Robert Niebuhr. ¡Vamos a Avanzar! The Chaco War and Bolivia's Political Transformation, 1899–1952. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. Illustrations, maps, table. 292 pp. $60.00 (e-book), ISBN 978-1-4962-2746-1; $60.00 (pdf), ISBN 978-1-4962-2748-5; $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4962-0778-4.
Reviewed by Elena McGrath (Union College)
Published on H-LatAm (September, 2022)
Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University)
The Chaco War and the Challenge of Popular Politics
The Chaco War was the deadliest war between two Latin American nations in the twentieth century, with upward of one hundred thousand casualties on the two sides combined. The war devastated Bolivia, with huge numbers of men mobilized and a significant number of casualties coming from hunger, thirst, and disease rather than bullets. Bolivia’s military defeat, despite starting the war with a stronger economy and a better equipped, larger army, stings popular memory to this day. One of the dominant narratives to come out of the war, aside from blaming foreign oil companies for provoking the conflict itself, is the perpetual refrain that Bolivia lost the war because its soldiers, many of whom were indigenous conscripts from small villages, had no concept of the nation that they were fighting for. As the story goes, the Chaco War produced a new generation of modernizers and reformers who sought to include indigenous Bolivians in the nation for the first time; it was this generation that would lead the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR) to transform Bolivia in the revolution of 1952.
Robert Niebuhr’s ¡Vamos a Avanzar! The Chaco War and Bolivia’s Political Transformation, 1899-1952, has two main aims. The first is to set the Chaco War within a wider international context, making comparisons with Europe during World War I and other Latin American and global cases. The second is to convey a longer history of attempts at modernizing, inclusive state projects on the part of Bolivian elites that predate the revolution of 1952. In both cases, Niebuhr’s book shows the important role of military mobilization in enabling such modernizing projects.
The first chapter offers a look at Bolivia in the early decades of the twentieth century and shows how desires to reform the Bolivian system, what Niehbur calls “emotion-based politics,” emerged as a series of unfulfilled elite promises to popular groups. Chapters 2 and 3 offer an account of the course of the war itself, while chapters 4 and 5 focus on the aftermath, emphasizing the role of veterans and dissident officers in Bolivian politics during the years between the end of the Chaco War and the 1952 revolution. Throughout, Niebuhr makes comparisons to other cases that he finds relevant, from US Reconstruction-era politics to the Boxer Rebellion.
Niebuhr professes, admirably, that his book “refuses to ignore the subaltern,” but he nonetheless claims to find little evidence of their influence in elite politics in the archive (p. 6). To this end, he expresses a “hope that future research will uncover more concrete examples that show how subaltern actors interfaced with the growing public spaces in early twentieth-century Bolivia” (p. 13). This literature exists, in both English and Spanish. Niebuhr is absolutely correct, but he is also not the first to argue that the MNR of 1952 was not the first generation to attempt to integrate popular groups into the nation. There is a wealth of scholarship, in both English and Spanish, that directly engages with Bolivian modernization projects between the 1899 civil war and the revolution of 1952. Some, like Elizabeth Shesko’s Conscript Nation: Coercion and Citizenship in the Bolivian Barracks (2020) and Stephen Cote’s Oil and Nation: A History of Bolivia’s Petroleum Sector (2016), engage directly with the role of the Chaco War and the military in Bolivia’s political transformations, using careful archival research to detail the interaction between elites and popular groups. Others, such as Luis Sierra’s La Paz’s Colonial Specters: Urbanization, Migration, and Indigenous Political Participation, 1900-52 (2021), E. Gabrielle Kuenzli’s Acting Inca: National Belonging in Early Twentieth-Century Bolivia (2013), and Laura Gotkowitz’s Revolution for Our Rights: Indigenous Struggles for Land and Justice in Bolivia, 1880-1952 (2008), highlight the demands of indigenous political actors and their ability to transform Bolivian politics long before 1952. Niebuhr cites much of this work but seems to ignore its implications, many of which complicate the very idea of a single group of elites or a coherent subaltern.
¡Vamos a Avanzar! thus appears to confuse a claim made by elites with the reality on the ground. By taking such claims at face value, Niebuhr misses an important piece of the story, one that would make very interesting fodder for international comparison: one of the central features of Bolivian politics has been a professed desire to incorporate new actors while actively suppressing or working to contain those demanding political space in the present. The Bolivian government used conscription into the armies of the Chaco to break peasant and worker unions and urban anarchist movements while blaming those same conscripts for their lack of political awareness. What a real comparison between Bolivia and other Latin American or global cases might show is how pervasive, sticky, and politically useful this view of Bolivian history actually is. Instead of elites “awakening the subaltern” from political slumber, as Niebuhr argues in the first chapter, Bolivian history is full of examples of subalterns trying to shake Bolivian elites into action prior to the revolution of 1952.
¡Vamos a Avanzar! does show how generation after generation of reformers across the ideological spectrum spoke in terms of the same project: to integrate the people into the nation, long before either the MNR of 1952 or Evo Morales in the twenty-first century. This was, as he shows, a useful way of creating a shared national project out of a diverse populace but not an easy way to sustain a political coalition. Niebuhr also shows some of the ways military mobilization gave the Bolivian state new tools to control both space and people, which made mid-century attempts at popular co-optation more effective. That said, Bolivian populism was not the product of elites discovering the people and the people discovering the nation during an episode of wartime, as Niebuhr concludes, but a product of struggles to define who constituted the “people” of the Bolivian nation and on whose terms political priorities would be set across two centuries. These struggles involved more than just oppositions between subalterns and elites but were always inflected by competing regional, gendered, class, and ethnic interests. The struggle over who gets to be part of the Bolivian nation continues to this day, as recent political controversies in Bolivia continue to demonstrate.
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Citation:
Elena McGrath. Review of Niebuhr, Robert, ¡Vamos a Avanzar! The Chaco War and Bolivia's Political Transformation, 1899–1952.
H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews.
September, 2022.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=57321
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