This book, part of the Hoover Institution’s “Politics in Latin America Series,” assays the Bolivian experience—geography, demography, economics, history, and politics from pre-Columbian past to contemporary present, together with some observations on foreign relations and the future of the republic—all in 140 pages. The author, who is to be appreciated for attempting an overview of a subject considered “inscrutable” by his editor, focuses on the political history of the last half-century, with appropriate emphases on the Chaco War and National Revolution, subjects pursued in his The Bolivian National Revolution (1958); coverage here of the later MNR years and the postrevolutionary military dictatorships brings the story up to date.
Alexander is at his best recalling historical curiosities: the “elements of comedy” in the RADEPA coup of 1942 (p. 71); a tale of the young Juan Lechín at the mines (pp. 72-73); Víctor Paz Estenssoro’s observation on Germán Busch’s suicide (p. 68). He disagrees with the interpretation that the MNR agrarian reform was merely a response to peasant land seizures, noting the movement’s early interest in the topic, but continues an earlier tendency to equate agrarian reform with land redistribution. The nature and extent of the redistributive process has been questioned in a doctoral thesis by Paul Turovsky, “Bolivian Haciendas: Before and After the Revolution” (1980) and the agrarian reform process critiqued by Alain de Janvry’s The Agrarian Question and Reformism in Latin America (1981) and Ernst Feder’s The Rape of the Peasantry (1971).
Ultimately Alexander falls victim to his encyclopedic approach, which, if all-encompassing, raises more questions than it answers. Brevity and a reliance on descriptive exposition deprive the work of a sense of historical process. Thus we find Gualberto Villarroel’s decrees on pongueaje (“personal service”) treated as fait accompli through presidential fiat: “Presumably, as long as the Villarroel government remained in power the decree was more or less enforced” (p. 73). Whatever is intended by “more or less” (a repetitive annoyance in these pages), a decree and its implementation are not synonymous and, in this instance, a perusal of Jorge Dandler-Hanhart’s research on the Cochabamba peasantry would have been illuminating. Likewise, the recent “cocaine coup” of Luis García Meza is treated in a manner bereft of historical context. The business long antedates its discovery by the popular media and clearly continues despite García Meza’s fall in 1981.
Readers seeking greater insight into Bolivian history and historiography (Alexander’s bibliography is confined to approximately a dozen books and encyclopedias) must look elsewhere: a good place to begin is Herbert Klein’s insightful Bolivia: The Evolution of a Multi-Ethnic Society (1982), which reflects the considerable advances in Andean studies of the past decade, and “Andean Ethnology in the 1970’s: A Retrospective” (LARR, 1982), by Frank Salomon, which conceptualizes the directions of recent scholarship in the field.
