32 Facts About Hugo Banzer

Hugo Banzer held the Bolivian presidency twice: from 1971 to 1978 as a military dictator; and then again from 1997 to 2001, as a democratically elected president.

Hugo Banzer was native to the rural lowlands of the Santa Cruz Department.

Hugo Banzer attended military schools in Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil and the United States, including the Armored Cavalry School at Fort Hood, Texas.

Hugo Banzer took a Motor Officer Course at the School of the Americas.

Hugo Banzer was a descendant of the German immigrant Georg Banzer Schewetering.

Hugo Banzer was promoted to colonel in 1961, and appointed three years later to head the Ministry of Education and Culture in the government of General Rene Barrientos, a personal friend.

Hugo Banzer became increasingly involved in politics, siding with the right wing of the Bolivian Army.

Hugo Banzer was appointed director of the military academy and the Coronel Gualberto Villarroel Military School.

Hugo Banzer had called an Asamblea del Pueblo, or People's Assembly, in which representatives of specific "proletarian" sectors of society were represented.

In early 1971, a faction of the Bolivian military attempted to unseat the new president but failed, whereupon Hugo Banzer fled to Argentina, but did not give up his ambitions to the presidency.

Hugo Banzer received the political support of the center-right Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario of former president Victor Paz Estenssoro and the conservative Falange Socialista Boliviana of Mario Gutierrez, considered to be the two largest parties in the country.

Frustrated by the political divisions and protests that characterized the Torres and Ovando years, and, traditionally an enemy of dissent and freedom of speech, Hugo Banzer banned all the left-leaning parties, suspended the powerful Central Obrera Boliviana, and closed the nation's universities.

At that point, Hugo Banzer dispensed with all pretenses and banned all political activity, exiled all major leaders, and proceeded to rule henceforth solely with military support.

Selich was accused of plotting to overthrow Hugo Banzer and died of blows sustained while in custody.

In 1975, Hugo Banzer restored diplomatic relations with Chile, broken since 1962, with an eye toward obtaining an access to the Pacific Ocean, denied to Bolivia since the loss of its maritime coast in the 19th century War of the Pacific.

Since the Bolivian constitution did not at the time allow a sitting president to immediately succeed himself, Hugo Banzer initially endorsed General Juan Pereda as the regime's candidate.

Hugo Banzer denounced the electoral fraud, blaming it on Pereda and his supporters.

Hugo Banzer declared he would call fresh elections within a year or two.

However, Pereda and other officers felt Hugo Banzer was manipulating them for his own political ends.

Hugo Banzer ran for elections in 1979 and 1980, obtaining third place in both contests.

Hugo Banzer opposed bitterly the UDP government of Siles which lasted from 1982 to 1985, but turned more conciliatory when Victor Paz Estenssoro was elected president in 1985.

Indeed, Hugo Banzer's party claimed authorship of some of the most prominent neoliberal economic reforms instituted by Paz to curb galloping hyperinflation, repress the influence of labor unions, and generally reduce government control of the economy.

Hugo Banzer finished second in the 1989 elections closely behind the MNR's Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada and ahead of the centre-left Revolutionary Left Movement's Jaime Paz Zamora.

At the 1993 election Hugo Banzer finished second to the MNR and Sanchez de Lozada.

In 1997, Hugo Banzer finally achieved democratic election as president of Bolivia, at the age of 71.

Hugo Banzer was the first former dictator in Latin America's recent history to transition successfully to democratic politics and return to power by way of the ballot box.

Hugo Banzer's faction, known as the dinosaurios, comprised the party's old guard and its members were less ideologically inclined, being mostly concerned with holding power and preserving Hugo Banzer's historical reputation.

Hugo Banzer was the president during the Cochabamba Water War in 2000, which centered on the privatization of the water works of Bolivia's third largest city, Cochabamba.

When officials of the consortium who had bought the right to run the water works fled after being told by the authorities that their safety could not be guaranteed, the Hugo Banzer government declared that they had abandoned the project in April 2000, declared the contract void, and settled with the demonstrators.

Hugo Banzer was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2001, and even though he had a year left of his five-year term, he resigned on 7 August.

Hugo Banzer died of lung cancer at a medical clinic in Santa Cruz de la Sierra on 5 May 2002, aged 75, five days before he would have turned 76 and around two months before his original presidential term ended.

Hugo Banzer's remains were buried at the General Cemetery of Santa Cruz in Santa Cruz.