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Part One Hundred Thirty-Eight: Turn of the Century South America

Bolivia's Aristocratic Republic:
The late 19th century is widely regarded as the height of Bolivia's power in South America and an era of prosperity and stability for the Andean country. After a rocky start during the split of the Peru-Bolivia Confederation after independence, the economic fortunes of Bolivia soared in the middle of the century. Mining and basic industry in the western half of the country and nitrate production in the southwest triggered an economic boom in the 1860s and 1870s that allowed Bolivia to become one of the great powers of the South American continent. The economic boom was combined with the political leadership of Narciso Campero. Campero came to power in 1867 in a coup overthrowing the short-lived presidency of Mariano Melgarejo, who himself overthrew Manuel Isidoro Belzu, a populist authoritarian leader who had ruled Bolivia for nearly a decade.

After the ouster of Mariano Melgarejo, Narciso Campero took a leading role in reestablishing regular political institutions in the country. Campero attempted to rule outside of any politics as the head of a broad unified Partido Nacional. For the most part, Campero was successful in this role and under his rule stability and success returned to Bolivia. Campero was elected to the presidency in 1868 and 1872 with wide majorities with few complications. Though the property restrictions and lack of suffrage for indigenous Bolivians mar the fairness of the elections during this period from a modern perspective, Campero was frequently compared to Simón Bolívar and George Washington at the time in his efforts to entrench democracy in the Andean nation.

Narciso Campero stepped down from the presidency in 1880 after serving three terms. In his stead, Campero's hand selected Vice President Nicolás de Piérola succeeded him in the presidency[1]. De Piérola continued to lead Bolivia with little opposition in the Congress. However, Campero stayed a close adviser to de Piérola and was appointed supreme military commander during the Bolivian intervention in the Platinean War. De Piérola took advantage of Bolivia's strong economic and military position to assist Mokoguay and Tucuman against Argentina, cementing Bolivia's position as a premier power on the continent. During de Piérola's presidency, Bolivia also used its vast mineral wealth to begin issuing the Bolivian libra, a silver currency that gained wide use throughout South America and gave Bolivia unprecedented monetary stability in the late 19th century[2].

While Nicolás de Piérola secured Bolivia's position of power in South America, his successors began a slide toward corruption. Following de Piérola, the Partido Nacional came to be dominated by two men; Gregorio Pacheco and Aniceto Arce, who frequently traded off presidential terms during the 1880s and 1890s. Both presidents had made their fortunes in Bolivia's lucrative silver industry and by the 1880s had become two of the wealthiest men in Bolivia. Pacheco enacted some reforms with support of the Partido Liberal in the Bolivian Congress such as granting indigenous men the right to vote, and removing the property qualification for municipal elections. However, elections to the presidency and to both chambers of the Bolivian Congress still had literacy and property requirements, so most lower class Bolivians still could not vote in national elections.

Bolivia's long run of stability that coincided with the dominance of the Partido Nacional ended abruptly in the early 20th century. The outbreak of the Great War, while it had not directly involved Bolivia, led to a global economic downturn and a protracted recession in Bolivia. Additionally, the stability of alternating presidencies from Gregorio Pacheco and Aniceto Arce had ended with the deaths of Pacheco in 1899 and Arce in 1904. The continued dominance of the business elite in Bolivian politics, and especially the sale of important resource interests to foreign companies around the turn of the century ignited resentment of the current elite among both the working classes and the indigenous peoples of Bolivia, two groups which frequently overlapped. A drought in 1911 and the assassination of President Mariano Baptista led to mass protests in the rural highland regions, centered around Oruro and Cochabamba. By the next year, the protests had become organized into a full scale insurgency.

The insurgency was led by two members of the Bolivian military: general Bautista Saavedra Mallea[3] and Colonel Pablo Zarate Willka. Saavedra and Willka declared the Bolivian government unjust due to its treatment of the Aymara and Quechua populations and defected to organize a revolutionary guerrilla force in central Bolivia. After the occupation of a wide swath of territory by the guerrillas near Oruro, communication from the capital of Sucre was cut off from much of the rest of the country. Rather than make a push for the capital, Willka and Saavedra pushed north, taking La Paz, Sorata, and Puno, securing much of the area surrounding Lake Titicaca. After the capture of La Paz, Willka and Saavedra set up a provisional junta in the city. Saavedra was the clear leader of the junta, evoking the memory of Tupac and Tomás Katari in Saavedra and Willka to gain a greater following among the people. With Saavedra, a significant chunk of the Bolivian military had defected to the revolutionary forces and they now were poised to take over Sucre.

With the rise of the revolutionary forces, the Bolivian Revolution ended its first phase as Bautista Saavedra outmaneuvered Willka in the provisional junta in La Paz. Saavedra had the loyalty of much of the defecting military forces and launched a dual attack south against Sucre and west against Arequipa to secure the central corridor of Bolivia, and with it, control over the country. Many of the old elite fled Bolivia as the revolutionary army approached, going to Peru or Tucuman. However, soon after the overthrow of the Bolivian government by Willka and Saavedra, the two leaders began to split and feud regarding the future of the new government. Saavedra wanted to secure power in a strong central government, clearly seeing himself as an authoritarian voice for the people. Willka, aligned with other members of the junta such as Guillermo Billinghurst, Jenaro Reinaga, and Alejandra Chavarria[4], wanted to build a strong civil institutions and a new liberal constitution that would protect the rights of the indigenous peoples of Bolivia.

When Saavedra saw the majority of the new Bolivian government turning against him, he proclaimed himself president of Bolivia in an attempted coup against the ruling junta. Saavedra's loyal forces briefly maintained control over much of Bolivia, but pockets of resistance, especially the coastal region which was still held by forces loyal to the pre-revolutionary government, quickly weakened Saavedra's position. In 1913, Saavedra was killed in a battle at the plain of El Alto outside of La Paz as the two factions of the Bolivian Revolutionary forces fought for control of the new capital. Following Saavedra's death, the rest of the military mostly fell in line with the governing junta. The Convention of La Paz formally established a new Bolivian government and constitution with very progressive reforms. Billinghurst was a major influence on the new constitution, inserting Morelian language into the constitution regarding promises of land rights for indigenous peoples and language combining both Catholic and indigenous religious teachings. However, the new Bolivian constitution went even further. Alejandra Chavarria, great-great-granddaughter of Tomás Katari, helped enshrined the rights of women and women's suffrage in the Bolivian constitution, as well as bringing further merit to the adoption of "katarismo" and the connection of the Bolivian Revolution to the indigenous rebellions against Spanish colonial rule. In 1917, for the first elections of the new Bolivia, the three leaders created the Partido Revolucionario Institucional. Guillermo Billinghurst became the first leader of the PRI after Willka declined, and was elected the first President of Bolivia under the La Paz Constitution. Billinghurst retained a high popularity throughout his presidency and his administration began the dominance of the populist PRI in Bolivia for decades to follow.


The Platinean Miracle:
The decades preceding the turn of the 20th century were a transformative time for much of South America, not just for Bolivia. With the unification of Mokoguay under the leadership of Paraguayan Francisco Solano López, there was now a powerful counterweight to both Brazil and Argentina in the influence around the Rio de la Plata. Solano López was the younger member of a political dynasty that had ruled Paraguay for nearly forty years before the creation of Mokoguay, and the near dictator was eager to expand his power in South America. The federal crisis in Argentina and the alliance with the Rio Grande Republic and Uruguay laid the groundwork, but Argentina's closure of the Parana River to the free flow of international commerce in 1882 provided the trigger for the Platinean War that let President Lopez fully flex Paraguay's military might.

Few observers had expected the Mokoguayan nations to perform well in the Platinean War initially as Argentina had the upper hand at the start of the war. However, many international observers underestimated the Paraguayan industrial miracle Francisco Solano Lopez had engineered. The Paraguayan dictator attracted enormous foreign investment during the 1860s and 1870s, exploiting Paraguay's abundance of natural resources to jump start his nation's economy. Lopez managed to court both British and French investment, despite the enmity between the two countries, and used the two nations to encourage exports from Paraguay and internal development. One of the first railroad and telegraph networks in South America was completed in 1865 between the newly constructed steel factory at Ybycui[5] and the capital of Asuncion. This industrialization along with the neutrality of Brazil during the Platinean War greatly aided Mokoguay in turning the tide against Argentina in the 1880s.

Once the Platinean War came to a close and Mokoguay affirmed its independence and sovereign status, the question turned to the governance of the nation. Politicians in Monteivdeo and Porto Alegre were immediately voiced concern over the potential dominance of Paraguay and particularly López in Mokoguay's government, especially when Francisco Solano López asserted himself as Mokoguay's first president with a slim approval from the founding Congress of Asuncion. To assuage the other states' fears of Paraguayan dominance, President Lopez presented them with a compromise in the form of nominating Uruguayan José Eugenio Ellauri as his Vice President. This was a deliberate choice by López; Ellauri was seen as a weak leader who could serve as a rubber stamp for López even if he was required to step down from power. It is thus fortunate for the young nation that Francisco Solano López died in 1884, just a year into his formal term as President of Mokoguay.

José Eugenio Ellauri became the second President of Mokoguay and his rule proved just as weak as López had thought. However, with the Mokoguayan Congress directing Ellauri's movements, the danger of an authoritarian ruler taking over the country was avoided. A brief National Coalition government established a new constitution in 1886, taking inspiration from the American and Bolivian constitutions of the time in its drafting. During the 1890s and early 1900s, the Colorado Party and the Liberal Party formed as the two major parties in Mokoguay. While the exception of the Liberal presidency of Gaspar de Silveira Martins from 1894 to 1902, however, the Colorado Party held the presidency from 1886 to 1930.

The Partido Colorado was the dominant political party in Mokoguay during this early period largely because of its role in the rapid pace of Mokoguay's industrialization known as the Platinean Miracle. While Francisco Solano López had begun the boom of the Mokoguayan economy in Paraguay, it would be later leaders and the relative stability of the country that would spread this rapid industrialization to the rest of the country. One of the most prominent and impactful leaders of Mokoguay during the Miracle era was Jose Batile y Ordoñez. Batile, noticing the success of Paraguay's industry decades earlier, repeated the nationalist industrialization for other areas. The railroads were extended from Asuncion to connect to Mokoguay's major port cities including Porto Alegre and Montevideo. This was a very auspicious moment to improve the country's infrastructure. The Brazilian Civil War in 1905 and its aftermath made Mokoguay a much more appealing entrepot for goods heading into and out of South America. Additionally, the Great War made domestic manufacturing much more useful than relying on finished goods coming in from across the Atlantic, and made Mokoguayan goods valuable throughout the continent. Batile also made improvements to the administration of Mokoguay's federal and state governments. To ensure all three members had a stake in the country's governance, the executive offices were moved from Asuncion to Montevideo and the seat of the national judiciary was relocated in Porto Alegre. This was also intended to protect the country in times of war, as the de facto seat of government could be set up in any of the three cities if needed. A further proposal by Batile to establish a National Council was defeated by the national legislature[6].

During Batile's presidency, another young politician and jurist was rising through the political ranks and would soon enter on the political stage. Born in Sao Borja on the left bank of the Uruguay River, Getulio Vargas quickly rose through the ranks of lawyers in Porto Alegre[7]. Vargas became a renowned legal orator and scholar, especially after arguing a number of cases in Porto Alegre following the judiciary's move to the Riograndense city. Shortly afterward, the young Vargas entered politics, being elected as a member of the Partido Colorado to the General Assembly of Rio Grande and six years later to the National Assembly. In many ways, Vargas was similar in outlook to Batile. Both were Mokoguayan nationalists and vehemently opposed both European meddling in the country's affairs and attempts by Mokoguay's neighbors to influence the direction of the fledgling country. Vargas, like Batile, thought state investment in public enterprises was the best way to improve Mokoguay's economy and to strengthen the economy from the danger of foreign influence. However, Vargas sometimes felt the state needed more control of the economy than even Batile and following Colorado presidents were willing to permit. In 1928, Getulio Vargas led a break by a large group of legislators from the Partido Colorado, not to join the Liberals, but to form their own Partido Popular. The Partido Popular was similar to the PRI in Bolivia in many ways, and in the elections of 1930 surged to an unexpected victory in the polls largely at the expense of the Liberals. In 1930, Getulio Vargas was elected President of Mokoguay and ended the nearly half century dominance of the Partido Colorado.

[1] I tried to use a mix of not just OTL Bolivians but people who would have been in TTL’s Bolivia but not OTL as well. For example, Nicolas de Pierola was from Arequipa and was president of Peru in OTL.
[2] In OTL, de Pierola did mint a libra currency in Peru. Tied to the pound, the Peruvian libra did indeed give Peru a prolonged period of economic stability during the late 19th century.
[3] I don’t think OTL Saavedra quite fits the equivalent personality I wanted here, but I went for a more “means to an end” scheming for Saavedra’s involvement in assisting Willka.
[4] Jenaro Reinaga and Alejandra Chavarria were the parents of Fausto Reinaga, an early forerunner in the modern Bolivian indigenist movement and an inspiration for OTL katarismo.
[5] Ybycui was indeed the location of the steel factory in Paraguay that helped Paraguay industrialize quickly before the War of the Triple Alliance.
[6] Batile also proposed a National Council on the Swiss model for Uruguay in OTL, but it was rejected by popular referendum. Uruguay did eventually have a National Council of Government instead of a single office of president between 1952 and 1967.
[7] While he was descended from paulistas, Getulio Vargas was born in Sao Borja and did grow up and start his career in Rio Grande do Sul. Also the “left bank vs. right bank” of the Uruguay River ITTL is a good sign of whether you speak Portoñol or Spanish, though Uruguay is much more mixed.