824.00/913
Memorandum of Conversation, by the Under Secretary of State (Welles)
The Bolivian Minister1 called to see me this afternoon. The Minister stated that he had been considerably disturbed by the nature of the first press reports which had come up from South America with regard to the change of government in Bolivia recently decreed by President Busch. The Minister said that these articles had referred to the new form of government installed as “totalitarian”, and that this gave a completely erroneous impression to the average American citizen. He said that he had given yesterday a statement to the press in clarification of the situation, and that his statement has been reinforced today [Page 304] by an official statement issued by the President of Bolivia to the effect that there was not the slightest sympathy on the part of the Bolivian people nor on the part of the Bolivian Government with either Nazi or Fascist ideology, and that the change of government had been undertaken solely for domestic reasons.
I said to the Minister that I greatly appreciated his clarification and that I was glad to see this morning that the press reports gave an entirely different coloring from that which they contained yesterday. I said that of course it was regrettable that the first reports had been of this character because the editorials which had now been published on the change of government were all of them based on the original Teports and the effect on public opinion was naturally disquieting.
The Minister explained to me at some length what he considered “were the real reasons for the change of government. He said that when he had recently been in Bolivia he had learned that the three ‘classic political parties of Bolivia—the Liberal Party and the two factions of the Republican Party—had reached a common alignment for the purpose of retaining the present Congress in power and of modifying the Constitution through the agency of the present Congress. … At the same time, the Minister said, there were certain influences at work within the Army trying to persuade President Busch to set up a dictatorial government composed solely of Army officers similar to the type of government in power during the last years of the Chaco war.
The Minister said that either of these two tendencies would inevitably, if successful, be highly prejudicial to the best interests of the Bolivian people, and he was hopeful that President Busch would adopt a middle course and hold fair national elections in the near future, as he had now publicly announced he would do, and that as a result of these elections the Government would obtain a reasonable measure of support but would at the same time have within the Congress a healthy opposition which would tend to ensure a return to civil rather than military government.
The Minister further stated that he considered the retention of the previous Cabinet in office a healthy sign, and that he was personally very much disturbed by the announcement that certain basic decree laws would be promulgated which would modify very greatly the traditional form of constitutional government of Bolivia. He said that he had asked for information on this point by cable from La Paz and that he wished me to know that if he found that such was really the intention of the present Bolivian Government, he would find it necessary to return at once to La Paz and if he could not succeed in [Page 305] changing that decision he would be forced to resign his position as Minister here.
The Minister also stated that in the alignment of the three political parties, of which he had previously Spoken, one of the chief planks was a violent attack against the Bolivian Government for the peace treaty2 entered into with Paraguay. In other words, the political parties were making capital out of the peace treaty between Bolivia and Paraguay, urging revision of the treaty so that Bolivia would obtain more than she had obtained through the treaty. The Minister stated that of course this would be utterly fatal to any progressive rehabilitation of Bolivia both in the economic sense as well as in the international sense, and that if such a policy were pursued he would of course oppose it with all the means within his power.