Sketches of two murals in Bolivia

Bolivia. Culture. Alandia Pantoja, resurrected
The National Museum of Art exhibits works from the master's recently acquired collection, including sketches of two murals destroyed by the Barrientos dictatorship.

November 1964. There is one month left until the Bolívar club is relegated. The Tesla cinema premieres Brigitte Bardot's latest, The Warrior's Rest. The Andalusian bullfighter (and also actor) Enrique Vera jumps into the arena of the Olympic in San Pedro. René Barrientos, vice president of Víctor Paz Estenssoro, carries out a coup d'état supported by Commander Alfredo Ovando Candia. Three weeks later, the Catholic newspaper Presencia—directed by Huáscar Cajías Kaufmann—“reports” with a photo on the cover of the prompt removal of a mural by Miguel Alandia Pantoja from Palacio Quemado.

The caption reads: “This is a mural detail that makes the Government Palace even more gloomy. It is due to the inspiration (?) of the communist painter Alandia Pantoja who shows in that and other of his works various facets of various Mexican muralists such as Siqueiros, Diego de Rivera and Orozco who are by rare chance united in the brush from Alandia. This painter who today lives abroad sinisterly traced some passages in the country's history and the military was seen as such by this artist who was protected by the MNR. "We have been informed that a merciful coat of white paint will make these monstrous brushstrokes disappear as dozens of soldiers who today govern the country go up and down the stairs of the Palace with their eyes closed."

The mural will take seven months to remove. There were more important things to do (kill and torture; and look the other way) than attack culture. At the end of May 1965, the president of the Military Junta René Barrientos Ortuño orders the palace bricklayers to destroy the work and declares (of course in the same newspaper): “the mural offended the Church, the Army and all values.” of national life, a mural must have optimistic expressions.” The dictator Barrientos had debuted as an art critic. The grotesque and caricature style (Alandia Pantoja began as a caricaturist in the 1940s), with which the master ridiculed the gorilla generals, the landowners and the big exploitative capitalist businessmen, was definitely not to the liking and artistic “taste” of he.

Presencia's colleague asks if it was a personal decision or that of the Government: “it arose from the unanimous opinion of all those who came to this Palace and saw that terrible picture. In his replacement an allegory of Liberty will be painted. Barrientos was sarcastic.

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August 1965, four months after the attack: Alandia Pantoja —one of the founders of the National Workers' Central, precursor of the COB— “lives abroad,” as the director of Presencia would say. He has not left Bolivia by his own decision, he is one of the main mining leaders and the POR (Revolutionary Workers' Party). And it is not the first time that he will have to go into exile to protect his life and that of his family (dispersed across half the world). There will be too many times that he will have to grab his works/canvases and wrap them around his (and his immediate family's) body to save his paintings from destruction.

In August 1965, Alandia Pantoja wrote a letter to the director of the weekly Marcha de Montevideo (where she was visiting) to denounce the destruction of her mural History of the Mine (82 square meters in the main “hall” of the Government Palace). He fears that another of his murals (History of the) Bourgeois Parliament (72 square meters on the steps of the Legislative Palace) will suffer the same fate, as well as the three that are inside the Museum of the National Revolution in Plaza Villarroel: People's struggle for its Liberation, Educational Reform and Universal Vote (a total of 172 square meters).

The “Painter of the Revolution” demands internationalist solidarity to “condemn in the name of the human values of the world the razing and destruction of works of art, perpetrated with impunity by the intolerant and totalitarian regime of Bolivia, my homeland. The Military Government Junta, chaired by Generals Barrientos Ortuño and Ovando Candia, has carried out the unusual attack on my monumental paintings in the city of La Paz. These works that represented historical moments of my country, of the struggles of my people to achieve their freedom, have been demolished by the pickaxe of the generals, who did not want the people to see their heroism and their history reflected in living pictorial documents.

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