Hugo Banzer
Hugo Banzer was president of Bolivia twice, from 1971 to 1978 as the dictator who had taken power in a coup with the MNR's and the Falange's support and Brazil's, and from 1997 to 2001 as the elected president his party's votes in congress made him. He was the colonel from Santa Cruz whose seven years were the longest single rule since the 1880s. It was the most prosperous, on the tin and oil prices of the 1970s and the loans that followed, with the lowland east opened to soybeans, cotton and cattle and the city of Santa Cruz made the country's second. It was the most repressive since the Chaco, with the universities closed for two years. The unions and parties were banned in 1974 when he dispensed with his civilian allies. There was the massacre of peasants at Tolata in 1974, some two hundred dead by the Church's count and fifteen thousand political prisoners, and the country's place in Operation Condor, the exchange of prisoners and killers among the dictatorships, in which the former president Torres was murdered in Buenos Aires in 1976. The hunger strike of four miners' wives in December 1977 grew to a thousand people in three weeks and forced the amnesty and the election he lost control of in 1978 to a fraud so gross his own candidate annulled it. He was born in Concepción in the Chiquitania in 1926, went through the military college and the School of the Americas in Panama and the armoured cavalry school at Fort Hood. He was Barrientos's education minister. He led the rising of August 1971 that overthrew the leftist General Torres after three days of fighting in La Paz. He founded the Nationalist Democratic Action party in 1979 and ran in every election afterwards. He came first in 1985 and 1989 and was denied by the congress each time, until in 1997 the congress chose him. The second presidency was the coca eradication in the Chapare with American money and soldiers, the Plan Dignidad, which cut the crop by ninety per cent and made Evo Morales. There was the water war of Cochabamba in April 2000 against the privatised utility that ended in the company's expulsion, and the lung cancer that made him resign in August 2001 to his vice-president. He died in Santa Cruz in May 2002. The country's argument about him, the developer or the torturer, was settled by the Chiquitano and Cruceño elites who kept his name on the airport and the highlanders who did not.
- Lived: 1926 CE – 2002 CE
- Nationality: Bolivian
- Roles: president, general, dictator
