20th Century Riot

In the camp at the Siglo Veinte (20th Century) tin mine, 12,000 feet high in the Bolivian Andes, Mrs. Elena O'Connor was preparing lunch. Her husband Tom, a Pasadena, Calif, engineer employed at the Patino-owned mine, was visiting another U.S. engineer next door. Through her window Mrs. O'Connor saw 15 Indian miners rush to the neighbor's house and kick in the door. Minutes later the Indians came out dragging the two Americans, whose faces were blotched with blood.

Elena O'Connor ran to her husband, clung to him so desperately that she was dragged along with the men to the miners' union hall. Before long, 14 other engineers and foremen, including six U.S. citizens, were brought to the hall. The kidnaping of the engineers was part of a plan to force the return of Mine Union Boss Juan Lechin, who had been banished to Chile along with 19 of his aides on a charge of plotting to overthrow the government.

Some of the miners wanted to kill their captives. Mrs. O'Connor stood on a chair, tried to convince the miners that the foremen were not responsible for Lechin's banishment. She got nowhere.

Rifles & Dynamite. As she was talking, a miner aimed a gun at her from a window outside. Her husband rushed to protect her; a bullet stopped him. Other miners fired; Tom O'Connor got 42 bullets in his body, was battered to a pulp with iron bars. U.S. Engineer Albert Krefting was also killed; Mrs. O'Connor was badly mauled before she escaped.

When soldiers from the local garrison moved in, the miners fought back with rifles and dynamite. Next day, when army reinforcements arrived, the miners blew up the hall, took to the hills. In the fighting, 40 were killed, 100 wounded.

An opportunistic rabble-rouser with no clear-cut political faith, Ex-Miner Juan Lechin got control of the tin union during the wartime regime of Dictator-President Gualberto Villaroel. After Villaroel was hanged to a lamppost in 1946 and his Movement of Nationalist Revolution (M.N.R.) disrupted, Lechin was among the first to cheer the new democratic government. But he missed no chance to badger it with ever-mounting wage demands.

As the regime struggled to keep alive, ambitious Juan Lechin gained strength through new or renewed alliances with resurgent elements of the totalitarian M.N.R., with Trotskyist and Communist-line unions. His powerful combine was responsible for much of the pressure that last month forced President Enrique Hertzog to take sick leave (TIME, May 16).

High-Cost Mines. The tin companies, who thought that the government leaned too far toward the unions, shared with Lechin responsibility for the outbreak at Siglo Veinte. When Hertzog, after prolonged arbitration, ordered a 40% wage boost for miners last month, the Patino company refused to comply. Wage boosts, it insisted, would force the high-cost mines to shut down, cutting the country's one big source of income.

To Hertzog's more amenable fillin, Acting President Mamerto Urriolagoitia, Patino suggested that the whole problem could be solved by getting rid of the union leaders. Their banishment followed.

A State of Siege. Before the fighting ended at Siglo Veinte, workers at three other big mines went on strike. The country's rail workers walked out in sympathy. In La Paz, more than 8,000 employees of the capital's factories and utilities stopped work. The government declared a state of siege (the seventh in two years), called all able-bodied men from 19 to 50 to the colors. An attempt by M.N.R. exiles to seize and paralyze the rail center of Villazon, near the Argentine border, was nipped.

By week's end, after the government had said that Lechin could come back "when things return to normal," most of Bolivia was working again. Even the miners had begun to go back to the pits. The only important exceptions were U.S. and other foreign mine managers, who had been evacuated by plane after the fighting stopped. Many of them refused to return to their posts, leaving Bolivia short of the know-how needed to get out the tin.

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