Bolivia: A New Mandate

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The grey clouds of South American winter hung low over La Paz as the blue, bulletproof Cadillac pulled up to the newly constructed grade school. Bolivia's President Victor Paz Estenssoro stepped out, strode into the crowded schoolyard and took his place in line. "We are here to vote," he said simply. After a 25-minute wait, Paz dropped his pink ballot into the box, dipped a finger into a cup of red ink to prove he had voted, then drove off to attend to other affairs of state.

So it went last week throughout Bolivia. In calm, peaceful balloting, the Andean nation's voters turned out to elect Paz to his second straight term and his third since the 1952 revolution that toppled the country's feudal tinmining aristocracy. All threats of anti-Paz demonstrations, violent strikes, even hints of an assassination attempt, proved empty. Early returns gave Paz 677,000 votes, a clear majority of the country's estimated 900,000 eligible voters and more than enough to secure his mandate for another term.

Two weeks before, Paz's enemies, led by Juan Lechín, leftist boss of the country's tin miners, had withdrawn from the elections, urging all voters to abstain or cast blank ballots in protest. Two days before the vote, Lechín and Hernan Siles Zuazo, onetime President (1956-60) and a former Paz supporter, went on a hunger strike hoping to marshal public opinion against the President. But on voting day, abstentions and blank votes ran only 20% or so, and the hunger strikers soon started eating again.

The best Lechín could do was call his tin miners off the job. By the morning after the election, most of the country's tin production had shut down. Paz coolly shrugged it off. "The strike," he said, "will last only three or four days because the miners don't want to lose their production bonus." Sure enough, three days later, the miners were back.

Lechín and Siles then announced the formation of a "National Revolution ary Front" to unite most forces, both left and right, in opposition to Paz. If it lasts, the Front will be the first sizable, organized political opposition in Bolivia since the 1952 revolution. But Paz remained unexcited. "I don't believe we are going to have a continuing political problem," he said. Referring to his former political allies, he added: "Some people are necessary for the early part of a revolution, others for a later stage. When the revolution enters the construction period, these people aren't necessary."