I have three or four friends throughout their lives have shown an admirable passion and infinite patience in the work of rescue memory of our contemporary history, so that Bolivians learn to remember and characters and historical events leave an imprint cyclical Blizzard can not take away more.
Eduardo "Pachi" Ascarrunz is one of them, and after many years of accumulation, published The Word of Peace: a man, a century (Plural, 2008), testimony about his relationship with Victor Paz Estenssoro, by far the most important statesman who has been in Bolivia in the last century.
As the same "Pachi" he says, the book is "something closer the craft of literature, as did my grandmother Rita: make a quilt from scraps left over from other clothing, in this case with remaining pieces of fragments of memory that ultimately make up the puzzle is this work in whole. " The quilt is woven around an historical event: the 1985 general election in which Paz Estenssoro qualified to be elected president of Bolivia for the fourth time. Pachi conducted a creative and ingenious campaign that contributed to the victory of the historic leader of the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) and the repositioning of its public image, damaged as a result of its support Colonel Banzer military coup in 1971. Sum of interviews, conversations, comments and observations, the book redeems the human dimension of Víctor Paz Estenssoro, is a "glimpse of the soul" of man and of itself gave little cryptic and open to other facets intimate. His reluctance to interviews was well known, not just those on politics, especially about his personal life.
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| Victor Paz in the magazine "Zeta", 1979 |
Perhaps because of the special relationship of friendship my father was Paz Estenssoro, I could talk to him several times, the last shortly before his death in his home in San Luis, Tarija, but this episode save that for another time.
Years before, when I was in the mid 1970's and asked him about the story "secret" of the MNR, he said he still could not talk about it because he believed he would still have involvement in politics Bolivia, as indeed had it for many years.
In 1979 I interviewed for one of many projects being undertaken by Pachi Ascarrunz, the magazine "Zeta" in which 6 or 7 numbers (not remember) collaborated. Paz Estenssoro received me at his apartment in the building Isabelita, on Avenida Arce in La Paz, and I talked about the political price he paid because of his alliance with Banzer in 1971. However, he defended the decision taken then because it allowed the military to lift the veto hung over the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement since the military coup of Barrientos:
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| interviewed by Alfonso Victor Paz Gumucio in "Zeta" |
"We enter into this conspiracy for two reasons. A general value: the country was in a chaotic situation, the worse day by day, could have unforeseen consequences for the very existence of Bolivia. Another, from the standpoint of the MNR, because he had established a miliary veto for political action. (...) As head of the party I had a vital interest for that veto would disappear. "
Pachi also devotes two pages to the political relationship and friendship between Alfonso Gumucio Reyes and Paz Estenssoro. In a conversation he had with him in May 1985, Peace rescues what he said about my father (who played in another occasion.)
Pachi seems to say at all times in his book: "I was there, I saw, I heard ...", as if to underscore the story first hand and your own voice, that of a journalist at the same time that it makes a great testimony to the character of contemporary Bolivian politics, offers his own life in turn to the relationship with the person-not just with the character, Victor Paz Estenssoro.
The "ninguneo" which is performed with relish in Bolivia ignore criticism makes written and published many books with great effort. Told myself at the wrong book (New Chronicle September 2010), two years after being out of print, despite the value that is testimony of our contemporary history as a product of the will of a reporter who works for the memory, a concern that has always characterized.
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