“A Showcase for the West”: Lowland Colonization, Cold War Counterinsurgency, and Community Development in 1960s Bolivia

As the United States searched for ways to contain third world radicalism in the 1950s and 1960s, its successful tempering of Bolivia’s 1952 national revolution became a particularly important model for U.S. policymakers and economists to celebrate and study.  Life magazine reported in May 1961 that "West Germany is already joining us to make Bolivia a 'showcase' for the West,” and by 1966 the New York Times asserted that Bolivia was "virtually run by U.S. technicians and administrators."  In the U.S. imagination, Bolivia thus appeared as a kind of diorama in which Westerners could exhibit not only the roads they had built and the parts of the country they'd helped colonize, but also the inculcation of the idea of "the West" (the logic of indigenous eradication inherent in "Western" frontier ideology, updated for the cold war developmentalist moment) in the subjects of development themselves. Through an examination of news stories and photographs, development workers’ accounts, and interviews with Bolivian intellectuals and movement activists, this paper investigates the cultural dimensions of a few 1960s development projects—most particularly the Peace Corps and USAID-aided drive to effect a transfer of the indigenous population from the Altiplano to the eastern lowlands, and their simultaneous attempts at anticommunist community development in mining areas. Through this investigation, the paper attempts to understand how the U.S. shaped a postwar modernization regime that not only helped contain and redirect indigenous Bolivian calls for self-determination toward a narrative of nationalism and assimilation, but also attempted to use hegemonically-imposed signifiers of place in order to actively conscript indigenous identity in the service of cold war modernization and anticommunist counterinsurgency.