10 Facts About Alcides Arguedas

Alcides Arguedas Diaz was a Bolivian writer and historian.

Alcides Arguedas began working in various forms of media as a student, beginning with the Peruvian newspaper El Comercio, moving on to columns for El Diario, the short-lived Revista de America and El Mundial, and eventually becoming deputy editor of El Debate in 1915.

Alcides Arguedas was consul general in Paris and minister plenipotentiary in Colombia, where he was dismissed for criticizing the President Hernando Siles.

Alcides Arguedas maintained a critical stance toward certain political administrations, for which he was removed from office, exiled, and even slapped by then-President German Busch.

Alcides Arguedas became senator for the department of La Paz and eventually led the Liberal Party.

Alcides Arguedas's work describes the relationship between Bolivian society and its indigenous peoples, often cynically.

Alcides Arguedas coined the term "radical pessimism" for his stance on indigenous issues, explaining that it came from "a mixture of fatal biological laws, historical reasons and environmental circumstances [that] have made the indigenous an atrophied or infirm race".

Alcides Arguedas completed only five of the eight projected volumes of that collection, ranging from the colonial period to its violent 19th-century era of caudillismo.

Alcides Arguedas received the Rome Prize in France for his autobiographical book La danza de las sombras in 1935.

Alcides Arguedas was married to Laura Tapia Carro from 1910 until her death in 1935.