Guillermo Gutiérrez Vea Murguía was a prominent diplomat, journalist, writer and Bolivian businessman. He was born in La Paz on May 29, 1912 and died in Buenos Aires on September 13, 1983 at age 71.
The Bolivian writer Alfonso Crespo defines him as "multi-faceted, gifted with multiple talents reluctant to be boxed in a single dimension, his existential path was flashing like that of a meteor, consumed in the end by his own flame." >
At age 17 he was employed in the newspaper La Linterna, of which he was later director, being very young. In 1932, when the Chaco war broke out, Bolivia and Paraguay entered, enlisted in the Army and went to the battlefield.
After returning from the war, in which he obtained several decorations, he related to the mining consortium that Carlos Aramayo, one of the great Bolivian entrepreneurs, had created, known as one of the "three barons of Tin". Aramayo hired him to work at La Razón, the newspaper that he owned, where he had several functions until becoming its managing director between 1939 and 1943. Although he was accused of "conservative and anti-worker," La Razón was also considered as one of the best newspapers in South America, which earned him in 1947 the Maria Moors Cabot award, given by Columbia University in New York.
In the second half of the 1940s, Gutiérrez Vea Murguía held diplomatic posts and was also Minister of State. In 1951 he appeared as a candidate for the presidency, but obtained little voting.
In 1952 La Razón was assaulted by adherents to the National Revolution that year and taken out of circulation.
In the 50's Gutiérrez went into exile, where he continued to dedicate himself to journalism and became involved with the Inter American Press Association (SIP). He won the Cabot Award for Journalism in 1968 "for his persevering efforts to improve and strengthen free and responsible newspapers in Latin America."
He returned to Bolivia in 1971, during the military government of Hugo Banzer Suárez, and obtained several public positions, the most important of them, in 1975, the ambassador in Chile, the first since the rupture of the diplomatic relations of both 1964. He helped lead the most important Bolivian negotiation for the recovery of a sovereign exit to the Pacific and got Chile to write a solution in writing. Negotiations failed in 1975.
In the last years of his life Gutiérrez Vea Murguía was again related to mining until his death in 1983.
During his life he authored books on diplomacy, journalism, and history.
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