Fausto Reinaga

Fausto Reinaga (Colquechaca, March 27, 1906 − August 19, 1994) was a Bolivian indigenous writer and intellectual.

Fausto Reinaga, born José Félix Reinaga, was born in the village of Macha, in the Colquechaca Municipality of Bolivia. His parents were Jenaro Reinaga and Alejandra Chavarria (great-great-granddaughter of the indigenous leader Tomás Katari). Both of his parents had participated in the uprising of Zarate Willka in 1898.

Part of his family did housework for the managers of the U.S. mining company Patiño Mines. Reinaga learned to read at the age of 16.

Out of four siblings, he was the only child to survive. His two older sisters were raped and murdered as children by white Bolivian landholders, while his younger brother Alberto died in the military service. The council of elders sent him to study in the city of Oruro to prepare him to lead his people. In accordance with his noble heritage, they gave him the indigenous name Ruphaj Katari. As a writer, Reinaga chose the pseudonym of Fausto Reinaga to express his admiration for Fausto by the German writer Goethe.

In 1957, the Communist Party of Bolivia sent him to Leipzig (in East Germany) to a Congress of communist Trade Unions, and from there he went on to visit the Soviet Union. After his return, he attended a Communist conference held in Montevideo (Uruguay), where he was arrested. His book The Messianic Feeling of the Russian People was confiscated. The communists did not help him, and so he had to be repatriated by the Embassy of Bolivia in Montevideo. He then entered into a crisis of conscience and distanced himself from the Communist Party of Bolivia. He traveled to Machu Picchu, which had been the capital of the Inca Empire, where he realized the power of his ancestors.

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