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Show World Eyes New Bolivia: Tin Coveted Dictator Busch Can Sway Market of Important Raw Metal. Prepared by National Geographic Society, Washington, D. C. WNU Service. Bolivia's newly established dictatorship dicta-torship can affect foreign countries more than would changes in many other parts of South America, because be-cause Bolivia's government is financed mainly by the revenue from its exports, and its exports particularly tin are in strong demand. de-mand. Tin, one of the strategic metals highest on the United States' want-list, want-list, is Bolivia's number one product and is responsible for its biggest business. As the third greatest tin-producing tin-producing country of the world, Bolivia Bo-livia is the nearest source for that metal to all countries of the New World, since its chief competitors are the Federated Malay States and the Netherlands Indies in Asia. Most of Bolivia's tin ore exports, however, go to Great Britain, since there are no tin smelters in Bolivia or the United States. Bolivian tin returns to the Americas from British Brit-ish smelters. Not a One-Metal Land. In Bolivia "the tin standard" substitutes sub-stitutes for the gold standard. This metal constitutes from two-thirds to nine-tenths of the country's exports; and export duties in this land of impoverished agriculture and limited limit-ed industry are the chief sources of the government's income. During 1937 the nation produced 12 per cent of the world's tin output. But Bolivia is by no means a one-metal one-metal land. Some 98 per cent of her exports are minerals, tin being followed fol-lowed in value by silver, lead, antimony, anti-mony, zinc, tungsten, copper, and bismuth. In antimony, too, the country ranks third on the list of producing nations. Its position is now of added importance because China has previously been the leading lead-ing source of supply but is no longer a factor in the world market. In addition to utilitarian tin and the Spanish silver of such romantic lore, exports of rubber, quinine, and exotic chinchilla fur help to make K0 Vi DICTATOR Col. German Busch, youthful president of Bolivia Bo-livia who dismissed his congress and set himself up as dictator, promising to give his people an election in a few months. Bolivia known to the outside world. Some estimates rank Bolivian forests for-ests second to those of Brazil for production of South American rubber; rub-ber; since much of the smaller country's forest products float down the headwaters of the Amazon to Brazilian ports, their origin is obscure. ob-scure. In an area more than twice as large as Texas, Bolivia supports only 55 per cent as many people as the Lone Star state. ' This is the only South American nation without access to the sea directly from its own ports; Bolivia lost her coastal territory to Chile after the War of the Pacific nearly 60 years ago. The land-locked Andean plateau, cradled 12,000 feet above sea level between two snow-capped ranges with peaks exceeding 21,000 feet, has so impressed im-pressed popular imagination with its "world's highest capital, La Paz," and its "world's highest steamer service" on Lake Titicaca that the low tropical plains to the east of the mountains are frequently frequent-ly forgotten. Yet these extensive lowlands constitute about 70 per cent of the nation's 537,792 square miles. On the south they merge into the Gran Chaca. scene of the most recent war in the Western Hemisphere. |