10 Most Famous Bolivian People

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10 Most Famous Bolivian People

Bolivians are people identified with the country of Bolivia. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Bolivians, several (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of their being Bolivian.

Bolivia, country of west-central South America. Bolivia is named after Simón Bolívar, a leader in the nineteenth-century wars of independence against Spain. The national culture is an amalgam of Hispanic and pre-Hispanic elements. Here are 10 Most Famous Bolivian People

1. Verona Pooth

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Verona Pooth is a German television personality, beauty pageant winner, and an occasional actress. In 1993, she was Miss Germany and Miss Intercontinental and represented Germany at the Miss Universe contest. She received the German “Bambi” media prize in 2004 and 2006. In 2004 she married Franjo Pooth, a German entrepreneur. They have two sons, San Diego and Rocco Ernesto.

2. Juana Azurduy de Padilla

Juana Azurduy Bermudez was a Latin American guerilla military leader. She was born on July 12, 1780 or 1781 in the town of Chuquisaca, Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata. She was Mestizo by ethnicity meaning she was half European and half indigenous.

“Her mother married into a family of property” meaning she married into a more wealth family. Her father however was killed by Spaniards, and the killer apparently got away without any repercussions.

She grew up in Chuquisaca and at the age of 12 joined a convent to become a nun. She was eventually expelled at the age of 17 because she rebelled far too often. She married Manuel Ascencio Padilla in 1805, a man who shared her love of the indigenous populations in Bolivia.

3. René Barrientos

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René Barrientos Ortuño was a Bolivian military officer and politician who served as his country’s Vice President in 1964 and as its President from 1964 to 1969.

General Barrientos came to power in the aftermath of the overthrow of the government of Paz Estenssoro in a CIA-backed coup. During his five-year rule, Barrientos and the army suppressed all opposition to his conservative regime, including a guerrilla group lead by Che Guevara in 1967.

4. Diego Cabrera

Diego Aroldo Cabrera Flores is a Bolivian football striker. He currently plays for Itagüí in the Categoría Primera A. He played at club level for Oriente Petrolero, Blooming, Bolívar, The Strongest and Aurora in Bolivia, as well as Cerro Porteño from Paraguay.

He also spent a couple of years in the Colombian Professional League with Cúcuta Deportivo, Independiente Medellín, Deportivo Pasto and Deportes Tolima. In 2007 Cabrera was elected as the “Football Player of the Year” by the Bolivian sports media, thanks to the impressive displays he had while playing for Cúcuta Deportivo.

In 2009 he was loaned to Independiente Medellín. During the first semester Cabrera had great performances in both, the domestic tournament and Copa Libertadores. However, due to some differences with his coach, he decided to leave the club. In early 2012 Cabrera joined Bogota’s Independiente Santa Fe.

5. Erwin Sánchez

Erwin Sánchez Freking is a retired Bolivian footballer. Dubbed Platini, he played as an attacking midfielder, with scoring range. Most of his professional career was spent in Portugal, after which he became a coach. From 2006–09, Sánchez managed the Bolivian national team, after having appeared as a player in the 1994 FIFA World Cup, the country’s third participation.

6. Jessica Jordan

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Jessica Anne Jordan Burton is a politician and a former model. Jessica is the only child of an English father and Bolivian mother, Aida Burton. Her father, Andrew Keith Jordan is a petroleum engineer. In addition to Bolivia, Jessica has also lived in England, Scotland, the USA and Brazil.

In her youth Jessica was very interested in sport and travelling and her mother worried that she was a bit too ‘tomboyish’ and not ‘girly’ enough. At about 16 years of age her mother enrolled her into modelling classes, which Jessica found she enjoyed.

As a result, Jessica went on to participate in numerous fashion competitions in Europe the USA and Mexico as well as having succeeded in many beauty competitions. These include Miss Mundo Latina, which she won in Miami in 2003. Jessica Jordan succeeded Desiree Durán who won the Miss Bolivia title in 2005, and Miss Bolivia Universe in 2006.

7. Roberto Suárez Goméz

Roberto Suárez Gómez, nicknamed “king of cocaine” was a Bolivian drug trafficker who played a major role in the expansion of cocaine trafficking in Bolivia. He was descendent of the Suárez brothers “rubber barons”, who had been responsible for the extermination of the Caripuña people on the Madeira River in Bolivia.

In the mid-1970s he began to conduct business with the Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar and after that he started to recruit Bolivian coca producers into his company “La Corporación”.

He financed the military coup that installed a dictatorship in 1980, in which Luis García Meza would be president and Suarez’s cousin Luis Arce Gómez was Minister of the Interior, and so he received political protection for his enterprise. Arce Gómez ordered the killings of many Bolivians, including union leaders and intellectuals such as Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz.

8. Jaime Saenz

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Jaime Sáenz Guzmán was a Bolivian poet, novelist, and short story writer. Born in the city of La Paz, he lived his entire life there, and the rough topography and harsh climate of this Andean city had a powerful effect on much of his work.

His poetry, though individual to the point of being difficult to classify, bears some similarities with surrealist literature. Throughout his life, Sáenz struggled with alcoholism, a struggle about which he frequently wrote in his poems. Accordingly, he is often viewed as a sort of poète maudit, or “cursed poet”. Sáenz was openly, “unashamedly”, bisexual.

9. Olivia Pinheiro

María Olivia Pinheiro Menacho is a Bolivian beauty pageant titleholder and model who was crowned Miss Bolivia 2010, and would have represented her country in the 2011 Miss Universe pageant. Pinheiro declined to participate in the international competition after rumors about her real age were revealed to the press.

10. Simón Iturri Patiño

Simón Iturri Patiño was a Bolivian industrialist who was among the world’s wealthiest people at the time of his death. With a fortune built from ownership of a majority of the tin industry in Bolivia, Patiño was nicknamed “The Andean Rockefeller”. During World War II, Patiño was believed to be one of the five wealthiest men in the world.