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German Busch
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German Busch Becerra was a former Bolivian military officer, hero of the Chaco War , and president of Bolivia between 1937 and 1939.
German Busch was born in San Javier, in central Bolivia's hot, fertile, coffee-growing region to a physician, a German immigrant and a mother of mixed Italian and Amerindian descent. At some point in Busch's childhood, his father went to Germany, while sending the young boy and his mother to live in Trinidad. He attended provincial school there and entered military college at age 18.
Known for his torrid, fearless, and reckless temperament, he seemed to dominate the Bolivian army by force of his personality alone (in addition to his feats of bravery on the field), despite his relatively lower rank. As a Major, he took part, and carried the bulk of the action, in the highly controversial coup d'etat that overthrew of the Constitutional President Daniel Salamanca in November 1934, right in the middle of the war and in the very theater of operations. The reason for this was the constant butting of heads of the Bolivian High Command with Salamanca over the conduct of the war and the issuing of military appointments and promotions. Busch again conspired in 1936, this time overthrowing Salamanca's successor and former vice-president, Jose Luis Tejada, and installing his higher-ranked friend and comrade David Toro as de-facto President. Toro presided over a reformist experiment called Military Socialism (championed by Busch) for a bit over a year, before Busch himself overthrew Toro and installed himself in the Palacio Quemado on July 1937, alleging that Toro's controversial past made him a liability to the regime and he was better off leading it.
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article German Busch
