Mineworkers and Merchants in the Bolivian Borderlands

When a Chilean subsidiary of the American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO) purchased a small, bankrupt copper mine in the northwest corner of Bolivia in 1934, the company inadvertently lit a fuse of labor and civic unrest that would detonate across the next two decades. This paper explores the transformation of the border city of Corocoro from a thriving merchant hub to a company controlled-town between 1934 and 1947. Both merchants and workers found reason to resent the foreign mining company, which sunk a new mineshaft on the northern edge of town and built company stores that priced out local merchants who trafficked across the Peruvian and Chilean borders. In struggles over everything from civic festivals to water contamination to company control over local police, mineworkers and merchants forged a temporary alliance around nationalist control over municipal and natural resources. While scholars have shown how workers organized into new national federations in this period, their militancy did not occur in a vacuum. This paper argues that coalitions with merchants and local elites were foundational to the rise of the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement across the 1940s, culminating in the 1952 Revolution and subsequent nationalization of Bolivia’s mines.