Bolivia seized the tin king's mines in 1952, and his heir offered the government a 5 million dollar loan for a law that would let him divorce

Simón Iturri Patiño built Bolivia's largest tin business and in 1924 merged his mines and railways into Patiño Mines and Enterprises Consolidated, a Delaware company. He moved abroad in 1924, died in Buenos Aires on 20 April 1947 aged 86, and was buried in a mausoleum in Cochabamba. His son Antenor took over. The 1952 revolution confiscated the Patiño mines. Antenor had married María Cristina de Borbón, a Spanish duchess, in Paris on 8 April 1931. In 1942 she filed for divorce in New York for adultery. He avoided a divorce with a separation agreement: 500,000 dollars at once and 500,000 nine years later, due at once if he committed adultery; he paid the second sum early. In 1949 he sought a change in Bolivia's divorce law; the Senate passed it, but a cable from the princess roused the Catholic Church and the lower house stopped it. In 1958 he obtained a Mexican divorce. She sued for a share of the fortune, arguing that Bolivian law recognised foreign divorces only where the country of marriage, Spain, allowed divorce. In December 1960 Time reported that he had agreed in principle to lend 5 million dollars to the state tin corporation in return for President Víctor Paz Estenssoro letting a divorce law pass. He married Beatriz de Rivera in London that January. His younger daughter, Isabel, eloped with James Goldsmith at 17 in 1954 and died that year giving birth. Antenor died in New York on 2 February 1982.