Not a Bird, Not a Plane But Barrientos

The Quemado Palace, Bolivia's presidential seat, has one entrance marked "RB" for Republica de Bolivia. Nowadays wits in La Paz insist that the initials actually stand for Rene Barrientos, the present occupant. The onetime air force commander was elected three years ago, following the coup that toppled Victor Paz Estenssoro. At the time, Bolivians predicted that he was politically too naive to survive longer than six months. With only a year to go before Barrientos completes a full term, even critics now admit that the handsome, mercurial chief executive has put his stamp on the country as have few be fore him.

Barrientos, scarcely beginning to grey at 49, did it with a will and a way that conquered Bolivia's vast complexity of mountain and jungle and reached the isolated campesino, the peasant, who accounts for 72% of the nation's population of 3,800,000. Barrientos sleeps only four hours a night, starts work at 7 a.m. and is incapable of being chairborne for very long. The way to go any place, as far as the President is concerned, is by air; he was trained to fly by the U.S. Air Force, and he reaches for the controls of an aircraft like oth er taut executives reach for a golf club.

Barrientos not only plops down godlike on Indian villages that have never seen a President; he is also one of the few blancos, or white Bolivians, fluent in the Quechua Indian language. He is robust enough to dance all night with pretty girls, hearty enough to eat as many as four lunches a day of peasant rabbit stew and peppers accompanied by home made corn liquor. "I'm eleven pounds heavier than when I became President," Barrientos told TIME Correspondent Mo Garcia last week. "The only way the campesinos have of showing affection is to feed you. The only way to show appreciation is to eat the food."

Sly, Not Dumb. Others besides campesinos have experienced this unique presidential abrazo. Tin exports account for 78% of all Bolivia's foreign exchange, and tin miners are thus a potent group that strikes frequently. During one protest against Barrientos in 1967, the President went down into the mines to confront them. An angry miner held out a dynamite stick and, to scare the President, threatened to blow the assemblage higher than Bolivia's Andean Altiplano. Barrientos grabbed the stick, held it out to be lit and called the miner's bluff. Last year Barrientos took charge in the jungle of the government troops who cornered and killed Che Guevara.

Barrientos' best-remembered bit of do-it-yourself leadership came after two air force recruits fell to their deaths because their parachutes failed to open; newspapers and congressmen howled that military parachutes were faulty. Barrientos summoned newsmen to El Alto Airport at La Paz, ordered them to pick any chute in the military supply room. When they did, he strapped it on, went up and jumped himself. The criticism stopped.

Some insist that he flutters and dashes about so much because he is intellectually not up to the job. Others, however, have begun to believe that Barrientos is sly rather than dumb. His fast movements and decisions keep Bolivians off balance and prevent any large anti-Barrientos bloc from forming. The fact, for instance, that Che Guevara was able to recruit only a handful of campesinos for his guerrilla band is credited in part to Barrientos' personality cult among the peasants.

In private, Barrientos shows the same disorganized whimsy. As an air force officer, he once had two wives and families simultaneously until a La Paz lawyer quietly got one marriage annulled. In addition to six children of his own, Barrientos' presidential menage includes 52 orphaned children of miners or campesinos that he has adopted. Barrientos' record is mixed where Bolivia's economy is involved. Prices are relatively stable and the peso is sound, but U.S. aid payments of $35.6 million last year included money to cover a national deficit caused by falling world tin prices. Domestically, there is financial stress and dissatisfaction because Barrientos leaves much of the government's important paper work in the hands of corruptible officials.

Barrientos wants to improve the economy by developing agriculture, forests and hydroelectric power. He would like to make the nation less dependent on tin mining and at the same time make tin more lucrative by building smelting plants to process the metal at home. Gulf Oil is developing petroleum deposits in Bolivia, and Barrientos hopes to attract other outside investors. Says he, when Bolivia's leftists complain: "I don't think there are any investors in this day and age who are still stupid enough to believe in exploitation."

Advice and Deodorant. Most of all, Barrientos wants to get all Bolivians involved in government. "Every citizen must be a participant in the building of this country," he says. "Otherwise the common man will continue to be managed." Barrientos has begun receiving delegations of campesinos at Quemado

Palace, where he lectures them on the necessity of paying taxes (afterward, he has his office sprayed with deodorants). Said he to one such group: "I have stolen $300 million from the cities to build your schools and health centers because you do not pay." Replied the contrite delegation leader: "You have embarrassed us."

Although the constitution prohibits a second successive term, some observers think that Barrientos would like to remain in office. Any move to do so would put him at odds with Army Commander Alfredo Ovando, an old friend who co-managed Paz Estenssoro's overthrow, and has presidential ambitions himself. Ovando presumably has the army to back him. But on some of his almost daily flying excursions to the hinterland in his rickety C-47, Barrientos has pointedly reviewed straggling parades of armed campesinos. Long used to neglect, peasants just might come to the big pilot's aid if he needed them.

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