Autobiography - The Galindo Group

Ram Galindo THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN Page 63
harassed the private schools. It seemed to me that with some predictable periodicity,
students from public schools properly spurred and covertly sent by the new authorities,
would raid our school throwing rocks and epithets and handing all kinds of abuse and
wreckage. At the time I thought the main motivation was class envy but I now realize
that the top ruling intelligentsia contrived this pattern for the purpose of scaring all
private school operators into leaving the country.
Under the leadership of the senior class council, we, the students, decided to make a
stand at the next raid. The president of the class was my best friend Ramon (Ray)
Rivero who years later also got a masters degree from Texas A&M and rose up to be
worldwide chief geologist for Occidental Petroleum. (He was also the one who met me
at New York’s airport when I first arrived to the U.S.) We, cleverly it appeared at the
time, moved buckets of rocks to the flat roof of our three-story building facing the street
from which we were raided. When the aggressors arrived we received them with a rain
of rocks, but we had not stored enough to repel them.
The attackers eventually breached the doors and, for the first time, invaded our
premises. Soon the police entered also, purportedly to restore order, but really to scare
us even more. None of us got captured, but instead, the next day, four of us seniors
were publicly expelled by the good Christian Brothers in a specially called meeting of
the whole student body. They needed to prove to the authorities that the battle was not
their creation. Through the intersession of our parents, who convened several
emergency meetings at my house, the four of us were allowed to complete school and
leave quietly at the end of the school year. This was my first direct brush with
authoritarian socialism and became a sample of the price of freedom that we all must be
prepared to pay. In July of 1956 I left for New York and then to Villanova University on
Philadelphia’s Main Line.
The state of affairs set by socialist policies in Bolivia evolved into an untenable situation
by the early 1960s. The misery brought about by the nationalization of all large mines,
confiscation of farms, government takeover of all foreign commerce, corrupt reindustrialization,
price controls, purges in the armed forces, elimination of most civil
liberties and other typical socialist measures, drained the country of all savings and
hope. Nevertheless, in the early 60s some improvements in the social climate started to
become apparent. Transferring title of the expropriated lands to the peasants that
resided on them had helped eliminate their semi-vassal state. The effort to connect the
small enclaves in the rain forest to the rest of the country also helped.
However, the corruption endemic to a socialist system had already rotted the party’s
and the government’s organizations to the core. Though improving, agricultural
production was still insufficient because the illiterate peasants were not prepared to run
the farms. Productivity in the tin mines plummeted but production had to continue
because export of the ore was Bolivia’s only source of hard currency and because the
miner’s leadership was in league with the politicians. The mining leaders simply would
Autobiography.doc 63 of 239