BOLIVIA: The Fanned Spark

Both Bolivians and foreigners—analyzing the problems of making a workable economic and political unit out of landlocked, geographically fractured, 68% illiterate Bolivia—have for a century been prone, in moments of desperation, to wry variations of the we-give-up suggestion that the country and its headaches should be divided among its neighbors. This rueful jest, repeated by a U.S. official in La Paz and quoted in TIME's March 2 issue, was turned last week into the spark for three days of anti-U.S. violence.*

"Imperialism's Vile Claw." The day Bolivia's 670 copies of TIME arrived...