Shortly after the publication of this book, the death was announced of Domitila Barrios de Chungara, in Cochabamba, at the age of 75. Domitila had won international renown through her testimonio account of the struggles of the Bolivian mining communities of the 1960s and 1970s, Si me permiten hablar…, published in English as Let Me Speak! (Monthly Review Press, 1978). It is a mark of the subsequent prominence of ‘history from below’ as a constituent feature of popular mobilisation in Bolivia that a commemoration of Domitila's life was marked by a conference in the National Archive in Sucre. The emergence of the popular movements associated with the ‘wars’ of water and gas from 2000 onwards has been tracked by some particularly detailed and discerning texts that, if not exactly oral histories, have depended heavily upon relaying the popular voice to an international audience. Since the presidency of Evo Morales in 2006, these sources have not shied away from representing complexity, contradiction, disappointment and downright truculence as well as the familiar figures of oppression and resistance. One can detect in this evolution both a Katarista current, which from the late 1970s sought to retrieve indigenous experience and voice as an intellectual contribution to a candid anticolonial cause, and a distinct but linked practice of balancing the hyper-abstraction of Bolivian radical political theorising with a much more approachable genre of plebeian personal story-telling. Very often, the peripheral heroic voice dissipated in the unavoidable messiness of daily life, especially amongst poor people, and particularly perhaps amongst the radical political activists. Nowhere, surely, is this more acutely illustrated than by the diary left by Che Guevara after his death in Vallegrande in October 1967, an experience that has recently been poignantly re-remembered by Ciro Bustos in Che Wants to See You: The Untold Story of Che Guevara (Verso, 2013).

Benjamin Kohl and Linda Farthing have, then, registered a singular achievement in providing a new, fresh and eminently readable book that simultaneously adds to and expands the genre. First, they openly confront the challenge of authorial/editorial responsibility that was most controversially provoked by the texts associated with the Guatemalan activist Rigoberta Menchú. Here, they put themselves centrally in the frame and do not dodge the fact that they have edited a text based on interviews with Félix Muruchi for a broad audience, adding contextualising introductions and many useful framing ‘boxes’. This apparatus not only makes the book completely approachable for non-experts – particularly, one hopes, undergraduate students – but also allows Muruchi free rein to tell his personal story without unduly trespassing away from the subjective experience or underscoring predictable historical and political points. As a result, a student reader can readily pick up the lineaments of modern Bolivian political history, which is no easy task, and also engage with broader issues such as Operación Condor, neoliberal restructuring and the role of NGOs. None of these explanatory asides is overlong or heavily referenced, keeping a nice harmony with the beautifully edited account of Muruchi himself.

This is a rich but not untypical life story of an indigenous man born in northern Potosí in 1946 who undertook military service and then, by no means an easy accomplishment in the 1960s, became a miner at the Siglo XX–Catavi tin-mining complex (Domitila, who was born in 1937 less than 20 miles from Muruchi's birthplace of Wila Apacheta, recounted some of the same experiences and incidents). Radicalised initially through the military repression of the Federación Sindical de Trabajadores Mineros de Bolivia (Union Federation of Bolivian Mine Workers, FSTMB) after 1964, and then through militancy in the Maoist Partido Comunista de Bolivia Marxista-Leninista (Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of Bolivia, PCBM-L), Félix Muruchi's story mostly relates to struggles in the 1970s, exile in the Netherlands in the early 1980s, subsequent adaptation to deindustrialisation and the socially recalibrated social structure of El Alto, and a late-career resurgence in activism as a consequence of the conflicts of the early twenty-first century. The bulk of the story relates to the 1970s and 1980s, not to the current political cycle. Anybody familiar with military rule will appreciate the descriptions of the Barrientos and Banzer regimes, depicted here less from an ideological stance than through the optic of a daily life of evading capture, clandestine activity and, almost inevitably, the experience of interrogation and torture.

On occasion, Muruchi's account is editorially enhanced by verbatim direct speech, but it never lacks authenticity, perhaps because moments of drama and fear compel particularly detailed recall. Patterns emerge: both the Bolivian ‘security forces’ and their Chilean counterparts to whom they handed Félix Muruchi under Operación Condor in 1976 conducted interrogations through the standard tripartite team of ‘good cop, bad cop and recorder’. Turncoats, informers, drunken truckers and even Dutch con artists pepper the story alongside good, generous people who give away their money and run considerable risks to facilitate escapes. Parents remarry, dodgy incidents occur, people actually cry. There is no passage of protracted length without a surprise or admirable admission. Muruchi tries to keep his family on the margins, in order to protect them, now more from the machinations of envy than the attentions of dictatorial goons. But we learn of an ardent man who has an affair with a Spanish nun and then is stunned by Amsterdam's red-light district, an individual who persists in self-identity as a miner when the (rather dim) Europeans see in him only an ‘Indian’. Fist-fights in exile between high-minded and mean-spirited former freedom fighters are candidly reported.

This is an unpietistic account that will be instantly recognisable to any child of the international Baby Boom generation. The precise partisanship of the politics is of less consequence than the evocation of an era not yet entirely ‘historical’ but still in need of the energetic recall so admirably achieved here by Félix Muruchi and his co-writer friends.