René Barrientos Ortuño (30 May 1919 – 27 April 1969) was a
Bolivian
Bolivian may refer to:
* Something of, or related to Bolivia
** Bolivian people
** Demographics of Bolivia
** Culture of Bolivia
* SS ''Bolivian'', a British-built standard cargo ship
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military officer and politician who served as the 47th
president of Bolivia
The president of Bolivia ( es, Presidente de Bolivia), officially known as the president of the Plurinational State of Bolivia ( es, Presidente del Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia), is head of state and head of government of Bolivia and the ca ...
twice nonconsecutively from 1964 to 1966 and from 1966 to 1969. During much of his first term, he shared power as co-president with
Alfredo Ovando
Alfredo (, ) is a cognate of the Anglo-Saxon name Alfred and a common Italian, Galician, Portuguese and Spanish language personal name.
People with the given name include:
*Alfredo (born 1946), Brazilian footballer born as Alfredo Mostarda Fil ...
from 1965 to 1966 and prior to that served as the 30th
vice president of Bolivia
The vice president of Bolivia ( es, Vicepresidente de Bolivia), officially known as the vice president of the Plurinational State of Bolivia ( es, Vicepresidente del Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia), is the second highest political position in Bo ...
in 1964.
General Barrientos came to power after the
1964 Bolivian coup d'état which overthrew the government of President
Victor Paz Estenssoro
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* ''Victor'' (1951 film), a French drama film
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. During his three-year rule, Barrientos and the army suppressed leftist opposition to his regime, including a guerrilla group led by
Che Guevara
Ernesto Che Guevara (; 14 June 1928The date of birth recorded on /upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/Ernesto_Guevara_Acta_de_Nacimiento.jpg his birth certificatewas 14 June 1928, although one tertiary source, (Julia Constenla, quoted ...
in 1967.
Early years
Barrientos was a native of
Tarata,
department of Cochabamba
Cochabamba ( ay, Quchapampa Jach'a Suyu, es, Departamento de Cochabamba , qu, Quchapampa Suyu), from Quechua ''qucha'' or ''qhucha'', meaning "lake", ''pampa'' meaning "plain", is one of the nine departments of Bolivia. It is known to be the ...
. His father was of
Spanish
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* Items from or related to Spain:
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Other places
* Spanish, Ontario, Can ...
ancestry while his mother was
Quechua
Quechua may refer to:
*Quechua people, several indigenous ethnic groups in South America, especially in Peru
*Quechuan languages, a Native South American language family spoken primarily in the Andes, derived from a common ancestral language
**So ...
. After his father died when he was a child, Barrientos was sent to a Franciscan orphanage. He left the orphanage at 12 and attended a private high school while working odd jobs to pay the tuition. After graduating, he entered the military academy in
La Paz
La Paz (), officially known as Nuestra Señora de La Paz (Spanish pronunciation: ), is the seat of government of the Bolivia, Plurinational State of Bolivia. With an estimated 816,044 residents as of 2020, La Paz is the List of Bolivian cities ...
. He was a career military officer, graduating from the military academy in 1943 and earning his pilot's license in 1945. Later in the 1940s, he gravitated toward the reformist
Revolutionary Nationalist Movement
The Revolutionary Nationalist Movement ( es, Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario , MNR) is a centre-right conservative political party in Bolivia and was the leading force behind the Bolivian National Revolution from 1952 to 1964. It influen ...
(Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario, or MNR) party of
Víctor Paz Estenssoro
Ángel Víctor Paz Estenssoro (2 October 1907 – 7 June 2001) was a Bolivian politician who served as the 45th president of Bolivia for three nonconsecutive and four total terms from 1952 to 1956, 1960 to 1964 and 1985 to 1989. He ran for pre ...
. Barrientos played a part in the
Bolivian National Revolution
The Bolivian Revolution of 1952 (), also known as the Revolution of '52, was a series of political demonstrations led by the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (RNM, MNR), which, in alliance with liberals and communists, sought to overthrow the ...
of 1952, when the MNR toppled the established order and took power. In fact, he was given the honor of flying out of the country to bring back the revolutionary leader
Víctor Paz Estenssoro
Ángel Víctor Paz Estenssoro (2 October 1907 – 7 June 2001) was a Bolivian politician who served as the 45th president of Bolivia for three nonconsecutive and four total terms from 1952 to 1956, 1960 to 1964 and 1985 to 1989. He ran for pre ...
, then in exile, once the rebellion succeeded. In 1957, Barrientos was rewarded when he was named commander of the Bolivian Air Force.
A new kind of general
Known as a rather obsequious, sycophantic supporter of the MNR, he slowly became famous throughout the country for his uncommon, and very public, feats of valor. In 1960, for example, a live parachute jump demonstration by
Bolivian Air Force
The Bolivian Air Force ( es, Fuerza Aérea Boliviana or 'FAB') is the air force of Bolivia and branch of the Bolivian Armed Forces.
History
By 1938 the Bolivian air force consisted of about 60 aircraft (Curtiss Hawk fighters, Curtiss T-32 Co ...
soldiers ended in disaster when their equipment failed and 3 of the 15 parachutists fell to their death before a large crowd assembled to view the event. Recriminations flew as to who should be held responsible for the carnage. Barrientos, as Air Force commander, decided to put on a demonstration of his own, and jumped from an airplane himself using one of the parachutes that had failed to open during the earlier debacle. His point was that there had been nothing wrong with the equipment or the training, simply bad luck; this incident cemented his popularity among certain sections of the population.
Furthermore, the ruling MNR helped prop up his standing, as the MNR leadership constantly extolled General Barrientos' virtues, portraying him as a paragon of the new kind of military officer the revolution had fostered.
By the early 1960s, while the ruling MNR party had begun to fall apart due to personal and policy differences between its leading members, Barrientos' stock was clearly on the rise. In addition, President Paz Estenssoro (elected to a second term in 1960) was leaning more heavily on military support to restore order to various parts of the country where rival pro-MNR militias had turned against each other, often on behalf of specific MNR leaders. Disarming the militias (who had been allowed to keep their weapons since the 1952 Revolution) became a priority to Paz, and this enhanced the role the new armed forces played in the national arena. The most popular of these military leaders was, of course, the dashing Barrientos.
Rise to power
In 1961, Paz Estenssoro had the Bolivian Constitution amended in order to be allowed to run for consecutive re-election, feeling that only he had the standing to keep the crumbling MNR together. Traditionally, attempts such as these (known as "prorroguismo") have been strongly condemned by the Bolivian political elites, many of whose members may have been waiting for their turn to occupy the Presidential palace for years. This was no exception, and Paz's controversial move would soon prove harmful to him. Paz, surprisingly to some, chose General Barrientos as his running mate in that year's elections, and the two were sworn in on 6 August 1964. Just three months later, Barrientos — in tandem with the Army Commander
Alfredo Ovando
Alfredo (, ) is a cognate of the Anglo-Saxon name Alfred and a common Italian, Galician, Portuguese and Spanish language personal name.
People with the given name include:
*Alfredo (born 1946), Brazilian footballer born as Alfredo Mostarda Fil ...
— toppled Paz in a violent coup d'état and installed himself as co-president in a Junta alongside General Ovando.
[''The Cambridge History of Latin America: Latin America since 1930'': Spanish South America, pg 564.]
His idea all along was to capitalize on his popularity and run for elections, with the full support of the Bolivian military establishment now in control of the country. To this end, he resigned his co-presidency in early 1966 and registered himself as a candidate for president in
the general elections that were held in July 1966. With the most important civilian leaders (Paz,
Hernán Siles and
Juan Lechín
Juan Lechín Oquendo (18 May 1914 – 27 August 2001) was a labor-union leader and head of the Federation of Bolivian Mine Workers (FSTMB) from 1944 to 1987 and the Bolivian Workers' Union (COB) from 1952 to 1987. He also served as the 29th vi ...
) in exile, Barrientos was easily elected, and was sworn in during August 1966.
Barrientos as constitutional president
![Ruperto Herboso and René Barrientos](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bc/Ruperto_Herboso_and_Ren%C3%A9_Barrientos.jpeg)
General Barrientos was quite charismatic, and was throughout his presidency popular with ordinary Bolivians, aided by the fluency with which he spoke
Quechua
Quechua may refer to:
*Quechua people, several indigenous ethnic groups in South America, especially in Peru
*Quechuan languages, a Native South American language family spoken primarily in the Andes, derived from a common ancestral language
**So ...
, the most important native language among the Bolivian peasantry.
Barrientos was skilled at manipulating the masses with his oratory, which often allowed him to present himself as both a populist and conservative, a revolutionary and a "law-and-order" advocate. Purporting to be a staunch Christian, Barrientos actively courted the church, and in fact, chose as his running mate in the 1966 elections the leader of the small Christian Democrat Party of Bolivia, Dr.
Luis Adolfo Siles. He was fiercely
anti-communist
Anti-communism is Political movement, political and Ideology, ideological opposition to communism. Organized anti-communism developed after the 1917 October Revolution in the Russian Empire, and it reached global dimensions during the Cold War, w ...
and pro-free market. Accepting more military aid and acquiescing to the training of special forces designed to combat possible communist-inspired insurgencies (under the aegis of the
Alliance for Progress
The Alliance for Progress ( es, Alianza para el Progreso, links=no), initiated by U.S. President John F. Kennedy on March 13, 1961, ostensibly aimed to establish economic cooperation between the U.S. and Latin America. Governor Luis Muñoz Marín ...
) made Barrientos particularly popular with Washington.
The 1967 guerrilla insurgency
Barrientos had ample opportunity to prove his anti-Communist credentials in 1967, when a guerrilla force was discovered to be operating in the Bolivian southeast under the leadership of the Argentine-Cuban revolutionary
Ernesto "Che" Guevara
Ernesto Che Guevara (; 14 June 1928The date of birth recorded on /upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/Ernesto_Guevara_Acta_de_Nacimiento.jpg his birth certificatewas 14 June 1928, although one tertiary source, (Julia Constenla, quoted ...
in the Bolivian jungle. Barrientos was very concerned with Guevara's alleged popularity among the miners in the southwestern part of the country, and clamped down in the area with some very heavy-handed measures (such as the
San Juan massacre). Guevara felt that such an atrocity by the Bolivian Army and Air Force would be the tipping point in his favour in rallying the miners to his communist cause, but eventually the miners signed an agreement with the government-owned mining company
Siglo XX, which agreement Guevara felt undermined his reason for being there. The war between the national forces under President Barrientos and Che Guevara's militia did not end there, but eventually the Bolivian Army Rangers captured Guevara and executed him in October 1967. Barrientos had directly ordered Guevara's execution after his capture.
Political troubles and Barrientos' death
While temporarily enhancing the president's stature, this only started more troubles for Barrientos. While the army was fighting the guerrillas, the miners of Siglo XX (a state-owned Bolivian mining town) declared themselves in support of the insurgency, prompting the president to send troops to regain control. This led to the San Juan massacre, when soldiers opened fire on the miners and killed around 30 men and women on Saint John's Day, called Día de San Juan in Spanish, 24 June 1967. Further, a major scandal erupted in 1968 when Barrientos' trusted friend and Minister of Interior, Antonio Arguedas, disappeared with the captured diary of Che Guevara, which soon surfaced in, of all places,
Havana
Havana (; Spanish: ''La Habana'' ) is the capital and largest city of Cuba. The heart of the La Habana Province, Havana is the country's main port and commercial center. . From abroad, Arguedas confessed himself to have been a clandestine
Marxist
Marxism is a Left-wing politics, left-wing to Far-left politics, far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a Materialism, materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand S ...
supporter, denouncing Barrientos and many of his aides as being on the
CIA
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian intelligence agency, foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gat ...
's payroll. The episode embarrassed the administration and cast doubts about the president's judgment (after all, it was he who was friends with, and had appointed, Arguedas to the most important ministry post in the government).
Antonio Arguedas obituary, ''The Guardian,'' Feb. 29, 2000.
/ref>
In the aftermath of the mining massacres and anti-guerrilla campaign, Barrientos was seen by some as a brutal dictator at the service of foreign interests while masquerading as a democrat. Eager to do some damage control and repair his once-excellent relations with the campesinos, Bolivian farm workers, the president took to traveling throughout the country to present his position, even to the smallest and remotest of Bolivian villages. It was a tactic that had yielded him good results in the past and Barrientos hoped to rebuild his political capital. However, on 27 April 1969, when flying into Arque Municipality
Arque Municipality is the first municipal section of the Arque Province in the Cochabamba Department, Bolivia. Its seat is Arque. At the time of census 2001 the municipality had 11,806 inhabitants. , Cochabamba Department
Cochabamba ( ay, Quchapampa Jach'a Suyu, es, Departamento de Cochabamba , qu, Quchapampa Suyu), from Quechua ''qucha'' or ''qhucha'', meaning "lake", ''pampa'' meaning "plain", is one of the nine departments of Bolivia. It is known to be the ...
, he was killed in a helicopter crash. An assassination has been considered a possibility but never proven.
Notes
References
*Mesa José de; Gisbert, Teresa; and Carlos D. Mesa, "Historia De Bolivia," 5th edition.
*Prado Salmon, Gral. Gary. "Poder y Fuerzas Armadas, 1949-1982."
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Barrientos, Rene
1919 births
1969 deaths
20th-century Bolivian politicians
Bolivian aviators
Bolivian generals
Bolivian anti-communists
Bolivian people of Quechua descent
Bolivian people of Spanish descent
Che Guevara
Leaders who took power by coup
Military College of the Army alumni
People from Esteban Arce Province
Politicians of Quechua descent
Presidents of Bolivia
State leaders killed in aviation accidents or incidents
Vice presidents of Bolivia
Victims of aviation accidents or incidents in Bolivia
Victims of aviation accidents or incidents in 1969
Victims of helicopter accidents or incidents