Few corners of the world were more physically isolated from the military conflagration of the Second World War, and from the near-military conflict of the ensuing Cold War, than the landlocked Andean republic of Bolivia. Yet, spurred by the insatiable external demand for strategic products such as tin, wolfram, and quinine, these global conflicts penetrated into the remotest mining camps and up the most inaccessible headwaters of the Amazon. Local political conflicts, with their own longstanding logic and structure, were thereby transmuted into extensions of the world struggle for ascendancy. External analysts with no previous knowledge of or interest in Bolivian political history were particularly prone to misleading simplification and prejudicial labeling of the contending forces (in some cases even engaging in willful falsification), but many Bolivians also threw themselves with relish into the game. After all, whereas a provincial movement to shore up the privileges of the landlord class might merit scant respect, this same movement, by adopting the “Falangist” label in 1938, could hope to ride on the prestige of Franco's victorious armies in Spain, and perhaps obtain some lucrative foreign sponsorship in the process. Similar considerations inspired the upsurge of pro-Nazi rhetoric in 1941, the regrouping of Left and Right under the banner of “democracy” in 1945, and the shattering of that alliance after 1947 as the deepening of the Cold War offered displaced economic elites a hope of restoring the old order.