Bolivia between Washington, Prague, and Havana: The Limits of Nationalism, 1960–1964

In 1961, Bolivia’s national revolution entered its ninth year. Bankrolled since 1952 with hundreds of millions of aid dollars from the United States government, the country’s governing Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR, Revolutionary Nationalist Movement) had skillfully avoided Washington’s antipathy as it nationalized the largest tin mines in the world and unleashed Latin America’s most radical agrarian reform project since the Mexican revolution. Despite occasional State Department outbursts that denigrated the “dictatorship of the Marxist-oriented MNR party,” and vitriolic rightwing attacks, such as Senator Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign pledge to oppose the MNR’s “candy-coated despotism,” revolutionary Bolivia remained the darling of