Catavi massacre
The Catavi massacre was a
Background
The workers' movement made some nominal political gains in the late 1930s as a result of the political shift after the
A law establishing the right to collective bargaining had been passed by the Germán Busch government, but the government's perceived shift on labor issues remained untested until the 1942 miners' strike.[1] Bolivia had formally entered World War II on the side of the Allied Powers after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and the Peñaranda government held that wartime strikes represented an unacceptable disruption of Bolivian production for the United States.
Massacre
When
The official report was that there were 19 deaths and 400 wounded, while estimates by the workers themselves reported up to 400 deaths.[1]
Aftermath
The massacre resulted in an open rupture in the already deteriorating relations between Peñaranda and the moderate and radical reform parties within the Bolivian Congress. The Congress initiated a
Footnotes
References
- Klein, Herbert S. (1971). "Prelude to the Revolution". In Malloy, J.; Thorn, R. (eds.). Beyond the Revolution: Bolivia since 1952. Pitt Latin American Series. University of Pittsburgh Press. pp. 25–52. ISBN 978-0-8229-7591-5.
- Nash, June C. (1993). We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us: Dependency and Exploitation in Bolivian Tin Mines. Columbia centennial classic. Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-08051-4.