Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada
Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada was president of Bolivia from 1993 to 1997 and from August 2002 to October 2003, the mining millionaire raised in Iowa and Chicago who spoke Spanish with an American accent that the country called Goni's gringo Spanish. He was the MNR planning minister who had carried out Paz Estenssoro's shock therapy of 1985. He was the president of the first term's reforms that the World Bank called the most ambitious in Latin America. There was the capitalisation of 1994-96 that sold half of the state oil, telephone, electricity, railway and airline companies to foreign investors for the promise of investment and put the state's half into a pension fund that paid every Bolivian over sixty-five a Bonosol. There was the popular participation law of 1994 that sent a fifth of the budget to three hundred and eleven new municipalities and gave the indigenous countryside its first councils. There was the education reform in the native languages, the constitutional recognition of the country as multi-ethnic with the Aymara intellectual Víctor Hugo Cárdenas as vice-president. There was the gas found in the Chaco by the capitalised companies that was to be the second term's fortune and was its end. He was born in La Paz in 1930, the son of a diplomat exiled by the governments of the 1930s, grew up in the United States, studied philosophy and literature at Chicago. He came home in 1951 to make films and then, from 1957, to mine, building the Comsur company into the country's largest private miner. He entered congress in 1979 and the MNR's leadership in 1990. The second term, won in 2002 with twenty-two per cent, a point and a half ahead of Evo Morales, was fourteen months of a recession. There was an IMF-driven income tax that brought the police into revolt in February 2003 with thirty dead in La Paz. There was the gas war of October 2003, when the plan to export the gas through Chile, the country that had taken the coast in 1879, brought the Aymara of El Alto onto the roads and the army cleared them with some sixty-seven dead. After that his vice-president resigned and the coalition broke. He flew to Miami on 17 October with his resignation faxed from the airport. Bolivia asked for his extradition on charges of genocide, the United States refused. A Florida jury in 2018 found him and his defence minister liable for extrajudicial killings and awarded ten million dollars to the victims' families, the first time a former head of state had faced a human rights trial in an American civil court. He lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland, at ninety-six. He has said the deaths were the fault of the men who blocked the roads.
- Lived: 1930 CE – ?
- Nationality: Bolivian
- Roles: president, businessman, politician
