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Commentary
We're going to set up ... a government of structural transformation, economically, politically and socially. We will work so that the Bolivian economy will belong to Bolivians and not to three exploiters who live abroad. We will incorporate the campesino into the economy, into national society, so that he ceases to be despised as a serf.
Provisional President Hernán Siles Zuazo, 19521
When we took power, 40 per cent of the GDP was in the hands of two foreign companies. After three years we have changed from a beggar-state to a relatively strong state, with the ability to exercise control ... This is a power-bloc of campesino and popular-plebeian origin, allied to the middle sectors.
Vice-President Alvaro García Linera, 20122
Fifty years later it is easy to underestimate the boldness and radicalism of the experiment launched in April 1952.
Laurence Whitehead, 20033
Whether the issue is natural resources, education and literacy, infrastructural development, or agrarian reform, the MNR reforms at mid-century were more radical and far reaching than anything MAS has accomplished in the twenty-first.
Forrest Hylton, 20114
The national revolution of April 1952 was, in essence, unnecessary and superfluous. The modernising effects generated by that process would have happened sooner or later under a regime of the traditional elites.
H. C. F. Mansilla, 20035
Why should the 60th anniversary of Bolivia's Revolución Nacional of 9-11 April 1952 matter? Nothing much happened on the day. Some 200 supporters of the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (Revolutionary Nationalist Movement, MNR) celebrated a mass in La Paz's metropolitan cathedral, but the police prevented them from laying a wreath at the monument to Pedro Domingo Murillo. The 'event' was quite similar to the 50th anniversary, which by custom and practice should have been a headline affair but was conspicuous by the minimal public presence in La Paz of the MNR, which had led the uprising and presided over the 'State of 1952' in government until the coup of November 1964.6In Santa Cruz the MNR's presidential candidate for the 2002 elections, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, had addressed a crowd of party faithful, but he had little to say about any past further back than 1985, when the...