When two sides can’t get along, one side gets repressed. Then the other side gets revenge. then the process repeats. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
Todays stamp is not well printed but displays the ancient Gate of the Sun. The archway is carved from a single stone and is a relic of the Tiwanaku Empire that ruled the area around Lake Titicaca from 300 BC to about 1150 AD. The Tiwanaku Empire predated the Incas and far predated Spanish Explorers.
The stamp today is an airmail stamp issue C209, a 5000 Boliviano stamp issued by Bolivia on March 26, 1960. The hyper inflation of the era is reflected in the high denomination of the stamp. An airmail issue from five years before was only 50 Bolivianos. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth $2.00 used.
Bolivia has not had much luck with it’s right of center governments. See https://the-philatelist.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=445&action=edit. In the early fifties those on the left were able to unite enough to get a string of their leaders into the presidency. Change was pretty dramatic but the results were not good. The tin mines were a major source of wealth in Bolivia and the new left wing government quickly nationalized them. The labor union that represented the miners was an important part of the coalition. However the output of the mines dropped off and there were constant strikes and the mines were seriously overstaffed.
There was voter and land reform that saw the number of voters go up by five fold as literacy and land owning requirements dropped away. The left assumed that the reform would bring a large number of new left wing voters. It did this but there was not enough discipline to see that they all voted for the same left wing party. Elections inevitably left the leading candidate with less than 50 percent of the vote leaving the decision to the legislature and by extension the party bosses.
The military, a right wing organization was heavily shrunk and purged. This left the government unable to disarm various peasant militias that though they were sometimes allies, were a huge challenge to achieving stability. Shrinking the military also angered the USA, whose aid was 20 percent of the national budget. All these challenges lead to hyper inflation, which turned the middle class rightward politically. The left was further divided as to whether the proper model for Bolivia was the one left party state of Mexico or a more pure form of socialism. Soon enough the left was splintered enough that when the next military coup came in 1969, it had support of many on the left.
The gate of the sun was built by the Tiwanaku empire that controlled much of Bolivia and some of Peru. It was not conquered so much as died out. A drought lead to a famine that spelled the end of the people. The relics of the empire were discovered by the Spanish who first wrote of them. They were studied by some of the great archeologists of the 19th century. The site of the gate of the sun is a UNESCO world heritage site. The foreign archeologists have left the site after Bolivia worried that the site was not being properly respected by the team from Harvard that included many students. Bolivia then stepped up its own work at the site but then stopped when UNESCO protested that their changes were not historically accurate.
The study of the gate of the sun makes a point about the failure of a society. Here is hoping that current Bolivian society does not have the same outcome. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.