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Challenge in the Charcas: Bolivia in the “Global Cold War” Geopolitical Imagination
VanSise, Casey F.
VanSise, Casey F.
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Conference paper
Date
2024-03-23
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History
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DOI
http://dx.doi.org/10.34944/dspace/10942
Abstract
Assorted observers of geopolitics have long been dismissive of Bolivia's significance within the international order, regarding it as a marginal "backwater" polity relative to other countries throughout the world and even among South American states. This common characterization of Bolivia's ostensibly wanting importance on the world stage is belied by the extent to which a variety of geostrategists valued the Andean nation's territorial and resource endowments as vital to shifting the balance of power within the Western Hemisphere. In the era spanning from the 1952 Revolution to the 1980 "Cocaine Coup" in Bolivia taking place in the midst of the Cold War, actors associated with multiple foreign powers would undertake interventions by diplomatic, financial, intelligence, and military means in an effort to shape that country's political trajectory to their perceived advantage. These foreign interventionists in Bolivia would include not only those affiliated with the United States (one of the two Cold War superpowers and the primary hegemon of the Western Hemisphere), but also those affiliated with other hemispheric states such as Cuba, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, and even extra-hemispheric states such as Israel and South Korea. Among those who played a crucial role in prioritizing and enacting interventions in Bolivia were individuals as varied as John Foster Dulles, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Lewis A. Tambs, Golbery do Couto e Silva, Bo Hi Pak, and Guillermo Suárez Mason, several of whom described Bolivia as the "Charcas Heartland," adapting the geostrategic thought of Halford Mackinder regarding the Eurasian continent to South American circumstances.
Description
A paper presented at the 29th James A. Barnes Graduate History Conference, which took place March 22-23, 2024 in Philadelphia, PA.
Citation
VanSise, Casey F. "Challenge in the Charcas: Bolivia in the 'Global Cold War' Geopolitical Imagination." Paper presented at 29th James A. Barnes Graduate History Conference, Philadelphia, PA, March 2024.
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