Alfredo Ovando
| Alfredo Ovando | |
|---|---|
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| 56th President of Bolivia (Co government with René Barrientos) |
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In office 26 May 1965 – 2 January 1966 |
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| Preceded by | René Barrientos |
| 57th President of Bolivia | |
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In office January 2, 1966 – August 6, 1966 |
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| Succeeded by | René Barrientos |
| 60th President of Bolivia | |
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In office September 26, 1969 – October 6, 1970 |
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| Preceded by | Luis Adolfo Siles |
| Succeeded by | Juan José Torres |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
Alfredo Ovando Candía 6 April 1918 Cobija, Bolivia |
| Died | 24 January 1982 (aged 63) La Paz, Bolivia |
| Nationality | Bolivian |
| Political party | None |
| Profession | Military, dictator |
Alfredo Ovando Candía (6 April 1918 – 24 January 1982) was a Bolivian president and dictator (1964–66 and 1969–70), general and political figure.
Ovando was born in Cobija and started his long military career in the early 1930s, when he served in the Chaco War against Paraguay. Originally rather apolitical, he was chosen (among others) to lead the reconstituted Armed Forces of Bolivia in the aftermath of the 1952 Revolution that installed in power the reformist Revolutionary Nationalist Movement party, better known as the MNR. Ovando lived through the relative deprivation, reduced budgets, and loss of prestige of the defeated Bolivian army during the early years of MNR rule. By the early 1960s, President Víctor Paz Estenssoro came to rely more heavily on the military in the face of growing political divisions among the governing elites. Equally as important in this rebirth was the considerable pressure exerted by the United States to modernize and equip the troops for a decidedly more political role: that of fighting possible Cuba-styled Communist insurgencies.
When Paz Estenssoro amended the Constitution in 1964 in order to allow himself to run for re-election (a largely frowned-upon move in the largely personalistic world of Bolivian politics), General Ovando, along with the Vice-President and former head of the Air Force René Barrientos, toppled Paz from power. They ruled together in a Junta (sometimes called "The Co-Presidency) until January 1966, when Barrientos resigned in order to register himself as a candidate. At that point Ovando became sole President, leading the country to the elections from which the popular Barrientos emerged victorious. With the new president having taken the oath of office in August 1966, Ovando returned to his post as Commander of the Bolivian Air Forces.
Uncharismatic but tenacious, Ovando was biding his time, counting on the fact that he would be the logical choice to run for elections once Barrientos' term ended in 1970, perhaps with some electoral "help" from the outgoing administration. Soon, major differences emerged between Ovando and the president, however, especially in regard to the massacre of miners at Siglo XX in June 1967, and the so-called Arguedas Affair of 1968. In early 1967, a guerrilla force had been discovered to be operating in the rural Bolivian southwest under the leadership of the Argentine-Cuban revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara. While the popular insurgency was eventually crushed by the US-trained Bolivian military troops under American CIA command, Guevara was captured and executed in October 1967. This event fostered a major spin-off scandal that surfaced in 1968. That year, Barrientos' trusted friend and Minister of Interior, Antonio Arguedas, disappeared with the captured diary of Che Guevara, which soon surfaced in Havana. From abroad, Arguedas confessed himself to have been all along a clandestine Marxist supporter, and denounced Barrientos and many of his aides as being on the CIA's payroll. This event embarrassed US military School of the Americas(SOA)graduate Barrientos as a US-controlled puppet, and prompted Ovando to distance himself from the president with an eye to the projected 1970 elections. The US SOA notoriously trained many Latin American dictators and death squads in counterinsurgency tactics and torture and disappearance techniques.
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