BOLIVIA: Tin Ears

The deal had a medieval ring. President Victor Paz Estenssoro needed more money to shore up his country’s nationalized tin mines; the tin baron wanted a divorce. What more logical situation?

Last week Antenor Patiño, 65, head of what was once the richest of Bolivia’s tin baronies, agreed in principle to a loan of $5,000,000 to the Bolivian government tin corporation. In return, Paz promised to let through a law that would permit Patiño to divorce his first wife, Princess Maria Cristina de Borbón (a niece of Spain’s last monarch, Alfonso XIII), and clear up any bigamous misgivings over the status of Patiño’s second wife, Beatriz María Julia de Rivera Degeon.

The marrying Mr. Patiño was getting a bargain. Shedding the first Mrs. Patiño has been his prime—and somewhat, hazardous—objective for years. In 1942 the princess walked out and filed divorce proceedings for adultery in New York State. At the time, Patiño did not want a divorce, managed to head it off by a separation agreement stipulating that he would immediately pay his wife $500,000, with an additional $500,000 to be paid nine years later—unless he was caught committing adultery before then, in which case he was to pay the second $500,000 on the spot. Sure enough, Patiño had to pay off early, after an expensive series of transcontinental train rides with a New York model.

In 1958, smitten with the well-bred Spanish beauty of Beatriz María Julia, Patiño capped a long campaign to be legally free by obtaining a Mexican divorce. At that, Princess Maria Cristina decided no settlement, no divorce, and sued for a sizable chunk of the Patiño fortune on the reasonably sound ground that, as a Bolivian, Patiño is subject to the Bolivian law that foreign divorces are legal only when the nation in which the marriage was performed (in this case, divorceless Spain) permits divorce.

The obvious way out was to change the Bolivian divorce law. In prerevolutionary 1949, the tin baron proceeded to do just that. After the Senate gave Patiño what he wanted and it went to the Lower House, an embarrassingly plaintive and highly publicized cable arrived from the princess, arousing the influential Catholic Church and stopping Congress in its tracks. Earlier this year, Patiño tried again, but his efforts were vetoed by President Paz.

This time, with Paz determined to prop the collapsing economy, the most eloquent message from the distressed princess is likely to fall on tin presidential ears.