Alfredo Ovando Candia was a Bolivian military officer and political leader who served as the 48th president of Bolivia from 1965 to 1966 and 1969 to 1970.
11 Facts About Alfredo Ovando
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Alfredo Ovando started his long military career in the early 1930s, when he served in the Chaco War against Paraguay.
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Alfredo Ovando lived through the relative deprivation, reduced budgets, and loss of prestige of the defeated Bolivian army during the early years of MNR rule.
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At that point Alfredo Ovando became sole President, leading the country to the elections from which the popular Barrientos emerged victorious.
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Uncharismatic but tenacious, Alfredo Ovando was biding his time, counting on the fact that he would be the logical choice to run for elections once Barrientos' term ended in 1970, perhaps with some electoral "help" from the outgoing administration.
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Furthermore, Alfredo Ovando had been undergoing a political metamorphosis, and had come to conclude that he had to move to the Left in order to be acceptable as president in the ideologically super-charged atmosphere of the late 1960s.
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Worse, the military had become polarized, with some sectors supporting the President and even calling for a further leftward turn and others criticizing Alfredo Ovando and urging a more conservative, anti-Communist, and pro US stance.
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The new guerrilla outbreak was easily controlled, but Alfredo Ovando's response had been rather vacillating and timid.
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Alfredo Ovando offered a generous safe haven to guerrillas who gave up the fight, for example, in contrast to Barrientos' call for "heads on spikes" in 1967.
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Alfredo Ovando remained in Madrid until 1978, when he returned to Bolivia.
11.
Alfredo Ovando died in La Paz on 4 January 1982, at the age of 63.