The Slippery Contours of Bolivian Nationalism: Oil in the Popular Economic Imaginary, 1952–69

In the aftermath of the 1952 Bolivian Revolution oil came to play an increasingly important role in the country’s economic development and popular consciousness. As the MNR regime veered to the right in the late 1950s, oil nationalism played a central role in galvanizing a popular coalition that challenged government economic policy from the left. This paper examines how conflicts over national oil policy became a focal point for broader debates about economic development and distributive justice in the 1950s and 1960s. Denunciations of the MNR’s increasingly “open-door” oil policy channeled longstanding popular suspicions of foreign capital in general. This sentiment was a source of profound concern for Bolivian and U.S. officials, who launched an extensive propaganda effort aimed at convincing ordinary Bolivians that global capitalism was mutually beneficial to all parties involved. Despite these efforts, resource nationalism remained (and remains) a powerful current in Bolivia’s popular political culture.

Yet oil nationalism, like resource nationalism more generally, was also ambiguous and at times intensely contradictory. It attracted adherents from across the political spectrum, and it was often deployed by military leaders as a way to avert more radical changes to the country’s economic structure, such as progressive tax reform. It also ended up reproducing a variety of social hierarchies even as it frustrated many imperial and capitalist objectives. For instance, urban-based oil nationalists tended to look with disdain on the country’s rural indigenous population, an attitude that impeded the development of a multiethnic popular coalition that could transcend the urban-rural divide; this division proved tremendously consequential in the 1960s and 1970s as the military consolidated an alliance with peasant unions around the country, and it remains important in the Bolivia of today. The case study thus underscores both the power and peril of resource nationalism.