Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz

Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz (born March 13, 1931 in Cochabamba , † July 17, 1980 in La Paz ) was a Bolivian politician, writer, playwright, journalist, commentator on social developments and university professor.

Life

Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz was the fourth of five children of Elena Santa Cruz and José Antonio Quiroga Chinchilla . As a primary school he attended the Colegio La Salle in Cochabamba . From 1931 to 1934 the family lived in La Paz , where his father was a member of the Partido Republicano Genuino and Ministro del Gobierno in the cabinet of Daniel Salamanca Urey .

In 1943 the family moved again to La Paz, as his father was employed in the management of Simón I. Patiño .

In 1949 he was a soldier in the armed forces of Bolivia . From 1950 he studied, like his older brothers Alfonso and Mario, at the Universidad de Chile . From 1952 he studied law and philosophy at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés .

He wrote political literature with Sergio Almaraz and founded a movement against the Korean War . He founded and published the weekly magazine Pro Arte . Before the revolution of April 9, 1952, the family migrated to Santiago de Chile . There he directed a theater and took part in the Bolivian art delegation at the Congreso Continental de la Cultura .

In 1954 he married Cristina Trigo Viaña and cultivated a friendship with the writer and politician Roberto Prudencio Romecín, who exiled from Bolivia to Chile in 1954. In 1957 his daughter María Soledad was born in Santiago de Chile. Quiroga was employed in a mining company and was writing his first novel.

In 1959 his son Pablo Rodrigo was born in Salta, Argentina.

With the painter Enrique Amal, his childhood friend, he went on a boat trip to Europe with the intention of settling in Paris. During the trip he suffered appendicitis and was operated on at sea. After a few months in Paris, he returned to Bolivia, where he published his novel Los Deshabitados , for which he received the PEN / Faulkner Award in 1964 .

In 1964 he founded the newspaper El Sol , which, under his leadership, took a critical position vis-à-vis the government of René Barrientos Ortuño . In 1966 he became a member of parliament as an independent candidate on a list of the Partido Demócrata Cristiano (PDC) of the Falange Socialista Boliviana for a constituency in Cochabamba. He was invited to Europe by the British government.

On September 19, 1968, Quiroga Santa Cruz put a six-question question to the government in parliament regarding the presence of the Central Intelligence Agency in Bolivia. On September 24, 1968, the District Attorney of La Paz, Juan Rivera Antezana, requested a criminal investigation against Quiroga Santa Cruz for defamation of the President at the competent court and with the chairman of the parliament Franz Ondarza Linares the waiver of the immunity of Quiroga Santa Cruz, which in a closed session of Parliament on October 11, 1968. On October 21, 1968, prosecutor Juan Rivera Antezana asked Judge Julio Santiváñez Villegas of the Fourth Criminal Court of La Paz for a summons for denial of the president and high treason for Quiroga Santa Cruz, which was served on him on October 23, 1968. He was asked to appear before the court within 48 hours, otherwise an arrest warrant would be issued against him. Augusto Mendizábal Moya applied for preliminary injunctions to enforce the habeas corpus in three simultaneous criminal proceedings . When Quiroga Santa Cruz appeared at Julio Santiváñez Villegas on October 24, 1968, the latter first wanted to send him home informally, which would have turned the summons into an arrest warrant. When Quiroga Santa Cruz refused to leave the court, Julio Santiváñez set the trial to start at 2:30 p.m. In the meantime, the judge's office was equipped with a typewriter and Julio Santiváñez held a telephone call with the public prosecutor Juan Rivera Antezana to finally decide that the time had now come to deal with a murder in Garita de Lima that had gone unnoticed for weeks he was not available for the Quiroga Santa Cruz case. He later claimed he was indispensable in a hardware store because of a fraud case. He let himself be called on the phone and fled from his office. On October 25, 1968, Quiroga Santa Cruz went to the Palace of Justice in La Paz to comply with the court summons. A paramilitary unit broke two portals of the Palace of Justice and kidnapped Quiroga Santa Cruz from the Palace of Justice. He was initially held in the Alto Madidi concentration camp and later in the San Pedro prison . The press reported on Saturday October 26, 1968 that presiding judge Roberto Pérez Patón had claimed that Quiroga Santa Cruz could not be arrested because he was in custody. On October 28, 1968, Quiroga Santa Cruz José's father, Antonio Quiroga Chinchilla, died.

In 1969 he became Minister of Mines and Energy in the cabinet of the de facto government of Alfredo Ovando Candía . On Quiroga's advice, Gulf Oil was nationalized in Bolivia. Quirogas was portrayed by conservative circles in the officer corps as an enemy of the institution of the armed forces of Bolivia and the nationalization was used as an opportunity to force him out of the cabinet and cover it with terror.

In 1971 he founded the Partido Socialista . During the dictatorship of Hugo Banzer Suárez, the Partido Socialista 1 split off under his leadership and remained in opposition to Banzer.

After his return to Bolivia in 1977, Quiroga took part in the presidential elections of 1978, 1979 and 1980. In the presidential elections on June 29, 1980, with about 144,000, twice as many votes were counted for him as in 1979, making him the fourth winner. He was a member of parliament and requested criminal proceedings against Hugo Banzer Suárez for human rights violations and mismanagement.

Quiroga was one of the first victims of Luis Arce Gómezdes in the coup of Luis García Meza Tejada on July 17, 1980: Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz took part in a meeting against the coup in the Central Obrera Boliviana building in El Prado, La Paz, as a paramilitary drove up in an ambulance from the Caja nacional de seguridad social and surrounded the building. As the unionists left the building with their hands behind their heads, a volley was fired at Quiroga Santa Cruz. The seriously injured man was abducted. A photograph of his battered body was published in the weekly Stern in 1984 . His body has since disappeared.

A gifted speaker and uncompromising human rights defender, Quiroga is revered in Bolivia as one of the martyrs of the anti-authoritarian and pro-democratic struggles of the 1970s.

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  Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz, second half of the 20th century

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  Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz, with the Partido Socialista armband

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  Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz, 1979

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz, Los deshabitados , reprinted Aug 2007.
2. ↑ Hugo Rodas Morales, Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz: 1969–1977 , p. 76.
3. ^ El País August 3, 1980, Así fue asesinado el líder socialista Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz
4. ↑ La Rrazon, La Paz , June 17, 2012, Fiscal lamenta que a 32 años del golpe el cuerpo de Quiroga Santa Cruz continúe desaparecido
5. ^ Hugo Rodas Morales, p. 573.
6. ↑ en: La Jornada , May 10, 2009, Ordenar a militares devolver restos de desaparecidos , exigen a Evo Morales; Bolivia Siglo XX, Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz 3