Carlos Quintanilla

Carlos Quintanilla was born on 22 January 1888 in the city of Cochabamba. He was the son of Jenaro Quintanilla and Carlota Quiroga. In 1906, he left his home town to pursue a high school education.

In 1907, he moved to live in the capitol of La Paz to continue his professional studies, entering the Military College of the Army. He graduated with the rank of second lieutenant of the army in 1911 at age 23.

To further his military education, Quintanilla traveled to the then German Empire in 1912 to pursue specialization courses in the 81st Frankfurt Regiment in the German army. In Germany, he would become deputy chief of the General Staff. In 1914 due to the outbreak of World War I in Europe, he returned to Bolivia.

In Bolivia, Quintanilla became an instructor at the Military College of the Army. He was also briefly Aide-de-camp to then-President Ismael Montes. Between 1915 and 1916 he rose to the rank of lieutenant and was promoted to captain in 1920.

Quintanilla again traveled to Germany in 1922, by which time the war in Europe had ended. He continued his studies in the 5th Infantry Division in Grafenwöhr. While abroad in 1923, he was promoted to the rank of major but was discharged the same year in Bolivia by President Bautista Saavedra. He was reincorporated into the Bolivian army with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in 1926 by President Hernando Siles Reyes who appointed him to be the Bolivian military deputy in Germany.

Following his return from Germany, he was assigned as commander of various infantry regiments between 1927 and 1928 rising to the rank of colonel in 1929. That same year he was appointed commander of the 4th Division of the Bolivian Army in the Chaco, in dispute with Paraguay. Already in 1929, Quintanilla sent a general report to his superiors, warning about the situation of the country and the army.

In 1930 President Carlos Blanco Galindo appointed Quintanilla to the post of Bolivia's military attaché in Germany. As an attaché, Quintanilla was in charge of different missions in various European countries until 1931. He returned for a final time to Bolivia in 1931 and went on to command the First Division of the Bolivian Army in addition to being Deputy Chief of the General Staff.

In July 1932, President Daniel Salamanca summoned General Quintanilla to replace General Filiberto Osorio as Chief of Staff of the Bolivian Army following his resignation. However, Osorio and Quintanilla reached a prior agreement and proposed to Salamanca that Osorio would withdraw his resignation and Quintanilla would take command of the Bolivian forces in the southeast of Chaco. In this way on 25 July 1932, Carlos Quintanilla was appointed commander of the First Army Corps made up of the 4th and 7th Divisions with a seat at Fort Muñoz.

By this point in 1932, tensions between Bolivia and Paraguay over the Chaco dispute had reached their peak. On 15 June, a Bolivian detachment captured a fort near Pitiantutá Lake. The following month, a Paraguayan detachment drove the Bolivian troops from the area. In retaliation, President Salamanca ordered General Quintanilla to seize the Paraguayan forts Corrales, Toledo, and Boquerón.

As a result of Bolivia's loss in the Chaco War, the old political order of Salamanca and his successor José Luis Tejada were quickly painted by military officers like Quintanilla as responsible for the country's failure. However, Quintanilla, like many of his fellow more conservative senior officers, was weary of the reckless reformist wave unleashed by the "Military Socialist" David Toro and Germán Busch regimes which followed.

Nevertheless, he was appointed commander-in-chief of the armed forces during the administration of Germán Busch. Busch, despite his experience of governing the army, was politically naive and allowed Quintanilla free reign to oust the younger liberal officers from their position of power. From the day of his appointment, there started a public purge of all "politically minded" officers from the ranks.[3] This would eventually be ended by Busch under pressure from the left who feared the replacement of their allies with prewar officers.

On 23 August 1939, Busch committed suicide. Though Vice President Enrique Baldivieso tried to convince the military chiefs to allow him to assume the presidency, General Quintanilla was soon elevated to the position on the basis that since Busch had declared himself dictator four months prior, the constitutional order was thus null and void. He would later amend article 90 of the 1938 Constitution outright abolishing the vice presidency on 4 December 1939.[4]

In the immediate aftermath of Busch's suicide, Quintanilla was faced with the task of stabalizing the country while also dispelling accusations that he was enacting a coup and that the president had been assassinated. In order to reinforce the version of Busch's suicide, the government of Quintanilla issued a statement on 24 August which "leaves on record with full evidence that the death of the president is due to an absolutely voluntary act by determination made under the weight of his deep patriotic anguish."[5]

His main acts in his brief capacity of president were to begin the process of returning the country to the pre-war oligarchic status quo, complete with its faults and relative stability. On 19 October 1939, Quintanilla temporarily postponed the compulsory delivery of 100% of currency by mining industrialists to the State. Mining industrialists managed to recover the foreign currency from their exports, erasing the actions ordered by the Busch in June. His decision to issue fiduciary currency without legal support caused an inflation in the prices of basic necessities, worsening the country's dire economic situation.

1940 election

Although Quintanilla sought to exercise a longer government, he could not resist the general pressure among civilians and the military for a swift call for national elections. Tensions between the left and right wings of the army soon became clear. General Bernardino Bilbao Rioja, the new army commander-in-chief of the army, was promoted as a potential presidential candidate. Bilbao represented the line of Toro and Busch, was an admired hero of the Chaco War, and had the consensus among ex-combatants that Quintanilla lacked.[6]

Due to Quintanilla's prolonged indecision to call elections, General Enrique Peñaranda declared to the press that the country urgently needed "direct general elections to be called."[7] Peñaranda was represented by the newly formed Concordance, a coalition of the traditional Genuine Republican, Liberal, and Socialist Republican parties backed by the mining oligarchy. These parties addressed the president in a note stating that "Deferring for a longer time, without valid reasons, the validity of the Political Constitution of the State and the call for direct elections, will lead public opinion to the conviction that their participation in the electoral plebiscite [...] will not be the authentic expression of the popular will.”[7] Given the pressure, the Quintanilla administration finally put out a call for elections on 6 October 1939, set to take place the following year on 10 March 1940.[8]

In order to ensure the power of the senior officers, Quintanilla enacted measures to put down leftist opposition. On 29 October, Bilbao was summoned to the government palace to meet with the president. As soon as he arrived, he was surrounded by several men who mercilessly beat him until he was unconscious. Gagged and handcuffed, he was taken to the train station and deported on the spot to Arica, Chile.[6] Following this, Quintanilla declared that "In the protection of social tranquillity, threatened in recent days and in my duty as a leader, I have accepted with feeling, but without hesitation the departure of General Bilbao Rioja."[7] It was an unspeakable aggression that, however, drove the administration's only potential political rival from circulation.

Given the suppression of opposition leaders, Peñaranda won in an absolute majority with 58,060 votes against only 10,000 of his opponent, the Marxist José Antonio Arze. Peñaranda was inaugurated on 15 April 1940 bringing a close to Quintanilla's interim mandate.[9]

Grave of Carlos Quintanilla at the general cemetery in Cochabamba

Following the inauguration of Peñaranda, Quintanilla left the Palacio Quemado and moved to Rome, Italy, where he served as the Bolivian ambassador to the Holy See until 1941.[10]

Quintanilla died in his native Cochabamba on 8 June 1964, at the age of 76.

• Government of Carlos Quintanilla, 1939–40