Jaime Paz Zamora (born 1939) moved from being an extreme leftist revolutionary to become a middle-of-the-road president of Bolivia. His party, the Movement of the Revolutionary Left, also evolved over a period of 20 years.

Jaime Paz Zamora was born on April 15, 1939, in the city of Cochabamba. His father was a general in the Bolivian army. Victor Paz Estenssoro, an influential Bolivian politician, was his uncle. Paz Zamora attended the Jesuit high school in Sucre and studied for the priesthood at a seminary in Cordoba, Argentina. He abandoned that career shortly before being ordained. Later, he studied social sciences at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium.

Academics

Upon returning to Bolivia in the mid 1960s, Paz Zamora taught sociology and international relations at San Andrés University in La Paz. He joined the Christian Democratic Party, but gradually adopted more radical politics. In 1970 some members of his Revolutionary Christian...