Víctor Germán Busch Becerra (23 March 1903 – 23 August 1939) was a Bolivian military officer and statesman who served as the 36th president of Bolivia from 1937 until his death in 1939. Prior to his presidency, he served as the Chief of the General Staff and was the Supreme Leader of the Legion of Veterans, a veterans' organization founded by him after his service in the Chaco War.
Busch was born in either El Carmen de Iténez or San Javier and was raised in Trinidad. He attended the Military College of the Army and served with distinction in the Chaco War. For his actions, he rose to prominence among the high command of the armed forces, participating in the military-led ousters of presidents Daniel Salamanca in 1934 and José Luis Tejada Sorzano in 1936. The latter propelled his mentor, Colonel David Toro, to the presidency of a military junta of which Busch was a member. On 13 July 1937, Busch orchestrated a soft-coup which forced Toro's resignation, elevating himself to the presidency of the junta.
A war hero, drawn in by the reformist social movements of the time, Busch spearheaded the development of Toro's Military socialist ideology, convening the 1938 National Convention which legally elected him president and promulgated the 1938 Political Constitution, hailed as a "Social Constitution" as it established the State's right to the country's natural wealth, alluded to the social function of property, and recognized the communal lands of indigenous Bolivians. However, his political inexperience and accustomation to rigid military structure weakened his ability to lead the disparate factions of the left-wing movements and led him to ultimately suspend the legislature and declare dictatorial rule in 1939. During this time, he issued a profusion of executive decrees including a new labor and school code and the mining currency law, the latter of which proved to be the most popular of his policies though it gained him the ire of the Rosca, the country's powerful mining oligarchy.
By the end of 1939, pressure from resurgent conservative parties, a corruption scandal, and a deepening personal depression led Busch to commit suicide on 23 August 1939, bringing an end to the era of military socialism in Bolivia. An enigmatic character who came from outside the political realm, he was wrapped in legend and controversy, even about his birthplace. His sudden and unexpected death in office is still disputed as either suicide or an assassination.
During his presidency, a Labor Code was introduced which provided for various rights for workers, Indigenous Struggle and the Bolivian National Revolution Land and Liberty! By James Kohl, Publisher: Taylor & Francis, 2020 together with social insurance for typographical employees and workers and railwaymen.CHAPTER I GENERAL DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL SECURITY IN THE AMERICAN CONTINENT GENERAL SITUATION OF SOCIAL SECURITY IN 1936, P.4
Early life and education Germán Busch was born on 23 March 1903. He was the fifth of six children born to Pablo Busch Wiesener, a physician and German immigrant, and Raquel Becerra Villavicencio. Due to the family's frequent travels, their children were born in different regions of the country, leaving Busch's exact place of birth to become a source of historical dispute. Some historians point to San Javier in the Ñuflo de Chávez Province of the Santa Cruz Department, while others to El Carmen de Iténez, a settlement in the Iténez Province of the northern Beni Department.
Rolando Roda Busch, the grandson of Germán's youngest brother Carlos, affirmed that Busch was born in San Javier, Santa Cruz, highlighting two historical documents to evidence his claim. The first of these is Busch's baptism certificate issued on 25 August 1903 in San Javier. The second document is the will and testament of Pablo Busch, written "with his own hand" in the presence of a notary public and seven witnesses, in which document he places the names of all his children, with their corresponding places of birth.
Historian Robert Brockmann maintains that this testament is incorrect, not as a result of malice on the part of Pablo Busch, but due to the fact it was written in extremis as Busch Wiesener was at the point of death, having been shot by an arrow. Brockmann points to the claim by Busch's mother Raquel Becerra, with sworn testimonies collected by historians Rógers Becerra and Arnaldo Lijerón. According to this testimony, Busch was born on the farm "La Pampita" in El Carmen, Beni while the family was navigating the Río Blanco, on their way to San Javier. From there, the family would have continued navigating the river until they reached Urubichá, continuing by cart to Ascensión de Guarayos and then to San Javier, where he was baptized. Engineer and historian Rodolfo Pinto Parada calculated that this route accounts for the time discrepancy between Busch's birth in March and his baptism in August.
Regardless of the disagreement over the location, both accounts agree on Busch's year of birth as 1903. Prior historiography had placed the date of birth as 23 March 1904, a full year after the fact. A few weeks after Busch's birth, Pablo Busch abandoned the family and returned to Germany while Raquel Becerra moved with her children to her home town of Trinidad where Busch spent the majority of his childhood. He attended the 6 August National School from which he was expelled at the age of 16 due to a physical quarrel with the principal, Agustín Rivero, as a result of a love affair between himself and another classmate.
Military career
On account of his will and physical ability, it was determined by his family that Busch would attend the Military College of the Army in La Paz, for which his brother-in-law Samuel Ávila Alvarado obtained for him the necessary certificates of good conduct. In order to travel to La Paz, Busch participated in a swimming competition in the town of Loma Suárez, winning first place and using the monetary prize to secure passage on a steam boat for himself and his three friends: Ceferino Rioja Aponte, Ernesto Wende Camargo and Sergio Ribera. The group navigated the river to Todos Santos, where they continued by mule through Cochabamba to La Paz, arriving in December 1921. On 16 January 1922, at the age of 18, he entered the Military College of the Army.
Military College of the Army While Busch excelled in physical exercise and training, he was challenged by the structural aspects of military life, especially as regards discipline and concentrated study. Fellow cadet Alfonso Arana Gandarias described Busch as a "temperamental and violent man [who] went from a sentimental state to an angry one". Such feelings eventually manifested themselves in Busch's lifelong inclination towards suicide. During his stay at the Military College, Busch attempted to end his own life on two occasions. The first occurred during a semester in which the cadet failed two or three subjects, leading him to attempt suicide with his rifle, which, as conveyed by Avila, "was with great difficulty prevented by his classmates". The second event came during one student's party, when Busch nearly came to blows with another cadet named Guillermo Estrada. While being separated from one another, Busch managed to unsheathe his revolver, pointing it not at Estrada but at his own temple, before being stopped from shooting by other party guests.
Busch graduated from the Military College on 4 January 1927 with the rank of second lieutenant and was assigned to the Campero Infantry Regiment. His disinterest in commanding heavy machine guns and his propensity towards quarrelling with other officers led him to be reassigned six weeks later to the Carabineros Corps in Copacabana. During this time, Busch was introduced to Captain David Toro with whom he built a good relationship, leading Toro to request the second lieutenant's transfer to the Ingavi Cavalry Regiment in Viacha, which he commanded. This allowed Toro to develop Busch as his protégé.
Marriage
The Military College was located close to the Liceo Venezuela, an all-girls school. Due to the proximity between the two, relationships and courtships between the cadets and schoolgirls were common. Here in 1926, Busch met Matilde Carmona Rodó, the daughter of a formerly wealthy mining family from Potosí. The couple were already familiar with one another. Carmona, because Busch's physical appearance and reputation had made him popular among the schoolgirls and Busch, because Carmona was the publisher of the student newspaper Ideal Femenino, of which he was a fan. After he graduated and was assigned to a unit in another town, the two continued to exchange letters and Busch would commonly visit her in La Paz when he had the opportunity. After a few years, Busch returned to La Paz in early 1928 to ask Carmona's family for her hand in marriage. To do this, Busch gained special military authorization to be married. This was because military regulations of the time prohibited marriages for officers below the rank of captain. For a second lieutenant to be married was unprecedented and required considerable persuasion and the special permission of General José C. Quirós, the Chief of the General Staff. Germán and Matilde were married on 18 February 1928.
After his marriage, Busch was assigned to the outskirts of Cochabamba where his meager second lieutenant's salary, coupled with the birth of his first son Juan Germán on 28 December 1928 and that of his second son Orlando just eleven months later, left the family in economic hardship for some time, relying on the generosity of his friend Ángel Jordán to get by.
1930 coup d'état
In 1929, Busch returned with his family to La Paz. Through the personal recommendation of Toro, General Hans Kundt, the Chief of the General Staff, had assigned Busch as his personal adjutant. Kundt and Busch's relationship, however, soon soured. In an account to Carlos Montenegro, Busch related that his time as an aide to Kundt made him feel "reduced in his powers, lagging behind in his hierarchy".
Busch's entrance into the General Staff came at the tail end of the constitutional term of President Hernando Siles Reyes. Seeking to extend himself in power while maintaining a pretense of legality, Siles Reyes resigned in late May 1930 in favor of his Council of Ministers whom he entrusted with calling a National Convention which would alter the Constitution and permit him to seek an unprecedented second term. The plan to extend his term had the reverse effect and by 25 June what had started as student protests had escalated into an uprising at the Military College of the Army. Faced with the crisis, Kundt, who as head of the General Staff was for all practical purposes the last remaining executive authority, elected to remain inactive in the face of the state of government failure.