Blood-Drenched Comeback

Just one month after Cuba's bloodless coup (see col. 3), Bolivia exploded last week in bloody revolution. Revolutions are no novelty in the remote Andean republic, which has averaged better than one a year since its liberation from Spain in 1825. Men the world over remember its 1946 rebellion, and the photographs of Dictator Gualberto Villarroel hanging from a lamppost (which is still a tourist attraction in La Paz). Last week, the heirs of Villarroel, fanatical members of the totalitarian Movement of National Revolution (M.N.R.), clawed their way back.

Into the Streets. On the appointed day, gunfire and cries of "Viva la revolution!" pierced the early-morning quiet of La Paz (pop. 350,000). M.N.R. partisans invaded public buildings, set up barricades, passed out guns. Seizing La Paz's most powerful radio station, they fooled at least part of the populace by announcing a "total and bloodless victory." But only part of the army joined them; at the last minute, top commanders swung their forces behind the junta government of General Hugo Ballivian. Bringing reinforcements from outlying towns, the government counterattacked with planes, artillery and mortars. Early next day, the M.N.R.'s top army supporter, General Antonio Seleme, thought the rebel cause lost and took refuge in the Chilean embassy.

But the angry men of M.N.R., seasoned street fighters, were powerfully bolstered by Bolivia's national police and tin miners flocking in from the mountains. They fought on in La Paz's working-class quarter. Most of the army's reinforcements were green conscripts with no passion for politics, no taste for bloody infighting. At a first-aid post where 350 casualties were treated in a few hours, an Indian mother squatted beside her dead soldier son's body and wailed: "What had my poor guagua (baby) to do with all this?"

Up to the Hills. Fighting raged on among the downtown skyscrapers, across the lawns of the upper-class residential districts and up the steep hills to the broad, 21-mile-high altiplano where the government generals had set up headquarters. By the afternoon of the third day, Good Friday, with 3,000 estimated killed and 6,000 wounded, army leaders signed a ceasefire. M.N.R. leaders proclaimed their triumph from the palace balcony. Then many of the battle-grimed revolutionaries, followed by weeping women, marched to Mass through the cobbled streets, behind the image of the martyred Christ, in La Paz's traditional Good Friday procession.

Thus M.N.R. wrested control of the country from the military junta which had annulled the election victory won last year by the M.N.R. leader, Victor Paz Estenssoro, who campaigned from exile. In Buenos Aires, 1,400 miles to the southeast, Paz Estenssoro made ready to fly to La Paz this week. A bespectacled, soft-spoken onetime economics professor, Paz has been called everything from "the No. 1 Nazi of the Americas" to "a Communist of the right." Now he says mildly that his first steps in power will be to balance Bolivia's budget and get a higher price from the U.S. for tin.

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