Autobiography - The Galindo Group

Ram Galindo THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN Page 61
Motivated by the allure of easier access and industrial plantations, English agents at the
service of their Crown, spirited away, against the law, enough saplings and seeds, first
of cinchona and then of rubber trees, to cultivate them very successfully in their colonial
plantations of Southeast Asia. The Malayan peninsula became the main center of
production. With the advent of this competition, which ultimately was improved to offer
better strains, Bolivia’s importance as a quinine and rubber supplier passed to history in
the second decade of the 20 th century without leaving a significant lasting trace.
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THE FIRST SPARKS.
Through no merit of my own, I was blessed to have been born in what I selfishly
consider the best family anyone could have chosen. It happened that my family was a
member of the patron class. In shrouded memories from my infancy, I seem to
remember my paternal grandmother having indentured clients for servants who would,
coming from her farm in the countryside, rotate in her house in two week shifts three or
four times a year. Although this is a practice I never saw in my own house, I was aware
it still existed in some landowning families’ homes during my early childhood.
My parents, who owned no agrarian land, abhorred it as much as I did from the minute I
became aware of it. The advancement of the cause of freedom for all in Bolivia was
indeed held back by this practice of semi-vassal servitude. The attempt to dismantle it
was traumatic, nay, destructive. It simply substituted the old class patrons for a new
harsh dictatorship that imposed its will cruelly and shamelessly. For more than one
generation, the effort brought freedom to no one who did not yet have it but brought
fear, oppression, poverty and servitude to those who had known freedom before. As in
any dictatorship, the only beneficiaries were the party intelligentsia and those in the
control mechanism.
Following a movement partly inspired by National Socialists (Nazis) and partly by
communists of all stripes, a new group under the leadership of a politician named Victor
Paz Estensoro took control of the country by violent revolution in 1952. In the elections
just preceding this takeover, my father, not a sympathizer of this group, had been
elected Senator to a congress that never convened as a result of this revolution. In the
years immediately preceding and following this convulsion, many prominent leaders of
the country lost their fortunes and lives. Because my father had never been party to any
plans of counterrevolution, his life was spared but his livelihood was destroyed. His
construction company was forced to close and his every move watched. All his life he
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