revolutionary nationalist thought since the Chaco war until the first phase of the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) government. After placing this school of thought in the Bolivian ideological spectrum of the time, the relationships between the crisis of hegemony provoked by the Chaco war and the transformation of the discursive formations are studied. The central part of this paper contains an analysis of the discourses elaborated by the main ideologues of the movement. Finally, keeping in mind that they were militants and propagandists dedicated to an intense proselytism (through articles in newspapers and magazines, pamphlets and manifestos), next to a list of books published along their lives, another list of abridged books edited by relatives and friends after the passing away of the authors is added.

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

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

Introduction: A New Time and Place for Bolivian Popular Politics

The Bolivian national project, provisionally underway with the founding of the in 1825, has been redirected several times in the latter half of the twentieth century. Arguably the most dramatic of these make-overs have been the 1952 Revolution and subsequent Agrarian Reform, and the drive toward neoliberal democratization initiated in 1985. Each has reframed a national cultural politics of identity, successively shifting the meaningful distribution of the native as a cultural category. These shifts have involved rearranging the degree of visibility or invisibility, and mutual relations of emphasis among, at least, Indian, Andean, Highland, Lowland, Quechua, Aymara, and Bolivian-centric definitions of the native. As an ongoing historical process, this is particularly apparent at the juncture of competing definitions of mestizaje (denoting racial or cultural mixing) with successive incarnations of the national project, junctures where categorical slippage is the rule. After Independence and during the early the racial (de sangre) mestizo was ambivalently incorporated into a distinction between the so-called Republic of Indians and the Republic of Spaniards. this scheme the criteria for the stratification of caste (racial-cultural distinctions) and class (economic power) were virtually superimposed, even as class hierarchies began take shape in some regions (Larson 1990). the context of a Creole national movement, native-born Spaniards stood at the apex of their own new nation-state. Rather than as potentially productive mediators between the two republics, mestizos were called traitors, descendants of idolaters, violent, and individualistic. Taken be the product of Spanish men and Andean women, mestizos were sterile, illegitimate, and so potentially disloyal (Rivera 1993:62-69). Conversely, from the Andean point of view, the mestizo colluded with Creoles in colonial extraction, and so were included as part of the oppressive colonial regime. As two analysts concisely put it, in this colonial scheme, In order exist, the mestizo is condemned illegality (Bouysse-Cassagne and Saignes 1992:132). terms of conventional social categorization, at this early juncture racial mixtures were neither betwixt nor between. The late-nineteenth- mid-twentieth-century horizon of liberal and oligarchic politics forged an alliance between Creoles and rural land-owning mestizos. This, then, changed the perception of what today we would call social hybridity. Even as political participation was limited a mostly urban and literate elite, liberal politics reinscribed a more affirmative cultural mestizaje within the category of citizenship. liberal cant the Indian was the primary for the country's backwardness. pursuit of greater economic rationality, the liberals' goal was elevate the Indian the physical and moral level of the mestizo. To be sure, a double standard of exclusionary practices was still easily detectable, but often as the basis for a romanticized reincorporation of indigenous identity (referred as indigenismo), now a part of national democratic window dressing. As Rivera (1993:70) explains the case for Cochabamba, this cultural mestizaje sustained a vigorous popular culture rooted in Quechua tradition but not submitted quite as rigorous a process of segregation. this context, a visible tendency was that of the erasure of specific ethnic differences within the generic category of Indian, usually treated as an aspect of the natural environment. The mestizo became in part a civilizing impulse from within indigenous Bolivia. With its coming power in 1952, the MNR (Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario) sought complete the work of citizenship for the nation-state. To do so, it needed erase bothersome traces of the past, reinventing it in order to expunge the anticolonial indigenous cause and to reinterpret an imagined mestizo territory which coincided with the former Inca Empire. …

The Decline of the Hacienda in Cochabamba, Bolivia: The Case of the Sacaba Valley, 1870-1929

S TUDIES of the rural sector in Latin America in both the colonial and national periods have focused on the hacienda and plantation, concerning tenure, land use, and labor relations. The literature on Bolivia is no exception. The two most important themes studied have been the expansion of the hacienda at the expense of Indian lands and the decline of commercial agriculture as a consequence of changes in commercial circuits in the southern Andean region. The official version of Bolivian history as formulated by the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) political party maintains that the land reform program initiated by that party in 1953 destroyed the feudal hacienda and restructured land tenure in the country, an interpretation which finds general acceptance in Bolivia, especially among scholars who argue that the hacienda expanded at the end of the nineteenth century. Recent studies have examined changing patterns of land tenure in different parts of Bolivia during the late colonial period and in the years after about 1870, showing that in most regions latifundio expanded at the expense of the land base of the corporate Indian communities. In the altiplano (La Paz and Oruro departments), the rapid growth of the cities of La Paz and Oruro in the period 1900-20, following the Federal Revolution (1899), together with the expansion of tin mining created an increasing demand for foodstuffs. Improvements in internal transportation with the construction of roads and railroads linked new areas in the altiplano to the growing urban markets, and made the acquisition of relatively cheap but fertile Indian lands close to the roads and railroad lines attractive to members of the urban oligarchy.' Erwin Grieshaber has documented the

Bolivia — the struggle continues: an interview with Domitila Barrios de Chungara

Another coup in a country which has known nearly 200 in 155 years of independence might mean nothing. But the coup of 17 July 1980 is probably the most significant in Bolivia's history - as the present regime seeks finally to end the country's fragile democratic structures and place it firmly alongside the regimes of Chile and Argentina. Military rule is being institutionalised on the Chilean model and a new constitution for Bolivia, written by the present junta, is in the offing. Resistance to military rule has a long tradition in Bolivia. In 1953- despite attempts by the military to prevent it - the progressive Movi miento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) was brought to power by a mass mobilisation of peasants and workers. But the MNR moved first towards reformism and then conservatism, paving the way for General Barrientos to be elected vice-president in 1964 and then to take power as leader of a military junta. Military control of the country continued. In 1971, General Hugo Banzer seized power and began one of the longest and most repressive military regimes in the country's history. But in 1978, he was forced to call elections, due to popular resistance and opposition through a hunger strike within the country, and to US pressure and international condemnation of his repressive measures. However, in the last three years, three civilian governments have been elected and each time the military has seized power almost immedia tely. Domitila Barrios de Chungara, leader of the Housewives Committee in the mining centre of Siglo XX and author of Let Me Speak, was at tending the UN Women's Conference in Copenhagen at the time of the latest coup. She immediately began to mobilise international support against the present regime and was consequently branded a traitor and threatened with execution if she returned to her country. Jane McIntosh: Can you tell us something about the current crisis in Bolivia?

The Quiet Experiment in American Diplomacy: An Interpretative Essay on United States Aid to the Bolivian Revolution

In a personal letter dated October 1, 1953, to the President of the United States, Víctor Paz Estenssoro, President of the Republic of Bolivia, urgently appealed for both food and economic assistance for his nation. “Our availabilities in foreign currency,” Paz wrote, “have diminished so considerably through the fall in the price of tin and other minerals that we find ourselves in the insurmountable difficulty of not being able to provide food and other essential articles for the people, since in order to import them we need foreign currency.”Never particularly stable, even by Latin American standards, the fragile fabric of the nation had been rent by the revolutionary change of April 1952 which brought the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario from underground and from exile to power. The MNR, led by Paz himself, had instituted rapid, radical modifications in the political, economic, and social structure of the country. These changes, however, exacted their toll. The most serious consequences were a decline in productivity of both minerals and foods. The nation, which had long depended on food imports, could not feed itself, and its foreign exchange earnings were insufficient to permit purchase of foodstuffs from abroad.