Bolivia: A Splintering Left and the Failure of Armed Struggle, 1963–65

In 1963, the United States government began to fret that scores of young Bolivian leftists were travelling to Cuba and the Soviet Union, representing the “largest number from any one Latin American nation.”  Some of these Bolivian youths were eager to receive guerrilla training, but Fidel Castro at first demurred, arguing that an insurgency against revolutionary nationalist President Víctor Paz Estenssoro “does not suit us.”  Instead, Cuba asked these Bolivian leftists to cooperate with dozens of Peruvian and Argentine revolutionaries who were on their way through Bolivia to wage armed struggle against their own countries’ governments.  In late 1964, however, Cuba’s support for armed struggle increasingly targeted Bolivia itself, particularly in the wake of La Paz’s diplomatic rupture with Havana in August and Paz Estenssoro’s ouster by the military in November.  This paper traces the evolution of the policy of armed struggle in Bolivia between 1963 and 1965, and it concludes that two factors contributed to the policy’s ultimate failure: infighting between orthodox and Maoist factions within the local Communist Party and, more importantly, the Bolivian military’s successful occupation of the country’s communist-led mining camps in May 1965.