| Hector A. Borda Leaño | |
| Nationality: | Bolivia,Sweden |
| Occupation: | Writer, politician, anthropologist |
| Senator | |
| Term: | 1982 – 1985 |
| Birth Place: | Oruro, Bolivia |
| Death Place: | Sweden |
| Party: | Falange Socialista Bolivia (FSB) |
| Alma Mater: | National University of La Plata |
Héctor Borda Leaño (1927 – 25 January 2022) was a Bolivian politician, anthropologist and poet. He was born into an intellectual family as son of a farmacologist from Potosí and a lady of landowner gentry from Sucre. His father and two uncles fought in the Chaco war, and much of his childhood was marked by difficulties. Borda joined the Falange Socialista Boliviana (FSB), as a teenager in the early 1940s. Eventually he was elected for this party to the national congress 1966-1969. In the early 1970s he broke out from the FSB together with Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz and Walter Vasquez Michel. After the military coup led by Hugo Banzer in 1971 Borda was forced into exile, first to Argentina and again in 1977 to Sweden. He returned to Bolivia in 1982 as elected senator for the newly formed Partido Socialista (PS-1).[1]
Borda Leaño was a member of several avantgarde artistic movements in Bolivia, such as the Second Gésta Bárbara in Oruro and Grupo Anteo in Sucre.[2] During the 1960s Borda Leaño was a founding member of the cultural movement Prisma, which gathered the Bolivian intellectual elite. Its leading members, among them Pedro Shimose, Julio de La Vega and Monsignor Juan Quiróz, were closely connected to the newspaper El Diario and were key in extending Bolivian literary influence across its national borders.[3] Borda became in the late 1960s gradually more left-wing and turned ideologically towards a nationalist marxist vision that sought to galvanize the mining proletariat with the indigenous pesantry. His literary style reflected his ideals, as he mixed indigenous – particularly Quechua – cultural and linguistic symbolism with an often brutal social realism. His poems are epics of the disposessed, and deals with the lives of miners, street vendors, drunks and prostitutes. Borda Leaño himself explained: "Before writing an exquisite poem on a trivial subject, it is preferable to write, even imperfectly, a poetry that deals with man and his dramatic and painful circumstances."[4]
Borda Leaño was the author of several poemaries and was twice awarded the Franz Tamayo national award for his books La Challa (1965) and Con Rabiosa Alegría (1970). In 2010 he was awarded the Bolivian national cultural award "Marina Núñez del Prado" by the ministry of culture of the Bolivian plurinational state.[5]
He died in Sweden on 25 January 2022.[6]