Bolivia declares war on the Axis

On 7 April 1943 the President of Bolivia, General Enrique Peñaranda, signed a decree stating that the country was in a state of war with the Axis powers: Germany, Italy and Japan. Two days earlier the National Defence Council had recommended this step, and had also proposed declaring a general mobilisation. The decree was provisional. According to the dispatches of the American ambassador in La Paz, Pierre Boal, final approval was to be given by Congress in a special session. The decision was announced while the Vice-President of the United States, Henry Wallace, was visiting Bolivia on a tour of Latin America.

Bolivia had neither a navy nor the means to send troops overseas. Its part in the war was of a different kind. It was one of the world’s most important tin producers, and after the Japanese conquests in South-East Asia it became for the Allies a source of this raw material of truly strategic importance.

A land of tin

Since the beginning of the 20th century Bolivia’s economy had rested on tin. The mines in the mountains around Oruro and Potosí belonged mainly to three great groups: those of Simón Patiño, Mauricio Hochschild and the Aramayo family. Bolivians called these magnates and the politicians who served them the “rosca”, or clique. The ore was exported mainly to smelters in Britain and the United States.

Tin was indispensable to the war industry. It was used to make cans for military rations, solder for electrical equipment, bearings and bronzes. Until 1942 most of the world’s output came from Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. Japan seized both in the first months of the Pacific War. From then on Bolivia was, for the Americans, the most important accessible source of tin, alongside the Belgian Congo and Nigeria, and the only one in the Western Hemisphere. The United States had already concluded contracts with Bolivia for ore deliveries and was building a smelter in Texas capable of processing the low-grade Bolivian ore.

The country was still scarred by the Chaco War with Paraguay of 1932–1935, which Bolivia had lost. Peñaranda had commanded the Bolivian army at the time. After the defeat, officers of nationalist and socialist leanings came to power. In 1937 the government of Colonel David Toro seized the assets of the American Standard Oil company without compensation. In 1940 the traditional conservative parties backed Peñaranda in the presidential election. The new president was a cautious conservative who sought closer ties with the United States.

The road to war

Bolivia had a large and influential German community. Germans served as instructors in the army, and the airline Lloyd Aéreo Boliviano was run by men linked to Lufthansa. Under pressure from Washington the government took over the airline in 1941, and the German pilots were replaced by Americans. In July 1941 the authorities made public an alleged letter from the Bolivian military attaché in Berlin, Major Elías Belmonte, to the German minister in La Paz. The letter announced a pro-Nazi coup. Peñaranda expelled the German minister and declared a state of siege, which he also used to arrest opposition activists. Today the letter is usually regarded as a forgery, most probably produced by British intelligence.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor Bolivia declared its solidarity with the United States. At the conference of foreign ministers of the American republics in Rio de Janeiro in January 1942, Brazil broke off relations with Germany, Italy and Japan, and Bolivia did likewise. On the eve of that decision, 27 January, the government in La Paz reached a settlement with Standard Oil. The company was to receive about 1.7 million dollars for its lost assets, and the United States promised 25 million dollars in economic aid. The opposition thundered that the president had sold the country to the Americans.

The Catavi massacre

The wartime boom in tin did not improve the miners’ lot. They worked in mines more than 4,000 metres above sea level, lived with their families in barracks without running water or sanitation, and silicosis killed them young. The government regarded any strike as sabotage of supplies to the United States. In December 1942 miners at Patiño’s Catavi and Siglo XX mines near Llallagua demanded higher wages. The authorities arrested the union leaders. On 21 December troops opened fire on a march of strikers. According to the official report 19 people were killed and 400 wounded. The workers spoke of as many as 400 dead.

The massacre became a political issue in Bolivia. A motion of no confidence in the government failed in Congress by just one vote. The fiercest attacks on the government came from the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR), founded in 1941 by Víctor Paz Estenssoro. The affair also echoed in the United States, where trade unionists asked whether American contracts were financing exploitation. In 1943 a joint Bolivian-American commission went to Bolivia to investigate working conditions in the mines.

The declaration of war

By the time Peñaranda signed the decree, Bolivia was no longer under any threat of attack from the Axis. The act was above all a political choice. The government in La Paz wanted to secure continued economic aid and arms supplies from America, as well as a seat at the table when the post-war world order came to be settled. Declaring war also made it possible to deal more harshly with the opposition, which the government and the Americans accused of German sympathies.

In the following days Ambassador Boal offered the Bolivian foreign minister help in detaining and deporting “dangerous enemy aliens”. The Americans already had a list of more than 150 such people, mostly Germans, and promised to cover the cost of transporting them. Some of those detained in Latin American countries later ended up in internment camps in the United States. Boal also offered help in setting up censorship of correspondence.

Bolivia also adhered to the Declaration by United Nations of January 1942. Notes on the matter were exchanged on 22 April, and lists of signatories give Bolivia’s date as 27 April 1943. At the beginning of May Peñaranda set off on a tour of the Americas. On 5 May he was received at the White House by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Latin America at war

Bolivia was not the first Latin American state to declare war on the Axis. In December 1941 the states of Central America and the Caribbean had done so: Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica and Panama. In 1942, after U-boats sank their ships, Mexico and Brazil followed. Bolivia was the first country in South America other than Brazil to enter the war formally. Colombia declared a state of war with Germany in November 1943. Chile broke off relations with the Axis in January 1943 but declared war only in 1945. Argentina, the most hostile to Washington, broke off relations in January 1944 and declared war in March 1945, a few weeks before Germany’s surrender.

Tin instead of soldiers

Bolivia did not send a single unit to the front. Its contribution to the war was tin, tungsten and rubber from the Amazon forests, sold to the Americans at prices fixed in long and often bitter negotiations. The Bolivians felt that Washington paid too little, the Americans that La Paz demanded too much. Export earnings went mainly into the pockets of the big companies. The mineworkers continued to live in poverty.

The declaration of war did not save Peñaranda’s government. On 20 December 1943 it was overthrown by the secret officers’ lodge Razón de Patria (RADEPA) together with the MNR. Major Gualberto Villarroel became president. The United States and most American states refused to recognise the new regime, accusing the MNR of links with Germany and with the pro-German junta in Buenos Aires. They recognised it only in mid-1944, when the MNR ministers left the government and the new authorities confirmed the state of war with the Axis and handed more Germans over to the Americans. Peñaranda went into exile and never returned to politics.

The war brought Bolivia a brief boom but did not change the lot of its people. The Catavi massacre and the wartime strikes drew the miners closer to the MNR. In 1946 Villarroel was killed by a mob in La Paz. Six years later the revolution of 1952 brought the MNR to power, and Paz Estenssoro’s government nationalised the Patiño, Hochschild and Aramayo mines.