The United States emerged from World War II with generally good relations with the countries of Latin America and with the traditional Good Neighbor policy still largely intact. But it wasn’t too ...long before various overarching strategic and ideological priorities began to undermine those good relations as the Cold War came to exert its grip on U.S. policy formation and implementation. In The Truman Administration and Bolivia, Glenn Dorn tells the story of how the Truman administration allowed its strategic concerns for cheap and ready access to a crucial mineral resource, tin, to take precedence over further developing a positive relationship with Bolivia. This ultimately led to the economic conflict that provided a major impetus for the resistance that culminated in the Revolution of 1952—the most important revolutionary event in Latin America since the Mexican Revolution of 1910. The emergence of another revolutionary movement in Bolivia early in the millennium under Evo Morales makes this study of its Cold War predecessor an illuminating and timely exploration of the recurrent tensions between U.S. efforts to establish and dominate a liberal capitalist world order and the counterefforts of Latin American countries like Bolivia to forge their own destinies in the shadow of the “colossus of the north.”
Fields of Revolution examines the second largest case of
peasant land redistribution in Latin America and agrarian
reform-arguably the most important policy to arise out of Bolivia's
1952 revolution. ...Competing understandings of agrarian reform shaped
ideas of property, productivity, welfare, and justice. Peasants
embraced the nationalist slogan of "land for those who work it" and
rehabilitated national union structures. Indigenous communities
proclaimed instead "land to its original owners" and sought to link
the ruling party discourse on nationalism with their own
long-standing demands for restitution. Landowners, for their part,
embraced the principle of "land for those who improve it" to
protect at least portions of their former properties from
expropriation. Carmen Soliz combines analysis of governmental
policies and national discourse with everyday local actors'
struggles and interactions with the state to draw out the deep
connections between land and people as a material reality and as
the object of political contention in the period surrounding the
revolution.
In the wake of a 1952 revolution, leaders of Bolivia's National Revolutionary Movement (MNR) embarked on a program of internal colonization known as the "March to the East." In an impoverished ...country dependent on highland mining, the MNR sought to convert the nation's vast "undeveloped" Amazonian frontier into farmland, hoping to achieve food security, territorial integrity, and demographic balance. To do so, they encouraged hundreds of thousands of Indigenous Bolivians to relocate from the "overcrowded" Andes to the tropical lowlands, but also welcomed surprising transnational migrant streams, including horse-and-buggy Mennonites from Mexico and displaced Okinawans from across the Pacific. Ben Nobbs-Thiessen details the multifaceted results of these migrations on the environment of the South American interior. As he reveals, one of the "migrants" with the greatest impact was the soybean, which Bolivia embraced as a profitable cash crop while eschewing earlier goals of food security, creating a new model for extractive export agriculture. Half a century of colonization would transform the small regional capital of Santa Cruz de la Sierra into Bolivia's largest city, and the diverging stories of Andean, Mennonite, and Okinawan migrants complicate our understandings of tradition, modernity, foreignness, and belonging in the heart of a rising agro-industrial empire.
Military service in Bolivia has long been compulsory for young men. This service plays an important role in defining identity, citizenship, masculinity, state formation, and civil-military relations ...in twentieth-century Bolivia. The project of obligatory military service originated as part of an attempt to restrict the power of indigenous communities after the 1899 civil war. During the following century, administrations (from oligarchic to revolutionary) expressed faith in the power of the barracks to assimilate, shape, and educate the population. Drawing on a body of internal military records never before used by scholars, Elizabeth Shesko argues that conscription evolved into a pact between the state and society. It not only was imposed from above but was also embraced from below because it provided a space for Bolivians across divides of education, ethnicity, and social class to negotiate their relationships with each other and with the state. Shesko contends that state formation built around military service has been characterized in Bolivia by multiple layers of negotiation and accommodation. The resulting nation-state was and is still hierarchical and divided by profound differences, but it never was simply an assimilatory project. It instead reflected a dialectical process to define the state and its relationships.
Placing a distinct focus on the role of the sending state, this book examines the history of postwar Japan's migration policy, linking it to the larger question of statehood and nation-building in ...the postwar era.
Conflicts over subterranean resources, particularly tin, oil, and natural gas, have driven Bolivian politics for nearly a century. “Resource nationalism"—the conviction that resource wealth should be ...used for the benefit of the “nation"—has often united otherwise disparate groups, including mineworkers, urban workers, students, war veterans, and middle-class professionals, and propelled an indigenous union leader, Evo Morales, into the presidency in 2006. Blood of the Earth reexamines the Bolivian mobilization around resource nationalism that began in the 1920s, crystallized with the 1952 revolution, and continues into the twenty-first century. Drawing on a wide array of Bolivian and US sources, Kevin A. Young reveals that Bolivia became a key site in a global battle among economic models, with grassroots coalitions demanding nationalist and egalitarian alternatives to market capitalism. While US-supported moderates within the revolutionary regime were able to defeat more radical forces, Young shows how the political culture of resource nationalism, though often comprising contradictory elements, constrained government actions and galvanized mobilizations against neoliberalism in later decades. His transnational and multilevel approach to the 1952 revolution illuminates the struggles among Bolivian popular sectors, government officials, and foreign powers, as well as the competing currents and visions within Bolivia’s popular political cultures. Offering a fresh appraisal of the Bolivian Revolution, resource nationalism, and the Cold War in Latin America, Blood of the Earth is an ideal case study for understanding the challenges shared by countries across the Global South.
Uncertain Citizenshipexplores how Bolivian migrants to Chile experience citizenship in their daily lives. Intraregional migration is on the rise in Latin America and challenges how citizenship in the ...region is understood and experienced. As Megan Ryburn powerfully argues, many individuals occupy a state of uncertain citizenship as they navigate movement and migration across borders. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research, this book contributes to debates on the meaning and practice of citizenship in Latin America and for migrants throughout the world.
In the growing literature on middle powers, this book contributes by expanding case study analysis and extending international relations theory in its application to foreign policy decisions. Thus, ...this book builds on prominent middle power literature and aims to advance our theoretical understanding for why crucial foreign policies were made by the "pivotal middle" powers this book examines--Poland, South Korea, and Bolivia. For this book's three case studies and their first-term leadership's critical junctures--from first term post-communist Poland, post-authoritarian/post-ruling party South Korea, and post-colonial Bolivia--we have the antecedents for contemporary middle powers essential for realizing the regional evolution for cooperative change with greater powers systemically; we may then grasp today why those historical foreign policies, albeit not so long ago, give us crucial antecedents for adapting and trying, yet again, to resolve seemingly perennial power dilemmas regionally, peacefully. Here are why middle power impact matters, not only regionally for stronger, dominant greater power neighbours, but also for transformative middle power leaderships which proved pivotal geopolitically for their region's challenges and changes.
The year 1879 marked the beginning of one of the longest, bloodiest conflicts of nineteenth-century Latin America. The War of the Pacific pitted Peru and Bolivia against Chile in a struggle initiated ...over a festering border dispute. The conflict saw Chile's and Peru's armored warships vying for control of sea lanes and included one of the first examples of the use of naval torpedoes. On land, large armies using the most modern weapons-breech-loading rifles, Gatling guns, and steel-barreled artillery-clashed in battles that left thousands of men dead on the battlefields. Eventually, the warring parties revamped their respective military establishments, creating much needed, civilian-supported supply, transportation, and medical units. Chile ultimately prevailed. Bolivia lost its seacoast along with valuable nitrate and copper deposits to Chile, and Peru was forced to cede mineral rich Tarapaca and the province of Arica to the victor.
Employing the primary and secondary sources of the countries involved, William F. Sater offers the definitive analysis of the conflict's naval and military campaigns.Andean Tragedynot only places the war in a crucial international context, but also explains why this devastating conflict resulted in a Chilean victory.
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