Tokens & Tin

Bolivians wanted to forget last July's bloody revolution and its lamppost lynchings. In part token, they had picked for next week's presidential elections two ultra-moderate candidates: Enrique Hertzog, 49-year-old surgeon who fought Dictator-President Villarroel and went to jail for it; and short, balding Luis Fernando Guachalla, 47, ex-Minister to Washington and friend of Cordell Hull. Both had helped run the melancholy Chaco War with Paraguay. (Last week, while the two old-line nominees campaigned in the interior, dissident laborites in La Paz put up a third candidate, General Felix Tavera. He figured to run third.)

Whoever won -- Guachalla seemed to have the edge -- Bolivia's new Government faced a stack of problems left by the totalitarian Villarroel regime. Living costs for the nation's 3,500,000 Indians, cholos (half breeds) and whites had zoomed 200% since 1939. Builders had never finished the highway (started with the help of U.S. funds) that would have given underfed population centers on the wind swept, 12,000-ft, altiplano food from the fertile lowlands. The $25,000,000 capital of Bolivia's RFC-like Development Corp. had been heavily tapped without bringing the country nearer to supplying its own essential food and clothing. Landlocked Bolivia still depended on imports for meat and wheat, had not got over the cut in Argentine food shipments imposed last summer by the Peron Government.

Tin remained the alpha & omega of Bolivian economy, the source of over two-thirds of the national income and four-fifths of the Government's revenues. But now that the war was over and Malayan mines were back in production, Bolivia's high-cost pits were up against it. Tin barons Patino and Hochschild wanted to shut down marginal mines. Their work ers threatened violence if they did so. The Government was in the middle.

This week Bolivians were hoping to get 9-c- more than the thumping 67-c- a Ib. the U.S. paid for tin in 1946. If they got it, the mines might keep going and Bolivia's new President might have a few months of comparative peace.

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