For a few days in May, the headlines were filled with a little-known name: Max Mendoza Parra. His fifty-year-old face, hidden behind a mask, his angry eyes, corpulent (almost obese), was repeated in the news.
The images showed him escorted by police from the DACI Group, who transferred him from his shelter in Cochabamba to a prison in La Paz. He was accused of at least eight crimes, among which was his alleged relationship with the use of a gas grenade in a student assembly in Potosí that caused the death of young students and injured more than 70.
The tragedy allowed to uncover the biography of this character who had been a university student for more than 30 years, a leader since 2013, linked to the Movement Towards Socialism and personally to Evo Morales, a coca grower leader who continually declares his aversion to higher education.
Mendoza presented all the possible trophies, he was president of the Bolivian University Confederation (CUB) after abandoning 82 subjects and failing 38 in 13 years of study for engineering; he earned a salary at the senior professional level (like few others in the country) at the highest university authority in the country; He participated in commissions to elect judicial authorities after having abandoned 73 subjects and failed 4 of the 79 in which he appeared enrolled at the Universidad Mayor de San Simón.
Max Mendoza Parra, old enough to be a grandfather, was the top operator of a wide network embedded in all public universities, where university leaders are failed students. Uncontrollable economic resources, political power, travel, celebrations and obedience to the MAS are the stage where they move.
Shortly after, there was a congress of Bolivian universities, in which no measures were taken to reverse this institutional collapse. Some speeches, pats on the back, exchanges of chips.
Then the silence.
But not oblivion for history.
However, the student leadership was not always like this. Quite the contrary. Since the beginning of the autonomist struggles in the 1920s, the leaders were brilliant, they founded political parties, they edited magazines, they promoted debates, mainly in Cochabamba.
It was university students from La Paz who were willing to die for their ideas in the so-called “Sad Night” of April 10, 1952. It was students who faced the power of Political Control in 1959. It was leaders of the Local University Federation who called the organization of the Committee for Santa Cruz.
The best students were the boys who went to fight in Teoponte, like the three Quiroga Bonadona brothers and other leaders of the CUB in 1970. Honest, sincere, to the point of sacrificing their lives for libertarian ideals.
It was university students who organized the Interfaculty Committee in 1974 and denounced the Banzer dictatorship to the world until they opened the channel for democracy. Several of those executed on Harrington Street in 1981 were student leaders.
The university assemblies during the rectorate of Hugo Mansilla Romero at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés were debates with arguments, with brilliant oratory, with respect. Edmundo Salazar, Roger Cortez, Henry Oporto, Gonzalo Aguirre, the communists, the Trotskyists, the “elenos”, the Falangists… what lessons each meeting.
At the Catholic University, the leaders had to be the best students, those that no authority could question, much less humiliate or use.
How far from the scenes for university candidates in the period of the Plurinational State with their caps, their beers, their barbecues, their fights and perks!
Above all, how far from the ignorant who are now champions!
