Víctor Paz Estenssoro
Víctor Paz Estenssoro was president of Bolivia four times, in 1952-56, 1960-64, for three months in 1964 and in 1985-89, the founder of the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement, the MNR, who came home from exile in Argentina in April 1952 to lead the revolution the tin miners had made in three days of fighting in La Paz. His first government nationalised the three tin barons' mines. It gave the vote to everyone over twenty-one whether or not they could read, which multiplied the electorate by five. It broke up the haciendas in the agrarian reform of 1953 that gave the highland Indians the land they worked. It dissolved the army and armed the miners' militias, and rebuilt the army with American money when the militias became the problem. The fourth government, thirty-three years later, at seventy-seven, undid the first. The decree 21060 of August 1985 ended the hyperinflation of twenty-four thousand per cent by freezing wages, freeing prices, floating the currency and closing the state tin mines. It dismissed twenty-three thousand miners whose march on La Paz in 1986 he stopped with a state of siege. It was the shock therapy that Jeffrey Sachs designed at twenty-nine and that became the model for Poland and Russia. He was born in Tarija in 1907, studied law and economics at San Andrés, fought in the Chaco war against Paraguay in 1932-35, which made the generation that founded the MNR in 1941. He was finance minister under the nationalist colonels of the 1940s and was exiled when they fell. He won the election of 1951 from Buenos Aires, which the army annulled and the miners then enforced. The second government was the alliance with Washington and the IMF, the stabilisation of 1956 that the miners fought, and the constitutional change that let him run again in 1964. There was the coup of his own vice-president, General Barrientos, that November, which sent him to Lima for seven years. He backed Banzer's coup of 1971 and lost the elections of 1979 and 1980 to Siles. He won that of 1985 in the congress with the third-largest vote. He retired to Tarija in 1989. He died there in June 2001 at ninety-three, the man who had made the Bolivian state twice, in opposite directions, and whose party's next president, Sánchez de Lozada, was chased from the country by the miners' grandchildren.
- Lived: 1907 CE – 2001 CE
- Nationality: Bolivian
- Roles: president, politician
