Daniel Salamanca Urey

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Daniel Salamanca Urey (July 8, 1869 - July 17, 1935) was president of Bolivia from March 5, 1931 until he was overthrown in a coup d'etat on November 27, 1934, during the country's disastrous Chaco War with Paraguay. Prior to becoming President, Salamanca was widely admired for his unstinting will, unbending ethics, and profoundly legalistic proclivities.

Born in Cochabamba, Salamanca studied law, before being elected to Bolivia's Chamber of Deputies in 1899 for the Liberal Party. Two years later, President José Manuel Pando appointed him Finance Minister. Salamanca eventually split with the Liberals, however, and helped to found the new Republican Party, running unsuccessfully for Vice-President in 1917. Following the split of a faction opposed to the growing (some would say ruthless) ambitions of Republican leader Bautista Saavedra, the ascetic, professorial Salamanca founded, with a number of other men including Jose Maria Escalier, the so-called Genuine Republican Party (Partido Republicano Genuino). Salamanca himself ran for president on the "Genuino" ticket in the elections of 1925, but lost to Saavedra's handpicked successor, Hernando Siles.

Shaken by his defeats, Salamanca professed to retire from politics and dedicated himelf to teaching law. In the aftermath of the military overthrow of Hernando Siles in 1930, largely as a result of the Great Depression, Salamanca was asked to head a Republicano Genuino-Liberal coalition, with him at the head of the ticket and Liberal leader José Luis Tejada Sorzano as his Vice-Presidential running mate. Salamanca was elected and took office in March of 1931.

Immediately upon assuming office, Salamanca introduced an unpopular austerity program and clamped down on political opposition to his government. In what was likely a measure to avert public attention to the economic problems still facing the country, he also revived hostilities with Paraguay in the disputed Chaco region. Indeed, Salamanca had been for a long time one of the "hawks" in Bolivian politics, advocating firmness against Paraguay in the territorial dispute. Upon taking office, his motto became "we must stand firm in the Chaco." Given that the parched region of the Gran Chaco (largely uninhabited) had been under dispute between Bolivia and Paraguay ever since the creation of both republics, each proceeded to establish a line of small garrisons (fortines), simply to establish a national presence and press claims. Esporadically, shooting battles would occur, but cooler heads tendedto prevail, especially in view of the fact that neither Bolivia nor Paraguay (the only landlocked, and poorest, countries in South America) could ill afford a full-scale war over the Chaco. But neither relinquished much in their claim to the entire Chaco region either, Bolivia on historic and legal grounds and Paraguay largely on possession.

All of this changed when oil was found on the foothills of the Andes, deep in Bolivian territory. It was then widely assumed that the nearby Chaco also contained oil, possibly in vast quantities. In addition, the explosive economic and political situation prompted the Bolivian President, Salamanca, to use the dispte to shore up national unity and distract attention from his governemnt's shortcomings. He ordered a stepped-up effort at establishing more "fortines" (military forts) wherever Paraguay wasn't established already. It is in this context that a Bolivian army exploration unit was sent deep into the Chaco early in 1932, whereupon they chanced to find a large lake in the middle of the desert-like scrubland. It was a perfect location for a fortin. Unfortunately, the lake -- named Pitiantuta by the Paraguayans -- turned out to be occupied by the Paraguayan military. Upon the arrival of the Bolivian expedition, a shooting battle ensued and the Paraguayan troops fled to the wilderness. This, in essence, started the disastrous Chaco War of 1932-1935).

The quick escalation of the war only exacerbated already severe economic problems in Bolivia (and in Paraguay), while causing many thousands of casualties. To make matters worse, Salamanca had very poor relations with the Bolivian High Command since the beginning of the conflict, when he demoted a Bolivian general and placed the German Hans Kundt (who had previously led a military mission to Bolivia) at the head of the country's armd forces at war. A string of devastating defeats at the hands of the Paraguayans, who knew the terrain much better than the Bolivians (most of whom hailed from the Altiplano Highlands) determined Kundt's replacement with the Bolivian general, Enrique Peñaranda, at the end of 1933. Salamanca's relationship with the latter general and his comrades in the High Command only got worse, as the mercurial President (then in his mid 60s) tended to blame the military leadership for the continuing military setbacks on the field. Things came to a head when Salamanca decided to replace Peñaranda and a number of his increasingly mutinous commandants. Astonishingly, on November 27, 1934, the Bolivian generals deposed Salamanca while he visited their headquarters Villamontes to explain the reasons for the changes he was ordering. It is a shameful stain in the turbulent history of Bolivia that the military deposed the duly-elected Commander-in-chief during a war, and in in the theater of operations at that. Peñaranda and his co-conspirators (Colonel Toro, Major Busch, and others) in the end decided to keep democratic appearances intact, and replaced Salamanca with his Vice President, the decidedly more pliable José Luis Tejada Sorzano of the Liberal Party. It has been alleged that Tejada was almost certainly in on the plot itself.

The elderly and sickly Salamanca at that point was allowed to "retire" to his native Cochabamba, where he died less than a year later (on July 1935), only days after the establishment of the cease-fire. A highly controversial figure, many blame him for the war, while others respect him enormously as a man who did all he could to maintain his country's foothold on the Chaco without resorting to warfare but was betrayed by a mutinous and incompetent (to say the least) military high command. The rather dour, intellectual Salamanca is perhaps best remembered by two celebrated phrases of his: musing upon one of the many disastrous losses of his armies on the Chaco fields of combat, he is said to have said "I gave them everything they asked for -- weapons, trucks, whatever they wanted; the one and only thing I could not give them was brains." He is also supposed to have remarked dryly to Peñaranda, upon the completion of the encirclement of the house where he was staying at Villamontes during the coup that deposed him: "Congratulations General; you just completed your first and only successful military siege of the entire war."