Cecilia Lanza Lobo
It is known, although not publicly, that in 2016, regarding the 35 years of the coup d’etat of 1980 that we had just remembered, the Argentine government, through its embassy in La Paz, delivered to the Bolivian government of a report on the links and participation of both countries during the military dictatorships of the time.
It is also known that neither Foreign Minister Choquehuanca, nor Vice President Álvaro García Linera, nor President Evo Morales himself gave him the slightest importance. And that fact, which certainly takes us out, the second not, because for 20 government the most avoid an essential request whose importance never understood: to disarch the classified documents of the armed forces related to military dictatorships. All documents, not distractive retacites. At this crucial political moment, the unavoidable question for current candidates is: could we now aspire to Rodrigo Paz, coming from where it comes from, does it? Could society think that Jorge Quiroga, vehement defender of democracy, can now prove it challenging his own pupil story of General Banzer, dictator turned into a Democrat?
Before, some details. The report delivered to the Bolivian government by its Argentine pair contains, among other things, the names of Bolivian political prisoners in Argentina during military dictatorships. Information that in Bolivia is scarce, partial and scattered. How will such information be important! I do not have the document, I am after him, but I have the word no less than the Argentine ambassador who made the delivery, Ariel Bastiro, who confirms the disinterest of the aforementioned characters. So, remember why is such a thing important?
Because memory is the root on which every society is sustained. Memory is our base, our framework, our skeleton. And never better. Because the bones of our memory cohesive to our pack. And in our pack, we have been missing pieces. And when something is missing, the weakness in the walk shows, because human beings are made of memories that nourish us, which tell us from where we come, who were before us, what they did, what they dreamed, what we dream, where we are going. And without that compass, we have the soul lags. It is necessary to recover stolen memory. Where is Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz? Where is Juan Carlos Flores Bedregal? Where are our missing? How did it happen? Who are responsible?
Argentina understands it well and works accordingly with an enviable persistence, with the love patience with which its anthropologists dig here and there looking for the bones of theirs, the bones of its pack. They were, through the grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, CELS and other solid human rights organizations, who in 2016 asked the US government to decrsnate their archives, and so it happened partially. That information of specific interest of Argentina was also useful and although the pieces do not necessarily reveal great secrets, they do not only help to confirm or test known facts but to better spin the story, to rebuild it, to explain it. That is its relevance. Following that order of 2016, in 2019 there was a mass delivery of declassified documents to the Argentine government. Surely that material would also be useful to us. As far as I know, we have not requested it and what the Ambassador Basteiro tells ratifies the evidence: the revolutionary government of the Bolivian plurinational state never had interest.
Thus, the fragments of our history continue to scatter, one part in the memory of those who never told or tell the truth, and the other is locked behind the doors of the military institution unable to face their responsibility and give society what corresponds to it: their right to know the truth. Your love right to find your pack bones. Will the next democratic government do so?
