Abandonment Issues: Honor, Hope, and Failure in the Colonization of the Bolivian Lowlands, 1952–68

Beginning in the 1950s and intensifying over the following decade, the Bolivian government initiated a dramatic project known as the “March to the East.”  The state produced films, radio ads and crude pamphlets to encourage thousands of Bolivians to leave the “overcrowded” Andes and settle in newly created colonization zones in the tropical Amazon basin.  As in Peru, colonization was cast within a narrative of a reconstituted masculine ideal, with prospective colonists drawn from the landless and jobless and encouraged to become honorable producers for family and nation.

                The reality of colonization often failed to match the harmonious human experiment depicted in such propaganda.  This paper examines the ways in which state planners and colonists negotiated those failings through conflicting interpretations of the meaning of “abandonment.”  Officials noted high settler abandonment rates and sought explanations.  These ranged from the unsuitable cultural practices of Andeans to excessive state assistance which, they felt, had cultivated settler “dependency.”  Confronting a discourse of abandonment originating from above, colonists turned that accusation back on the state.  A litany of letters, denunciations and complaints streamed into national offices from across the colonization zones.  Petitioners joined the state in linking masculinity, settlement and honor, but did so by placing the state in the role of masculine provider and then raising doubts about the nation’s territorial integrity, the government’s ability to feed its population and its commitment to its own revolutionary legacy.  In this paper, failure is understood not as a definitive endpoint, as the language of “abandonment” would suggest.  Rather, for both planners and colonists, failure served as the impetus for new rounds of intervention in the colonization zones.