Germán Busch
Germán Busch was president of Bolivia from July 1937, when he deposed the colonel he had put in the year before, to August 1939, when he shot himself in his bedroom at thirty-six. He was the Chaco war's young hero, the officer who had led the raid that captured the Bolivian army's own deserting president in 1934 and the retreat that saved the army at Villamontes. He was the president the country's left remembers as the one who tried, before the revolution of 1952, to take the tin from the tin barons. He was a Beni frontiersman's son of German descent. He was an academy officer at twenty-three. The war of 1932 to 1935 made him, at thirty, the most decorated man in the army and the leader of the young officers who came back from the Chaco believing that the oligarchy that had sent them there had to go. The coup of May 1936 against the Liberal government, and Toro's military socialism, and then Busch's own coup against Toro in July 1937 were meant to arrange that. The two years were the constitution of 1938, written by a convention in which the new parties of the left sat, which made the state's ownership of the subsoil explicit and the social function of property the law. There was the labour code of 1939 that the country still uses. The Standard Oil concession confiscated by Toro was kept, and the school for the Indians at Warisata protected. In June 1939 came the decree that the tin companies must sell all their foreign exchange to the central bank. That was the first blow struck at Patiño, Hochschild and Aramayo, who owned the country. The companies were arranging to have it withdrawn when he died. He had declared himself dictator in April 1939. He dissolved the Congress he had called. He found that the state he had taken did not obey him. On the night of 23 August, after a dinner with his brother-in-law and friends and, the reports said, a good deal of drink, he went to his room and shot himself in the head. The left has never believed it was his own hand, and the investigation found it was. He was born in San Javier, in the Beni. The department of the Beni's capital province is named for him. The MNR, which took the tin in 1952, took his name for its saint. That is what the country does with the ones who die in office young.
- Lived: 1903 CE – 1939 CE
- Nationality: Bolivian
- Roles: president, army officer
