Background
Juan Lechin Oquendo was born of middle-class parents of Lebanese extraction in Corocoro on 14 May 1920.
Juan Lechin Oquendo was born of middle-class parents of Lebanese extraction in Corocoro on 14 May 1920.
He was a veteran of the Chaco War (1932-1935). Thereafter, he worked as a clerk in the Patino Company’s mines; he was also the star of the company’s soccer team.
When the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNRO)-military government of Gualberto Villarroel López seized power in December 1943, Lechín was made subprefect of Catavi. He gained the respect of the miners by refusing to be a “company man” as had his predecesors. In 1944 he was elected executive secretary of the Miners Federation (FSTMB), which quickly became the country’s most powerful union. Despite the opposition of the other labor groups to the MNR-military government, Lechín and the FSTMB gave critical support to the regime until its fall in 1946.
Lechín, despite misgivings, agreed to the radical labor platform, the Thesis of Pulacayo, which had been drafted by Guillermo Lora, a law student and Trotskyite leader, and adopted at the FSTMB Congress in 1946. In 1947 Lechín, along with several other national labor representatives, was elected to Congress on the ticket of the Miners’ Bloc.
Between 1946 and 1952 Lechín experienced repeated exile and repression. After the April 1952 triumph of the National Revolution, which he and Hernán Siles Zuazo* largely led. Lechín and the FSTMB created the Bolivian Labor Central (COB), of which Lechín became executive secretary. He also served as minister of mines in the new government of President Víctor Paz Estenssoro. Between 1956 and 1960 he was president of the Senate and acting vice president of the republic. Lechín expected to run for the presidency in 1960, but deferred his candidacy to 1964 in order to permit Paz Estenssoro to run again. He served as vice president during the second Paz administration. However, when his presidential ambitions were again thwarted in 1964, he broke with the MNR and founded his own party, the Revolutionary Party of the National Left.
Although Lechín supported the coup against Paz in November 1964, the Miners Federation soon fell out with President René Barrientos Ortuño, and Lechín was forced into exile in May 1965. He regained influence in the reformist governments of Generals Alfredo Ovando Candia (1969-1970) and Juan José Torres González ( 1970-1971). Lechín served as president of the radical Peoples’ Assembly until Torres’ overthrow in August 1971.
Lechín was in exile in Chile during most of the succeeding Hugo Banzer Suarez government, and again after the military coup of 1980. With the election of Siles Zuazo in Ocrober 1982, Lechín continued to play a central role as chief spokesman of the labor movement. He led several general strikes against the Siles government’s austerity program. With the reelection of President Victor Paz Estenssoro in 1985, Lechin’s role as principal leader for organized labor continued.