Gumucio Dagrón, Alfonso

(1950– )

   Bolivian writer, filmmaker, photographer, journalist, and specialist in developmental communications. Born into a family with deep roots in the cultural and political life of Bolivia, Gumucio Dagrón is the son of Alfonso Gumucio Reyes (Cochabamba, 1914–1981), a prominent leader in the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario and one of its founders. As a young man, Gumucio Dagrón first went into exile following the 1971 coup of Hugo Banzer Suárez. He studied at the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques and the Université de Vincennes in France. Earlier, he had done stints as a student at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés in Bolivia. As assistant director and screenwriter, he collaborated with Jorge Sanjinés and Antonio Eguino, who have made significant Bolivian contributions to the film output of Latin America. The first film Gumucio Dagrón directed was Señores generales, señores coroneles, a 1976 documentary detailing the part played by the Bolivian military and the CIA in Banzer Suárez’s coup. He would go on to film over nine socially conscious documentaries, including one on Domitila Barrios de Chungara and a 1983 film, co-directed with Eduardo Barrios for UNESCO, on the radio stations of the mining communities in Bolivia, a key component of the cultural resistance in this country during various periods of dictatorship.

   A multifaceted man, Gumucio Dagrón is also the author of La máscara del gorila, a narrative of Bolivian dictatorship that was awarded the 1982 Premio Nacional de Literatura (National Prize of Literature) of the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes of Mexico, where the author spent two years of exile following the coup of Luis García Meza. Other publications, totaling more than 20, include poetry, film studies, and communications, as well as a book on the life and work of Luís Espinal Camps, the Spanish-Bolivian priest murdered during the first days of the García Meza regime. He has also exhibited his photography on several occasions and published numerous journalistic articles. In various capacities as a journalist, he has collaborated with several publications in Latin America and abroad. As a consultant on developmental communications, he has traveled around the globe for organizations such as UNESCO, UNICEF, the Rockefeller Foundation, and AusAID, a nonmilitary aid program of the Australian government, as well as worked for the Bolivian nongovernmental organization Centro de Investigación y Promoción del Campesinado (CIPCA) in the late 1970s. He continues to work in the field of journalism and communications as managing director of programs at the Communication for Social Change Consortium.