A Grand Crusade! Smallpox Eradication and the Exercise of Political Power in Post-Revolutionary Bolivia

On March 3, 1958, Bolivian President Hernan Siles Zuazo became the first person vaccinated against smallpox in what the press deemed a massive campaign to completely eradicate the disease from the national territory. With the help of “patriotic” vaccination brigades, Bolivian public health authorities aimed to complete more than 700,000 vaccinations in four months. Since Bolivia supposedly had the highest rate of smallpox in the western hemisphere, eradicating this “real scourge of the Bolivian population” would be a tremendous benefit to a country struggling both demographically and economically. By July 1958, the national press proudly proclaimed that over two million Bolivians had been vaccinated, representing around eighty percent of the total population.

In order to accomplish this monumental feat, public health authorities and workers emphasized discipline, cooperation, and obedience. As a national decree proclaimed, “everyone is obliged to cooperate with this great sanitary crusade.” An army of vaccination brigades, staffed by doctors and sanitary inspectors, carried smallpox vaccines to the nation’s frigid and tropical margins, while vaccination centers attended to “disciplined men, women, and children of all social classes.” In this way, the smallpox vaccination campaign brought ordinary Bolivians from the country’s diverse geographic and climatic regions into contact with representatives of state authority. As these state agents administered life-saving vaccines courtesy of the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR), the political party that came to power via a successful political revolution in 1952, they also encouraged Bolivians to obediently accept the state’s authority and cooperate with government mandates. In doing so, the MNR worked to advance its principal goals of political loyalty, economic development, and national unity. Therefore, this case demonstrates that seemingly altruistic public health programs went beyond enhancing public welfare; they also served the revolutionary state’s political and economic agenda.