Exclusive: The U.S. Paid Money to Support Hugo Banzer’s 1971 Coup in Bolivia
For nearly four decades, there’s been an open question about the 1971 coup that brought dictator Hugo Banzer Suárez to power in Bolivia: was the U.S. government involved? Thanks to newly declassified documents, we now have an answer.
Banzer was a dictator of Bolivia from 1971-8 and a democratically elected president from 1997-2001. His three-day coup in August 1971 was significant not only for the fighting that accompanied it, which left 110 dead and 600 wounded, but for the seven-year regime that followed, one of the most repressive in Bolivia’s history. Under Banzer’s rule, more than 14,000 Bolivians were arrested without a judicial order, more than 8,000 were tortured—with electricity, water, beatings—and more than 200 were executed or disappeared. (I’m writing a long article about the legacy of the regime for Narrative Magazine. It will hopefully be out by the end of the year.)
American support for Banzer before and after the coup was never in doubt. He had trained at the School of the Americas in Panama and the Armored Cavalry School in Texas, and in the late 60s served as military attaché in Washington. In the five months after he ousted left-wing dictator General Juan José Torres, Banzer was rewarded with $50 million in grants and aid from the Nixon Administration.
But while U.S. support for Banzer during the coup has been widely assumed among Bolivians and historians of Latin America, the only proof (until now) was a Washington Post report published a week after the event, which said that U.S. Air Force Major Robert J. Lundin had advised the plotters and lent them a long-range radio. The report was never substantiated, however, and the State Department denied it immediately, asserting unequivocally that the U.S. played no part in the overthrow of Torres.
A collection of declassified documents recently released* by the same State Department proves that this denial was not only incorrect, but a lie: the Nixon Administration, acting with the full knowledge of the State Department, authorized nearly half a million dollars—”coup money,” according to the ambassador in La Paz—for the politicians and military officers plotting against Torres. The CIA handed at least some of this money over to the coup’s leaders in the days leading up to Banzer’s seizure of power.
Minutes from a July 8, 1971 meeting of the 40 Committee (an executive-branch group chaired by Henry Kissinger and tasked with oversight of covert operations) included discussion of a CIA proposal to give $410,000 to a group of opposition politicians and military leaders, money that they knew would be used to overthrow Torres. (Under Secretary of State U. Alexis Johnson: “what we are actually organizing is a coup in itself, isn’t it?”) Though the committee decided to wait to hear from Ambassador Ernest Siracusa (he opposed the measure) the plan was ultimately approved. The same day that the coup began in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, an NSC staffer reported to Kissinger that the CIA had transferred money to two high-ranking members of the opposition.
The CIA proposal had its roots in a June conversation between Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, when they decided that Torres’s overtures to the Bolivian left wing had gone too far:
Kissinger: We are having a major problem in Bolivia, too. And—
Nixon: I got that. Connally mentioned that. What do you want to do about that?
Kissinger: I’ve told [CIA Deputy Director of Plans Thomas] Karamessines to crank up an operation, post-haste. Even the Ambassador there, who’s been a softy, is now saying that we must start playing with the military there or the thing is going to go down the drain.
Nixon: Yeah.
Kissinger: That’s due in on Monday.
Nixon: What does Karamessines think we need? A coup?
Kissinger: We’ll see what we can, whether—in what context. They’re going to squeeze us out in another two months. They’ve already gotten rid of the Peace Corps, which is an asset, but now they want to get rid of USIA and military people. And I don’t know whether we can even think of a coup, but we have to find out what the lay of the land is there.
The CIA was almost certainly correct that regardless of U.S. involvement “an attempt to oust Torres in the next few months, if not sooner, [was] inevitable.” But even though they recognized that supporting the coup was “a high risk operation,” they decided they might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb:
The U.S. Government will be the logical culprit in the minds of Bolivians. Moreover, we fully expect the CIA to come under fire and accusations of CIA involvement seem inevitable. Since the CIA has been accused regularly (and falsely) of innumerable plots and activities in Bolivia, one more accusation should not cause excessive public reaction.
On August 26, three days after Banzer claimed power, Kissinger and Nixon spoke on the telephone. Kissinger briefed the President on his recent meeting with Vietnam POW wives and the President told Kissinger that “the trouble with Reagan is quite clear. He really is simplistic.” At the end of the conversation, Kissinger noted, “In Bolivia there has been a coup. It has brought on a right-wing government.”
Nixon’s response? “What about Chile.”
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*In July 2009 the State Department Office of the Historian released volume E-10 of Foreign Relations of the United States 1968-1972, edited by Douglas Kraft and James F. Siekmeier, but withheld the Bolivia chapter until declassification could be completed. The Bolivia documents were released sometime between March 1 of this year and now. I believe this is the first notice of the significance of the Bolivia documents.
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Se puede leer una traducción parcial en español de este artículo en el sitio BoliviaSol.
I wouldn’t say the question was exactly “open”: http://books.google.com/books?ei=ybQCTMS-HpH8NcmZlTs&ct=result&q=banzer+c.i.a.&btnG=Search+Books
Every claim of U.S. complicity in the coup before now was either unsourced or based on the Washington Post article I cite. There was nothing to stand up against the State Department’s blanket denial. The Post’s charge against Lundin might well have been true, but a/ we still can’t verify it and b/ without further proof it seemed entirely possible he was acting on his own. The documents I’m pointing to prove that U.S. involvement in the coup was sanctioned at the highest level of government.
Exactly. I was saying that until now it was an extremely plausible thesis—actually, an extreme likelihood. That’s not an “open question.”
Actually, that is an open question. Even if something is very likely to be true, if there is the possibility that it isn’t true, then it’s veracity is, strictly speaking, an “open question”.
There was never any doubt of the extreme likelihood of the CIA’s involvement, what was lacking, and what Mr. Baird has clearly demonstrated as being lacking, was conclusive proof of the CIA’s involvment.
Will it also take 40 years until we can read the transcripts of conversations that took place in the State Department and in the U.S. embassy in Tegucigalpa last year when the decision was made that Zelaya’s overtures to the Honduran left wing had gone too far and that School of the Americas graduates had to step in to prevent the U.S. from being squeezed out?
Short answer: Yes.
I think I have bad news for you. The link to the State Department release of the papers proving the link between the funding of the coup and the blatant lies of the Nixon Administration has been removed. The page now only leads to a blank page. If you have a screen cap, could you please post it. I would like to read it as well as post the documents on my website.
Hi Jim,
I’ve got copies of everything, so don’t worry, but it looks like the whole history.state.gov site is down, so let’s see if it comes back up in the next couple of hours. If not, I’ll post the docs.
Thanks. I’ll keep trying. I just am so distrustful of the US Government. After growing up in Panama, I have seen far too much to put anything past them.
Thanks to Ken Silverstein at Harper’s and Abbas Raza at 3 Quarks Daily for the links.
So the Peace Corps Was an “asset” – a CIA “asset”?
This sort of confirms that.
Ironically, the Torres government wasn’t that leftist, and an intelligent and knowledgable leadership in Washington shouldn’t have had any problem at all coexisting with Torres. E.g. his Minister of Economy – in no way any leftist – had grown up in Washington, educated in the US and spoke Spanish with an even worse gringo accent that his more famous brother, Gonzalo (“Goni”) Sanchez de Losada, both of them politically middle-of-the-roaders with a liberal (in the classical sense) world view.
But if you look at US-Bolivian relations after WWII Washington has had a tendency to act as a real bully when Bolivian leaders have had the audacity to tend towards some form of independent thinking and action.
TL
So the Peace Corps Was an “asset” – a CIA “asset”?
It’s a curious phrase, but I think Kissinger means getting the Peace Corps kicked out was a net gain for the U.S., while getting USIA and the military group would not be. The expulsion of the latter was especially on his mind, as the ambassador thought it was a real possibility. Right about the time of this conversation, Nixon—on Kissinger’s advice, of course—signed a national security decision memorandum that tried to prevent such an expulsion by way of a $1M military-assistance grant.
The late Penny Lernoux had several sources who informed her that the coup was supported by the USA (and some banks in Brazil). That’s in her book, Cry Of The People.
If you haven’t read James Dunkerley’s book Rebellion In The Veins (1984), you need to put that on your list, too.
Here’s a neat little posthumous whitewash of Banzer’s life and career, from the on-line Encyclopedia Of World Biography: http://www.bookrags.com/biography/hugo-banzer-suarez/