Siege

Having beaten down half a dozen uprisings and one full-scale civil war in three years, Bolivian officials moved swiftly to meet another crisis last week. "In view of irrefutable evidence that subversive preparations were afoot," suave, bearded President Mamerto Urriolagoitia ordered the exile of ten civilians and army officers (including one general) and slapped on a drum-tight state of siege.

Though government communiques spoke darkly of their old bogey, the neo-fascist Movement of Nationalist Revolution, the President faced far more deep-seated and widespread opposition than the M.N.R. For over three months he had been trying without success to get other democratic parties to join with his own Republican Socialist Union Party in a coalition government to stave off economic disaster. Just before the state-of-siege order, a rumor went around that a group of army officers had given Urriolagoitia 24 hours to form a "government of national unity."

Bolivia's political state of siege was the direct consequence of an economic state of siege. The national budget depends on tin for around 45% of its revenue. With world prices tumbling (from $1.03 to 77 1/4-c- lb. in the last four months), tin mines had been closing all over the treeless, three-mile-high altiplano. Since May's bloody Catavi riots (TIME, June 13), almost 10,000 Indian miners had been thrown out of work.

Before Christmas Urriolagoitia offered to give tin producers who increased their exports a more favorable exchange rate for their dollar earnings. Such a measure was of small help: Malaya and Indonesia, with the advantage of currency devaluation, were selling high-grade tin at a price Bolivia could not continue to meet. Last week the President appointed an Emergency Economic Committee to report on possible fiscal expedients.

In Washington, Bolivian representatives urged the U.S. to stockpile Bolivian tin at a price around 90-c- a lb. Reluctant to pay a bonus of 12 1/2-c- a lb. above the world price, U.S. officials stuck to the view that the Bolivians would have to continue to help themselves. With little else to sell in the world but high-cost tin, and with their unemployment rolls growing daily, Bolivians could look forward to a long siege.

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