BOLIVIA: The Fanned Spark

Both Bolivians and foreigners—analyzing the problems of making a workable economic and political unit out of landlocked, geographically fractured, 68% illiterate Bolivia—have for a century been prone, in moments of desperation, to wry variations of the we-give-up suggestion that the country and its headaches should be divided among its neighbors. This rueful jest, repeated by a U.S. official in La Paz and quoted in TIME's March 2 issue, was turned last week into the spark for three days of anti-U.S. violence.*

"Imperialism's Vile Claw." The day Bolivia's 670 copies of TIME arrived by air, they were taken by special order straight to the palace of President Hernán Siles Zuazo, whose ambassador in Peru, getting the magazine a day earlier, had alerted him. Siles made the story the topic of a six-hour Cabinet session, then issued a statement blasting the remark as "damaging to the national honor" and "absolutely inadmissable." The statement gave the Bolivian public to understand that the remark had been put forth as a serious proposal.

Next day Siles turned the magazines over to TIME's La Paz agent, but as the agent lugged them out of the palace he was waylaid by waiting members of the M.N.R. Youth—a Siles-supporting branch of the government's National Revolutionary Movement—and all the magazines were stolen. A day later two La Paz papers ran translations of the story, including the point that the remark was in jest, but the official government newspaper La Nación banner-lined: TIME, THE FINGERNAIL OF IMPERIALISM'S VILE CLAW, OFFENDS BOLIVIA. Next morning 2,000 blue-jeaned high school students marched through downtown La Paz chanting "Down with imperialism!" and "Bolivia will not be a Yankee colony!"

Flag for Burning. That afternoon, ten minutes after Chargé d'Affaires Wymberley Coerr (the embassy is between ambassadors) returned from delivering a note to the Foreign Ministry stating the U.S. position that there was "no evidence" that the statement was ever made, the demonstrators were back again. They were joined by a noisy, violence-bent band of Trotskyites,† Communists and left-wing rabble-rousers of the government National Revolutionary Movement. (A big banner demanded the establishment of diplomatic relations with the U.S.S.R.) They burned the carefully hoarded copies of TIME on the doorstep of the seven-story building whose top three floors the embassy occupies, stoned windows, produced a homemade facsimile of the U.S. flag (with four-pointed stars) to burn on the smoldering ashes. Surging up to the U.S. Information Service Library a block away, they smashed more windows. "

President Siles appeared at the edge of the mob. He marched straight through, headed for M.N.R. headquarters two blocks away, and the crowd followed. There, from a balcony, he pleaded that "shouts do not solve anything, and violence is useless," but he denounced TIME's correspondent as a "journalist without scruples." Out of control, the rioters followed their leaders to stone Point Four's La Paz offices and smash 25 heavy trucks and pickups of the U.S.-Bolivian Roads Service. During one of the attacks, a 15-year-old student was killed.