Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge From Nazism by Leo Spitzer

Author:Leo Spitzer [Spitzer, Leo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biographies & Memoirs
Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press
Published: 2018-04-03T21:00:00+00:00



Hochschild visiting Finca Caiconi, the agricultural training farm for Jewish refugees in Miraflores, 1940 (Courtesy JDC archives)

At the same time, SOPRO, again with Hochschild funding, set up a second agricultural training center — initially with eight men — near Todos Santos, in the subtropical Chaparé zone, some two hundred kilometers northeast of Cochabamba. Founded on the basis of an exploratory plan drawn up by a refugee agronomist, Otto Braun, and a follow-up site-study by F. Saphir, an agricultural engineer “lent” to SOPRO by the Jewish Colonization Association (ICA) in Buenos Aires, it was hoped that this settlement would serve as the regional nucleus for a much larger colony for about 5,000 Jewish families. Eventually, its planners optimistically estimated, the fertile and potentially productive soil of the Chaparé zone (which Saphir had described as “a paradise”) could sustain “a minimum of 17,000 families” — or about 50,000 Jewish immigrant settlers, eight to ten times the total number of refugees in Bolivia at that moment!153

Hochschild and his SOPRO associates realized, however, that practical implementation of any large-scale Jewish colonization scheme in the Bolivian hinterland could not come about without the sanction and substantive support of two key parties: Bolivian government officials at the highest level, including President Busch; and the directors, in the United States, of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Hochschild lobbied each of these energetically and, for the most part, quite skillfully. President Busch and other “modernizers” in the Bolivian government — on the basis of their own post-Chaco War colonization plans — were, of course, already aware of some of the potential benefits that productive agricultural settlements would yield to the national economy. But in his private meetings with the president, Hochschild wanted to extract pledges from him for a grant of land for the immigrants from Europe to settle and develop, and for the continued acceptance of additional refugees. He thus not only reiterated the longer-term economic and political advantages Bolivia would reap by fostering immigration and agricultural production, but also held up the possibility of additional, more quickly earned rewards. Bolivia was highly dependent on substantial imports of vegetable foodstuffs from neighboring countries and from overseas, he pointed out — wheat from Argentina and Canada, rice from India, sugar from Java, coffee from Brazil and Colombia. Domestic agricultural production replacing foreign purchases could save approximately $6.5 million annually, which could be invested within Bolivia, which would gain independence and self-sufficiency from this transformation, less vulnerability to the fluctuations in international market prices. And more immediate benefits were also likely. Hochschild explained that the refugee agricultural communities would in large part be underwritten with capital from the Joint in New York and from North American bankers and financiers. If an agreement could be worked out, substantial funds would be sent to the government in short order as an initial indication of their sponsors’ “serious intent.” And continued cooperation by the Bolivian government in accepting and settling refugees would certainly also ensure favorable results in its transactions with U.

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