Arts and Humanities Workshop | Evo Morales and the Burnt Palace: His Fall and Unexpected Rebirth (A documentary and a diary)

Speaker: Martin Sivak, Director of ElDiario.Ar
Moderated by: Mariano Siskind, Professor, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University

For this session, we will read and discuss the introduction to Sivak’s work-in-progress narrative and diary of the last three years in Evo Morales’s life. Since September 2019, Sivak has been working on a documentary (together with Noah Friedman-Rudovsky) based on Morales' life. Thanks to their unique access to the former president, they have been able to document his controversial run for a fourth term, the Coup that forced him to leave the country, his life in exile, and his unexpected return to Bolivia. During our workshop, we will see a long version of the trailer and a crucial scene of the documentary.

Sivak interviewed Morales for the first time in 1995 and has maintained a relationship with him for over a quarter of a century. He published Jefazo, retrato íntimo de Evo Morales, which was translated into English, French, Italian and Chinese. He is the author of eight books of non-fiction, four of them about Bolivia. His latest work, El salto de papá (2017), was a bestseller in Latin America and Spain, and will be a motion picture in 2023. He has worked as a journalist since he was 18 years old, and has worked in newspapers, magazines, radio, and television. He holds a BA in Sociology from Buenos Aires University, a Masters in Latin American Politics from the University of London, and a PhD in Latin American History from New York University. He is currently the Director of elDiarioAR, a daily National newspaper in Argentina.

Martin Sivak, PhD in Latin American History, is the Director of elDiarioAR, a daily national newspaper in Argentina, and the author of eight books of non-fiction, including the international bestsellers El salto de Papá and Evo Morales, the extraordinary rise of the First indigenous president of Bolivia, and the two-volume history of the largest media conglomerate in Latin America, Clarín. Una historia (soon to be published in English by Duke University Press).

The Arts & Humanities Workshop Series fosters scholarly discussions centered on the work of leading academics in the fields of the Arts & Humanities.