Morales "plotter" was writer, fighter, film star idealist and political cameleon

Last Thursday Bolivian commandos sent from La Paz stormed some hotel rooms in Santa Cruz and killed three men, or “terrorists and mercenaries” whom they accused of plotting to assassinate President MoralesPresident Morales.

One of them was Irish, one an ethnic Hungarian from Romania, and the third, 49 year old Eduardo Rozsa Flores, a Bolivian-Hungarian who in his life defied any attempt to being categorized. For some he was an agent provocateur who liked to play with fire. He was also a writer, journalist, actor, soldier, fighter and idealist born to a Hungarian Jewish father and a Catalan mother in Bolivia and died also there as a Muslim. His leftist parents moved to Chile from Bolivia only to escape again after Pinochet took over ending up in Communist Hungary.

Here, Eduardo, or to his friends Edu, finished school and got a degree in humanities. At some point he was a Communist Youth leader and got to know many future left wing politicians. He then went to the USSR to study in a military college, but returned home and started working as a border guard and counter intelligence agent, then a reporter – according to his obits for La Vanguardia and for the BBC World Service - for a while. Having learnt five languages, he found himself in Croatia at the outbreak of the Balkan wars, first as a correspondent, but later as a commander of the international corps of the Croatian National Guard. As he recalled, his father was shocked to learn this and shouted at him for “joining the fascists, when it was the fascists who shot your grandfather into the Danube in WWII”. Because of the wartime Croatian Ustasha government he saw the new Croatian leadership as fascist too. But Eduardo believed in the Croatian cause and later was awarded with Croatian citizenship for his service in the war.

To say that Rozsa-Flores was a complex character would be a gross understatement. He himself spoke about his Communist/”Latin-American Guerilla Faith” and how he worked for Hungarian counter intelligence in the 80-s, meeting Carlos Ramirez Sanchez, aka Carlos, the Jackal. In an engaging docu-drama, (Chico, 2001, dir: Ibolya Fekete) playing himself he goes to Jerusalem to understand his faith. He arrives wearing a kippa, but then turns up in a Catholic church, trying to make a confession. “I’d done things, but the causes I did them for have dissappeared. Only my acts remain” – he tells a priest.

In the following years he published books about war and poetry, appeared in a few TV-soaps and started writing for some right-wing Hungarian magazines. He got close to the Hungarian extreme right, which in other countries would be easily called the extreme left for demonising “international capital” (often interchangeable with the words Jewish, Western, American) and symphatising with Islam and the Arab people, not on a principled basis, but out of antisemitism. The Hungarian left-liberal media on the other hand supported the Iraq war and portrayed civilian casualties in the 2006 Lebanon conflict as anti-Israel propaganda. Rozsa-Flores somewhere along the way converted to Islam and became vice-president of the Hungarian Islamic Community.

Not all his friends on the right could understand his reasoning of returning to Bolivia. Some claimed he said he was going to fight “the Communists” – i.e. President Evo Morales, who is a hate figure in the richer provinces. But to some Hungarian right wingers Morales is a hero, because ‘he stands against international capital and the US and supports the oppressed”. One right wing blogger managed to untangle this by noting: Morales is being supported by the “famously hardworking local indian population, who are just like our hard working gypsies”.

Some reports claimed Rozsa-Flores was invited back to offer military expertise in case of a civil war. Hungarian journalist Andras Kepes says he recorded a “last testament” interview with him which will be shown on Hungarian National TV on 21 April. (watch Kepes’ previous film/interview with him here, in Hungarian http://www.mtv.hu/videotar/?id=31375)

Bolivian TV showed graphic footage of the aftermath of the raid with the bullet-riddled bodies of the alleged plotters among them reportedly Rozsa-Torres, who was buried on Friday by his Bolivian relatives. Local police and papers said that a number of weapons were discovered in the city pointing to the assassination plot. A police chief claimed the group was behind a bombing that happened on Wednesday at the residence of Cardinal Julio Terrazas. Some Bolivian and Hungarian media reports suggest the men were simply killed in their sleep and there was no firefight. Questions were also raised about whether judicial procedures were followed before the raid.

Whatever were his views or whatever he did in his life Eduardo Rozsa-Flores was an intriguing and interesting character.