April 2004 Newsletter

Teaching the History of United States-Latin American Relations in Cochabamba, Bolivia

By James F. Siekmeier

The ideas expressed here do not necessarily represent the policy of the U.S. Department of State.

From August through November 2002 I had the opportunity through a Fulbright teaching/research grant to teach in the master's program at the Universidad Mayor de San Simón (UMSS) in Cochabamba, Bolivia.(1) It was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life-an educational exchange from which I profited far more than my students did. The Centro de Estudios Superiores Universitarios (CESU), a multidisciplinary master's program founded in 1994, is a departure for Bolivia, where master's degrees are relatively new and doctoral programs are nonexistent. CESU professors of sociology, political science, and economics offer a wide variety of courses in development studies, including sociology and development, sustainable development, gender and development, and international relations.

The three-hour weekly course I taught was entitled "History of United States-Latin American Relations," with an emphasis on United States-Bolivian relations. Since UMSS has no history department, my course was listed as an international relations course. The international relations program, part of the political science major, had been established only four years earlier, in response to student petitioning. Since there was a dearth of political science professors-and therefore many cancelled courses-the students were enthusiastic about my course.

At first I spent the bulk of the time lecturing, but as the course progressed, more class time was devoted to discussion. The course was taught in Spanish, so finding Spanish translations of U.S. historical documents was imperative. I availed myself of an excellent set of translated documents on U.S. history, the nine-volume EUA (Estados Unidos de America), edited by Ana Rosa Suárez Argüello and published by the Instituto Mora in Mexico City. (The library of the Centro Boliviano Americano, the bi-national center in Cochabamba, owned the set.) Although U.S. students generally find analyzing primary sources confusing and difficult, in Bolivia my students appreciated the chance to read such material, in part because getting access to such documents on U.S. history in Spanish is difficult.

Although only sixteen students enrolled in the course, about twenty-five others audited the first few sessions. The students were from working- and middle-class backgrounds and spanned a wide range of ages. Some students' analytical and creative abilities were undeveloped due to the prevalence of rote learning in secondary schools, which is only slowly being phased out. As a result some of them would copy long, unattributed passages from the documents. However, others employed subtle and skillful arguments backed up with a plethora of evidence.

University life in Bolivia differs sharply from that in the United States. Students reside at home or in apartments, not dormitories. Since nearly all students work, the majority of classes are held in the evening. Politically, most students are on the left. They urge expanded civil rights for the Indians of Bolivia, and, with regard to economic issues, they are critical of the neoliberal "Washington consensus." (Essentially, neoliberalism calls for an international, free-market capitalist system with minimal national government regulation.) The principle of autonomy has deep historic roots in the Bolivian university system, and students exercise a degree of control over university governance unheard of in the United States. Student leaders, elected by the student body, sit on powerful university governing boards. While I was teaching at UMSS, a radical student organization claimed that an election for seats on of one of the governing boards was stolen from them, and they organized a university-wide strike. Strikes at Latin American universities are common, and as in most drawn-out walkouts, the intensity of the strike ebbed and flowed. At one point some students took over CESU's building and held hostages for a day. (I was not in my office during the takeover.) To end the standoff, the university tacitly acknowledged that the radical students could sit on some of the university's governing boards.

Despite the strike, my students came to class. This proved fortunate for me, because I found their reactions to the course material fascinating. For example, when I taught North American colonial history I found that the students had a hard time understanding England's policy of "salutary neglect" towards its thirteen colonies. The idea that England would hold the colonial reins of power lightly as long as the crown's subjects produced income for the mother country was foreign to them. There were few or no precedents in Latin American history they could use as points of comparison. The Spanish colonizers' urge to control the vast lodes of silver they discovered in the New World reinforced a preexisting authoritarian political tradition.

When I taught the U.S. Constitution, I asked the students why the U.S. Constitution is the longest-lived in the world, whereas Latin American constitutions often come and go. One student replied that historically Bolivian (and Latin American) constitutions are written without considering the rights, or even the role in society, of the majority of the population-the poor, and in particular the Indians. Therefore, the popular sectors form revolutionary movements to change the constitution, and a new one is produced. This pattern has repeated itself throughout the region's history. Another student said that the U.S. citizenry's acceptance of the U.S. Constitution became, after a while, a self-fulfilling prophecy, or a habit. That is, since the U.S. Constitution proved workable for a long period of time, U.S. citizens began to accord it automatic respect.

The 1898 Spanish-American-Cuban-Philippino War also proved a popular topic. The students seemed to understand the complicated interplay of economic, security-related, and paternalistic motives on the part of the United States. Many saw the war as the beginning of a slow but steady increase in the exercise of U.S. power in the region and believed the United States often had economic motives. Some students noted that the United States has historically made both unilateral and (more recently) multilateral attempts to pursue open markets in the hemisphere.

My teaching of Bolivia's 1952 revolution was facilitated by an international conference held on the fiftieth anniversary of the revolution in Cochabamba in October 2002. The title of the conference, "Revolution in the Twentieth Century- Globalization and the Nation-State," reflected its rich content, as scholars from all over the world came to discuss a variety of revolutions. The conference included Bolivian revolutionary-nationalist film documentaries and commentary by peasant leaders from the 1950s. Student papers on the films revealed their frustration that many of the goals of the revolutionaries remain unfulfilled. These aspirations included economic development and providing economic betterment for the mestizo (mixed-blood) poor and the Indians.

In class discussion of the Cold War, Cuba featured prominently. In addition to providing a challenge to the United States-led hemispheric economic system, Cuba's revolution, some students noted, was also an uprising of darker-skinned non-whites against a mixed-blood and white elite. As such, it proved to be a turning point not only in United States-Latin American relations, but perhaps even in the history of the Cold War. Surprisingly the class did not consider Ernesto "Che" Guevara's attempts to foment revolution in Bolivia a compelling topic, despite the thirty-fifth anniversary of his death in Bolivia on October 6 and the fifth anniversary of the finding of his remains. Perhaps the relevance of Che has deteriorated since most of the students were born after he was killed. Also, contemporary issues have so preoccupied Bolivians of late that to many his struggle seems very, very long ago.

Not surprisingly, many students looked at United States-Latin American relations through the lens of Bolivian history and La Paz's relations with Washington. Regarding the U.S. government's refusal to purchase tin for its strategic stockpile in the 1950s and 1960s and the present-day U.S. effort to eradicate coca (the raw material for cocaine), the students asked me if the U.S. government understood the implications of its policies vis-à-vis Bolivia. The ramifications for Bolivia are profound; coca is the countryside's lifeblood. In addition, they queried me about the U.S. public's knowledge of U.S. policy. I told them that, regrettably, the United States government often takes its relations with the Latin American republics for granted. Moreover, Bolivia is often not a high priority for the norteamericanos (i.e., North Americans, shorthand for people from the United States).

Many, if not most, students firmly adhered to the dependency (or dependencista) theory of United States-Latin American relations. They saw the United States historically controlling the most dynamic sectors of the Latin American economy, and Washington currently using its power to shape the outcome of the nascent Free Trade Area of the Americas Agreement (FTAA). Historically speaking, Latin American have, with some justification, interpreted U.S. trade policy as an attempt to protect U.S. markets while demanding access to Latin American goods that are rare or unavailable in the United States.

Presently, in accordance with the terms of the FTAA, the United States is using its leverage as an important market for Latin American exports (such as textiles from Bolivia) to force the Bolivians to enact certain policies-in particular, to maintain their vigilance in the drug war. In addition, Washington has used the political leverage that flows from U.S. assistance to compel Bolivia to prosecute some drug-related crimes in military tribunals. The majority of the students in my class, and in Bolivia generally, view these measures as coercive and see little hope of a warming of norteamericano-Latin American relations.

In class, I argued that some of the wealthier nations of Latin America were not prostrate before U.S. power and that the dependency framework was less useful in explaining these nations' relations with the United States than Bolivia's. However, most students retorted that the FTAA was part of a coordinated effort on the part of the United States to strengthen the hemisphere-wide neoliberal trend currently prevailing, but increasingly criticized, in Latin America.

In the end, typically, no consensus emerged-otherwise, of course, teaching would be dreadfully boring! One classroom dynamic that became evident was that some students expressed balanced, nuanced views of the United States and its foreign policy motives in their written assignments but did not articulate such sentiments in class. These students expressed the belief that although relations between the two continents have been tense, and Latin America's frustration with U.S. policy has been growing, the nations of the Western Hemisphere need to find a way to work together. As the "global village," once only a much-discussed theory, becomes more and more a reality, there will be greater incentives for the United States and the Latin Americans to rework their relationship into one of mutual respect. In response to my assignment that they write a paper on whether it was possible for the United States and Latin America to be "Good Neighbors," one student wrote that "Latin Americans need to get away from the unproductive idea that the United States always acts as the cat, and the Latin Americans necessarily play the role of mice."

1. A research grant from the Fulbright Commission gave me the funding to teach and do research in Cochabamba, and the Historian at the State Department allowed me to take leave time from my job. In addition, Arnoldo De León, Monica Belmonte, Laurie West Van Hook, Marc Susser, and Catherine Tall offered helpful criticisms on early drafts of this article. My colleagues at Centro de Estudios Superiores Universitarios and the Universidad Mayor de San Simón in Cochabamba provided an excellent working and teaching environment. And, of course, I would like to thank the students in my class on the history of United States-Latin American relations.

James F. Siekmeier is a historian at the Office of the Historian at the U.S. Department of State