[1] Jose Antonio Paredes Candia was born on July 10, 1924, in the city of La Paz into a well-known political and intellectual family in Bolivia.
He was the son of the famous Bolivian historian Don M. Rigoberto Paredes Iturri and Doña Haydee Candia Torrico.
He spent his entire childhood in a house located on the intersection of Sucre and Junín, in a typical neighborhood in the north of La Paz.
It was very common to find her sitting by the door of her house, singing famous opera arias accompanied by guitar music.
He attended Felix Reyes Ortiz high school, where he studied together with Raúl Salmón de la Barra, who would later become a famous pioneer in Bolivian folk theater.
It was his military experience that gave him a direct understanding of the reality of the Bolivian people and would later shape his passion, fate and research.
He was aware that his books were not written for the country's intellectual elite but for the lay people who did not read on a regular basis or had access to any kind of information at all.
Several writers joined these famous fairs, and nowadays they are placed permanently in the city of La Paz in a passage called Maria Nunez del Prado.
In the last years of his life, Antonio Paredes Candia decided to donate his private art collection to the city of El Alto.
The collection was estimated to be worth half a million dollars in Bolivian artworks, sculptures, and archaeological pieces saved from the hands of "guaqueros" (looters).
After the doctor explained that he had little of his life remaining he was immediately taken to a room at the hotel of his younger brother Rigoberto to spend what would be his last weeks.
His funeral was veiled with a string quartet from El Alto followed by a long procession accompanying the coffin to the gates of the museum, including a little band of street kids that joined the back of the parade with instruments constructed by them, using buckets as drums and tubes as pan flutes.
The museum is also not properly taken care of, which makes one wonder why the family of Paredes Candia remains silent while such a barbarian act is committed against his work and heritage, as has unfortunately been seen before with other great characters.