In the thin, biting air of Catavi, 13,000 feet above sea level, the great refining plant last week lay still and smokeless. Past the paymaster's windows shuffled the Indians who dig and smelt a third of Bolivia's tin from the biggest of the Patiño mines. All 7,000 of them were being fired.
The parting was sweet sorrow, for to each man the paymaster handed severance money that averaged 10,000 bolivianos ($250). At the prevailing 50¢ a day, that was almost a year and a half's pay, a lump sum greater than most Indians had ever seen. There would be drinking and feasting in the company's bars before they went back to work.
For his part, Tin Baron Antenor Patiño was far from displeased. His plan was working out. When the company rehired its miners, it would hire only non-union labor, no "agitators." That would break the National Federation of Tin Miners.
In a country where tin supplies two-thirds of the national income and four-fifths of Government revenue, Patiño's maneuver was also a political power-play. It knocked the wind out of the six-month-old Government of President Enrique Hertzog. A fragile coalition of pro-mine-owner Conservatives and the Marxist Left Revolutionary Party (P.I.R.), it had held together only because of common fear that the supporters of the late Dictator-President Villarroel, who wound up his career dangling from a lamppost (TIME, July 29, 1946), might stage a comeback.