Óscar Zamora Medinaceli

Óscar Zamora Medinaceli (a.k.a. 'Motete', 'Comandante Rolando', January 20, 1934, Tarija – November 17, 2017, Tarija) was a Bolivian politician and lawyer. A communist student activist in his youth and leader of a failed Maoist insurgency in the 1970s, Zamora Medinaceli went on to become a senator, minister, mayor, ambassador and prefect.

Zamora Medinaceli entered politics through activism in the student movement. In 1951 he became the executive secretary of the High School Students Federation of Tarija. Between 1954 and 1958 he served as the executive secretary of the Local University Federation of Tarija. He was also a founder and leader of the Communist Youth of Bolivia. In 1954 he became the founding chairman of the Tarija Civic Youth Committee. He became the executive secretary of the Bolivian University Confederation, a nationwide university students movement. Between 1961 and 1964 he was stationed in Prague, working at the office of the International Union of Students.

During his tenure in Czechoslovakia, Zamora Medinaceli had developed close links with the Chinese communists. Upon his return to Bolivia, he formed an oppositional tendency inside the Communist Party of Bolivia along with Raúl Ruiz González and Luis Arratia. Zamora Medinaceli's group were expelled from the Communist Party in August 1964 in connection with the second party congress held. His followers founded the pro-Chinese Communist Party of Bolivia (Marxist-Leninist) (PCB(ML)) in 1965, in which Zamora Medinaceli was the main leader.

Zamora Medinaceli had contacts with Che Guevara and Régis Debray during the 1960s. Zamora Medinaceli had been part of the CODEP delegation (which also included Guillermo Lora and Lidia Gueiler Tejada) to the Latin American Solidarity Organization in Havana in January 1966, but which was expelled from Cuba. Nevertheless, contacts between Zamora Medinaceli and the Cubans continued. In the end PCB(ML) never offered any concrete support to Guevara's guerrilla effort. Zamora Medinaceli did however continue to defend Guevara's guerrilla struggle publicly. Zamora Medinaceli is harshly criticized by Fidel Castro in his preface to Guevara's Bolivian Diaries. The refusal of Zamora Medinaceli to support to Guevara's initiative in 1967 remained a bone of contention between Maoists and Guevarists in Latin America for several years to come. Zamora Medinaceli wrote a lengthy rebuttal to Castro in 1968, in which he stated that Guevara himself had not accused the PCB(ML) of betrayal, that PCB(ML) had discussed plans for an armed insurrection during a visit to Cuba in 1964, that the PCB(ML) had been unaware of Guevara's arrival in Bolivia and that Castro had aligned himself with the 'revisionists' during the 1964 Latin American conference of Communist Parties.

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