Gualberto Villarroel
Gualberto Villarroel was president of Bolivia from December 1943, when the young officers' lodge Razón de Patria and the MNR took the palace in a night, to July 1946, when a crowd took it in a day, dragged him from his office and hanged him from a lamppost in the Plaza Murillo, where the lamppost is still shown. He was the major of thirty-five whom the country's revolution of 1952 made a martyr. The Americans had called his government fascist and refused to recognise it for six months. He was a Chaco veteran from Cochabamba. He was a major of the RADEPA lodge that the officers had formed in the Bolivian prison camps of Paraguay. The coup of 20 December 1943 against the tin barons' president Peñaranda was the lodge's with the MNR of Paz Estenssoro as its civilian half. Washington read it, in the middle of the war, as an Argentine and German plot, and made the country wait for recognition until the Nazis in the cabinet had been removed, which they were. The government was the one that the revolution of 1952 finished. There was the first national Indian congress, held in La Paz in May 1945 with a thousand delegates, at which the president abolished the pongueaje, the unpaid labour the haciendas took from their Indians, which the haciendas ignored and the Indians remembered. There was the mine workers' federation founded at Huanuni in 1944 under Lechín, which was the state's ally and became the state's other power. There were the labour code enforced against the tin companies; the railway workers' and the teachers' pay, and the murders, the opposition politicians and the Chaco general Luis Oblitas taken from their beds in November 1944 and shot at Chuspipata on the road to the Yungas, which was the thing the government's enemies had to point to and did. The end was the teachers' strike of July 1946, the students' demonstrations, the police that would not fire, the crowd that entered the palace on the 21st, and the president who had told his guards not to shoot and was thrown from the balcony and hanged with two of his aides, with the mob the tin companies' newspapers had called for, though not the companies. He was born in Villa Rivero, Cochabamba. The MNR, when it took the country six years later, made him the revolution's precursor. His body was moved to a mausoleum in the cemetery of La Paz. The lamppost is the monument.
- Lived: 1908 CE – 1946 CE
- Nationality: Bolivian
- Roles: president, army officer
