[3] However, his political inexperience and accustomation to rigid military structure weakened his ability to lead the disparate factions of the left-wing movements and led him to ultimately suspend the legislature and declare dictatorial rule in 1939.

[10] On account of his will and physical ability, it was determined by his family that Busch would attend the Military College of the Army in La Paz, for which his brother-in-law Samuel Ávila Alvarado obtained for him the necessary certificates of good conduct.

In order to travel to La Paz, Busch participated in a swimming competition in the town of Loma Suárez, winning first place and using the monetary prize to secure passage on a steam boat for himself and his three friends: Ceferino Rioja Aponte, Ernesto Wende Camargo and Sergio Ribera.

[23]Busch then turned his sights on the Military Aviation School in El Alto, whose insurrectionist officers maintained aerial dominance over La Paz, but was ordered to stand down by Toro.

[24] In March 1931, Busch, promoted to the rank of lieutenant in January, was commissioned by President Daniel Salamanca to lead a military contingent of thirty men tasked with locating the site of San Ignacio de Zamucos, a former Jesuit mission in the Chaco.

In September, the government in La Paz deemed the discovery of ceramic masonry and hydraulic excavations to be sufficient evidence that there had been a San Ignacio de Zamucos and recalled the Ayoroa expedition.

[38] Busch used his new command to advocate for more guerrilla action, tactical withdrawals, and surprise offensives as opposed to prolonged defenses and mass attacks which he viewed as a waste of soldiers and equipment.

On that day, sectors of the military loyal to Peñaranda, which included Colonel David Toro, Oscar Moscoso, and Germán Busch, decided to resist the order and constructed a plot to rebel against the president.

[42] In June of that year, a few weeks after the armistice with Paraguay, President Tejada Sorzano offered him a cabinet position in the Ministry of Defense but this was rejected by the military leadership which proposed Lieutenant Colonel Luis Añez as an alternative.

After a few weeks, the military leadership returned to the Chaco to direct troop demobilization and repatriate prisoners of war, leaving Busch as the interim chief of the General Staff based in La Paz.

His PRS had been both one of the three large traditional parties allied with Tejada Sorzano's government and, when the viability of that administration seemed lost, had flipped sides and joined the United Socialists in their opposition to it.

In a manifesto issued to the nation, Busch stated that, "The parties of the left, united by pacts which seemed solidly defined, did not delay in breaking them" and that the army had thus decided to rule without them and would instead receive their base of support from the veteran and labor movements.

[59] Busch then asked that Toro send a letter of resignation as President of the Republic to the military garrisons as a symbolic gesture to convince the public that the army was completely free to respond to the referendum.

The left and the right alike assumed he would revert from Toro's military socialism to the traditional political establishment, a sentiment Busch himself did little to clarify through his vague statements of "national regeneration" and the "[maintenance] of public order".

Nevertheless, Busch allowed the minister the freedom to undo many Toro-era policies including the closing down of state-subsidized food stores and the elimination of various consumer goods subsidies and economic support programs.

[65] Busch, in turn, did little to stop Peñaranda's successor, the newly appointed General Carlos Quintanilla, from orchestrating a public purge of young left-wing officers from their positions of power in the military ranks.

[68] Faced with this new movement led by Busch, the traditional parties (save for the PRS which joined the FUS) withdrew from the election,[69] allowing the so-called Generación del Chaco to win in a landslide and giving them full control over the convention.

[78] Bogged down for most of his presidency in the procedural aspects of enacting a new political framework (the Assembly, the new Constitution) Busch was not able to pass many meaningful reforms, despite his stated aim of "deepening" the military socialism of Toro.

Not long after, on the 18th, Gosálvez resigned from his position as minister of government in order to dedicate himself fully to his diplomatic work in Rome as Ambassador to the Holy See, removing himself both from domestic Bolivian politics as well as the country itself.

While the motive of this likely had to due with the desire to settle Jews in the Chaco before Paraguay did, it nevertheless made Bolivia the only country in the world at the time which permitted unlimited Jewish migration and went against the strong national socialist and pro-German sympathies of the army.

[96][97] While the measure was not meant to challenge private ownership of the mines, it for the first time provided the government with an effective way of acquiring some of the earnings of Bolivia's powerful tin industry and asserted the right of the State to intervene in the country's economy.

On the other hand, it made Busch the public enemy of the Rosca,[c] Bolivia's powerful oligarchy of tin barons, who denounced the new law and enlisted the support of the conservative Concordance to oppose it.

According to Foreign Minister Eduardo Díez de Medina, "The consortium of the large mine owners [...] who saw in the attitude of the president a threat to the predominance of privileged groups, unleashed a violent opposition to his measures.

Busch's political woes were compounded by personal issues including the death of his mother, whose funeral saw low attendance, and a dental ailment which forced him to take analgesics to calm the pain.

[100] In order to reinforce the version of Busch's suicide, the Quintanilla government issued a statement on 24 August which "leaves on record with full evidence that the death of the president is due to an absolutely voluntary act by determination made under the weight of his deep patriotic anguish".

Later, the final order of the case, issued on 5 October 1939, concluded that "President Busch has ended his existence through the violent procedure of suicide [...] at his work desk in his private home, using a Colt 32 revolver".

[109] In 1944, Congressman Edmundo Roca and Captain Julio Ponce de León accused Colonel Eliodoro Carmona as having been the "main perpetrator of Busch's death" and requested "imprisonment while ordinary justice is pronounced again".

[121] While Wendler expressed interest, the final reply by the German government on 22 April cordially denied Busch's request, stating that it wished to avoid "conspicuous measures, such as the sending of a staff of advisors".

While Busch sympathized with elements of Nazi ideology, he never agreed with its fundamental principles regarding race and antisemitism, confirmed by his sponsorship of Jewish emigration from Europe and his condemnation of the racist and regionalist Eastern Socialist Party which he claimed constituted "an attack against national unity".

Puerto Busch, for many decades, was a port project in oblivion, which regained its prominence as a strategic commercial and export zone after the defeat of Bolivia before Chile in the Maritime Demand at the International Court at The Hague.