NAZI INTRIGUE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 31 December 1943, Page 4

NAZI INTRIGUE

SOUTH AMERICAN REPUBLIC POLITICS IN BOLIVIA. IMPORTANCE OF MINERALS. Economic relations with the United States, recent labour troubles and possibly also Nazi intrigue are believed to be factors in the political upheaval in Bolivia, whereby the President, General Penaranda, has been removed from power. This South American republic has had 14 Presidents since the beginning of the century, and General Penaranda is the sixth of them to be deposed. A seventh, Lieutenant-General German Busch, died mysteriously from a pistol shot in August, 1939, four months after he had proclaimed a totalitarian state and suppressed the Constitution, which was restored after his death. GREAT MINERAL WEALTH. Bolivia is 506,000 -square miles in area, with no coastline, and has a population of 3,250,000. It is extraordinarily rich in minerals and ranks next after Malaya as a producer of tin. It is the world’s chief source of antimony and is of great importance to the United States for a number of other strategic materials. It has an expanding oil production, from which the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey was expropriated in 1937 by a military junta, a compensation agreement being negotiated later. For three years from July, 1932, Bolivia was at war with Paraguay over the Gran Chaco boundary dispute, which was eventually settled by arbitration in 1938. GERMAN INFILTRATION. At the outbreak of the present war American and German interests were carrying on a political and economic tug-of-war in the republic. For a number of years the army had had German instructors, including at one time the notorious Captain Ernst Roehm. Air transport was a monopoly of the German Lloyd Aero, and it was estimated that in 1939 there were 8000 Germans in the country, which was recognised to be militarily and politically the strategic key to South America. > . General Penaranda, who had been commander-in-chief of the army since 1933, was elected president in March, 1940, by a large majority, over a Socialist opponent, Dr. Jose Arze, all of whose 4900 votes were declared void on the strange ground that he had not fought in the Gran Chaco war. COUP AGAINST NAZIS. In July, 1941, the President invoked the army’s support in breaking the hold of the Nazis, who were trying to undermine public order. He declared a state of siege, expelled the German Ambasador and imprisoned Nazi sympathisers. Four days after Pearl Harbour, Bolivia declared wal - on Japan, and a little later broke off relations with the Axis. She declared war on Germany and Italy last April. In the course of 1942 the United States made an important trade agreement affecting metals, rubber and drugs, but labour interests in Bolivia, representing the ill-paid and downtrodden Indian mine workers, attacked “dollar diplomacy,” and at the end of the year there was a strike of 10,000 tin miners, which the Government alleged to have been fomented from Berlin. The upshot was that the United States sent a mission of labour experts, and a joint commission planned a number of industrial reforms. Other difficulties were believed to have been smoothed out when President Penaranda visited Washington in May. Emphasis was placed upon a declaration by President Roosevelt that future American loans to foreign countries would be made by State agencies and not by private corporations.