Image: Picture painted by Epifanio Garay 19th century

El Libertador and his descendents 

The founder of Bolivia and one of the most relevant figures during the South American wars of independence, Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar Palacios Ponte y Blanco (or more simply Simón Bolívar) is known worldwide for being one of the finest soldiers of all time and a grand statesman. Born into nobility and dying ill and poor at the age of 47, he wrote the 1826 Constitution of the Republic of Bolivia. Preferring to be known as 'El Libertador' and rejecting the title of emperor, he helped create Gran Colombia, a short-lived state comprising much of northern Latin America that lasted for only 20 years due to each region's competing interests. But Simón Bolívar left an important legacy, as he is considered the liberator of five nations.

During his life, Bolívar had many followers, admirers, enemies and opponents. Some admired his accomplishments and his military leadership, but at the same time he was ruthless, with a commanding personality, according to the 1828 book Memoirs of Simón Bolívar, written by General H.L.V Ducoudray Holstein. Furthermore, in P. Pruvonen’s 1858 book Memorias y Documentos de Memorias del Perú, Bolívar's relations with women are described in detail. Bolívar had a wife, at least four longtime lovers, including the Ecuadorian revolutionary Manuela Sáenz, and at least 47 mistresses.

Oftentimes, a great man’s legend hides many shadows as well. Bolívar was a warrior, with a great fighting spirit, but he was also a haunted man. The novel that describes his heartbreakingly human side is Gabriel García Márquez’s 1989 novel The General in his Labyrinth. In it, the last days of Simón Bolívar are recreated – his illnesses, his flaws, his agony and his death. 

The late Bolivian scholar Edmundo Murillo Costas, a man whose eyes would light up with every book or photograph that contained Bolívar's image, knew these two sides of Bolívar. He proposed that Bolívar is the most important symbol of freedom and the figure of South American independence. He admired the path of this hero, visionary and brave fighter, but he didn’t disregard Bolívar's womanising ways – and he also claimed to be his descendent.

Many authors and experts of Bolívar's life, such as Luis Eduardo Pinto, who works as a guide at Bolívar’s final resting place, the Quinta of Saint Peter of Alexandria in Colombia, claim that El Libertador was unable to have children because he suffered from a genital condition known as orchitis. However, throughout the land in which Bolívar explored and waged war, there exist allegations and claims from Bolívar's purported descendents – and Bolivia was no exception to El Libertador’s amorous adventures. 

In 1825, the year of the country's independence, Bolívar paid a visit to the city of Potosí and ascended Cerro Rico, the Mecca of Spain’s South American empire. There, he apparently met a woman named María Joaquina Costas, who alerted him about a possible assassination attempt against him. She helped him escape, and from there a romance was born, recounts Teresa Campos Costas in an article in the newspaper El Potosí. Campos refers to a book, La Sangre de Bolívar en Bolivia, by Juan José Toro, in which Bolívar's accomplishments are proudly related. Toro says that a child was born from Bolívar and Costas’s relationship, José Costas, and that a birth certificate was found in the town of Caiza in the department of Potosí. Two names appear on the birth certificate issued by the church: mother María Joaquina Costas and father Simón Bolívar. Toro argues that the child was not recognised because Bolívar did not want his enemies to find out about his son, but there is no proof to back up this statement.

Other well-known authors, such as Lucas Jaimes and Luis Subieta Sagárnaga, had already made reference to Bolívar and Costas’s purported love child; however, it was not until Elías Costas told his story to the historian Humberto Iporre Salinas that the possible bloodline of Bolívar in Bolivia was made evident. Edmundo Murillo Costas, one of Elías Costas's children, was aware of this story, but he did not make it public. Maybe deep down, Murillo knew that looking for fame through Bolívar's bloodline was not what he wanted to take from El Libertador, but instead he wanted to keep with himself Bolívar’s spirit and courage, and in fact be proud of his mother's surname, Hortensia Murillo, putting it before his surname Costas. In this way, as Edmundo Murillo did, I also prefer to remember Bolívar as brave, strategic and providential. He died banished from his homeland, and although he was an extraordinarily severe man, his image as liberator remains omnipresent in the history of South America.

Photos: Courtesy of Fundación Grupo Ukamau 

The continuing legacy of Jorge Sanjinés and the Grupo Ukamau’s combative cinema 

It is impossible to think and speak about Bolivian cinema without mentioning film director Jorge Sanjinés and the Grupo Ukamau, the cinema group he founded. Sanjinés’s 1966 film Ukamau was the first feature-length Aymara-language film, and it lent its name to the group. In Aymara, ukamau means ‘it’s like this’. The word strongly resonates with the group’s political Marxist commitment to exposing national socio-political realities to Bolivian citizens and fearlessly denouncing imperialist crimes against Bolivia’s indigenous communities. César Pérez Hurtado, one of the founding members of Ukamau and the director of photography and camerawork for its most iconic film, La nación clandestina (1989), explains that Ukamau’s films are a ‘service to the country’. Sanjinés’s devotion to and representation of the cosmovisión andina has made him one of the most celebrated patrons of the indigenous people of Bolivia.

What started off as a small gathering of Bolivian film intellectuals wanting to improve the social conditions of marginalised ethnic populations grew to become one of the leading participants in the New Latin American Cinema movement of the 1960s. This cinema movement was initiated in response to the extensive struggles associated with the underdevelopment that plagued Latin American nations. This revolutionary type of cinema used film as a political tool. It empowered popular sectors by giving them a platform and broadcast the injustices happening on the continent to other corners of the world. In the case of Sanjinés and Ukamau, their cinematographic and political agenda correlated perfectly with this movement’s ideals. Sanjinés adopted an inherently combative social cinema to shape the lived realities of the Quechua-Aymara peasantry of Bolivia. 

From the moment the Grupo Ukamau began producing films, such as Yawar Mallku (1969) and El coraje del pueblo (1971), its members sought to simulate a different point of view from that shown in mainstream Westernised cinema. Ukamau member Pedro Lijeron says that Ukamau’s films presented ‘a new point of view, of another world, to a universal audience.’ In Sanjinés’s films, heroes and protagonists are indigenous Andean people. When asked to summarise the philosophy of the cinema group, Pérez responds, ‘We think of others before ourselves.’ Lijeron simply says, ‘Ukamau, junto al pueblo’ (‘Ukamau, with the people’). Both their answers confirm how Ukamau was created on the basis of defending those most in need and giving these sectors a voice and a space through cinema.

Unfortunately, Ukamau’s films are extremely difficult to view on DVD or online. Sanjinés ensured that his cinema could only be watched at film screenings, as a collective experience. Ukamau’s philosophy also revolves around ideas of unity and collectivity. Pérez describes the deeply fissured state that was Bolivia when the group was founded. ‘Urban citizens and intellects used to speak about “Otherness”,’ he says. ‘But I had to ask myself, “What is Otherness?” The truth was, it was the indigenous people that were forever living in marginality of what was happening in Bolivia.’ Pérez feels that this segregation was unnatural to the native and modern cultures of Bolivia. ‘In La Paz, we always speak in first person plural: iremos, nos tomaremos, etc. Always in plural,’ he says. If Pérez were to reduce Ukamau’s philosophy to one word, he says he would choose jiwasa, meaning ‘we’ or ‘us’ in Aymara. Ukamau’s films are for, from and with the people of Bolivia. 

It must be noted that the Grupo Ukamau’s work and efforts are not stuck in the past. Its cinema lives on. Sanjinés and Hurtado are still active on the cinema scene and have been joined by a new generation of filmmakers to continue the legacy of Ukamau. Hurtado and Ligeron both agree that while the group is still devoted and committed to representing the popular sectors, it has opened up a new space for progress, one that simultaneously looks to the future and reflects on and analyses the country’s past. The group’s latest films, such as Insurgentes (2012) and Juana Azurduy (2016), are feature-length dramas that draw on significant historical events and figures that allow Bolivians get in touch with their roots and understand their current realities. In a similar vein, the upcoming movie Los viejos soldados (due to come out in 2020) tells the story of a friendship between an indigenous Aymara farmer and an urban white Bolivian during the 1932–35 Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay. Ligeron also comments on how important it is that Ukamau has opened up a new space for dialogue and filmmaking by inaugurating the Escuela Andina de Cinematografía. Sanjinés started the school for aspiring filmmakers to create audiovisual material in order to ‘collaborate towards the construction of a more democratic and participatory society.’ The director and the Grupo Ukamau have had an unprecedented positive social effect on improving the lives of the indigenous peoples of Bolivia, and their mission is still not over.

To learn more about Fundación Grupo Ukamau visit or their instagram @fundaciongrupoukamau

Photo: Peter Rios − BX Collaborator

Cover Issue #96

PATRIMONY

In 1972, UNESCO adopted the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage. Bolivia signed the convention, but was one of the first countries at the time to remark that the notion of ‘folklore’ wasn’t explicitly mentioned and to claim it as ‘natural heritage.’ This was an important first step towards the recognition of ‘immaterial cultural heritage’ as something worth preserving. It also carried the implication that immaterial (or intangible) heritage needed to be defined and that it could belong to someone – in this case the Bolivian state. Today, there are seven Bolivian sites considered (material) cultural heritage and five intangible cultural-heritage practices.

Some of these cultural-material sites are from pre-Columbian times: Tiwanaku, Samaipata, the Qhapaq Ñan; others are from colonial times: Potosí, Sucre and the Jesuit missions of Chiquitos. The last one is a natural site: the Noel Kempff Mercado National Park. The intangible Bolivian comprises the Carnaval de Oruro, the Kallawaya culture, the San Ignacio de Moxos celebration, the Pujllay Ayarichi dance of the Yampara and, the latest addition, the Alasitas market.

A country’s heritage is something that the nation as a whole identifies as its own, and which is closely connected to its identity – if not an integral part of its identity. But these heritages are also social constructions, something that became patrimony because it was decided as such. In that sense, it is a fleeting notion, something that represents a nation at a fixed point in time. Because identity is a social construction, it is a dynamic process that responds to the ideals and values of a leading class making it also a political construct. If Bolivia’s patrimony comprises those mentioned above, then it says a lot about how Bolivia sees itself and how Bolivians want to be seen in the world.

It could also be argued that cultural patrimony transcends time and space, that once the status is given it can never be taken back. This is true only to an extent; the national park could disappear because of the Amazon rainforest’s increasing deforestation and environmental destruction. Cultural sites can be destroyed by overexploitation and tourism. It may be counterintuitive, but the heritage of a country is more likely to remain in its intangible practices and traditions. For example, in a really terrible apocalyptic scenario, salteñas could disappear and not physically exist anymore, but the recipe and what it represents in the minds of people would keep on existing.

Because of the fragility of the world we live in, there is a real necessity to value, protect and take care of our patrimony, as individuals and as a nation. Bolivia’s heritage is not only items on a list approved by UNESCO, it’s all the food, dances and traditions of the people of Bolivia. It’s the Uyuni salt flats, the 13 national parks that have been recognised, the chullpas. It is everything that surrounds us and that means something to us.

Editrial Issue #96, by CAROLINE RISACHER

Read more here: http://www.bolivianexpress.org/magazines/96