Luis Rico

Luis Rico Arancibia was born on 15 May 1945 in Tupiza, in the southern Bolivian department of Potosí, one of ten children. His father, Jorge Rico, was a guitarist and singer who had carried his guitar through the Chaco War, and Luis's earliest memory was of watching him play a cueca at a family party. The guitar was so precious that young Luis was forbidden to touch it, and he had to save for years before he could buy one of his own.

He finished secondary school in November 1964, just as the coup led by René Barrientos closed the school year. In 1965 he travelled alone to La Paz, where his brother Jorge hoped to send him to Switzerland on a scholarship to study chemical engineering; they arrived one minute late at the embassy and were turned away. In the city's folk clubs he watched Alfredo Domínguez and Los Jairas and even met Violeta Parra. Instead of studying theatre in Buenos Aires, he took up his brother Antonio's place at the university in Potosí and studied economics, and it was there that he finally bought a guitar and began singing with the Trío Economía.

The turning point came on the night of 24 June 1967. Rico was performing at a birthday party at the foot of the Cerro Rico when the radio carried news of the San Juan Massacre at the Siglo XX and Catavi mining camps. That night he began writing his first song, "La Patria" (also remembered as "Mi patria"), which opens with self-criticism before it turns to social criticism. In 1969 he sang it at a national folk festival in Cochabamba, and the response convinced him that an artist could be genuinely useful. After a university festival in Sucre, where he met the singer Benjo Cruz, he declined an invitation to join the Teoponte guerrillas, saying he could not kill even the chicken he would eat for lunch, and in 1970 he moved to La Paz to take over the folk club stages Cruz was leaving.

In La Paz he lived in a conventillo, a crowded tenement on Calle Castro, which inspired "Matrimonio en el conventillo", and he worked in cultural programmes for the prefecture until the coup of Hugo Banzer in August 1971. Under Banzer he was arrested several times, including after performing in the play "Tres generales" by Raúl Salmón, and he eventually left the country in 1972 before returning clandestinely. In 1972 he met Cecilia at a guitar gathering, and they married in 1973; their daughters Daniela and Paola followed, and the family home in the San Pedro neighbourhood of La Paz became a house of art. In 1976 Banzer's regime forced him into exile in France, and after the 1980 coup of Luis García Meza he was exiled again, this time to Mexico. During those years he toured Europe, especially France and Switzerland, bringing Bolivian and Latin American music to new audiences.

He returned to Bolivia when democracy was restored in 1982 and became one of the defining voices of Bolivian social song. Across more than five decades he recorded over thirty albums, for labels including Lauro, Discolandia and Heriba, using rhythms from the altiplano, the valleys and the eastern lowlands as well as the joropo, zamba and other Latin American forms. His best known songs include "Coplas de la sequía" (popularly called "Pisa coca"), "En el funeral del río", "El último tinku en París", "Pucha caray", "Panorama yungueño", "Los chiriguanos del sur", "Palomitay", "Coraje", "Nuestra coca no es cocaína", "Moto Méndez", "Elegía a Juana Azurduy" and "Cuando tenga la tierra", and his version of Apolinar Camacho's "Viva mi patria Bolivia" became a standard. During the trial of García Meza he wrote "Bienvenido general". His 2007 album "Mujeres" honoured his mother, his wife and his daughters, who all worked on it.

Rico never tied his songs to one party. In September 2011 he joined the march in defence of the TIPNIS indigenous territory singing "Coraje", and he later said Evo Morales complained about him singing against the government. In 2018 he compared the climate under Morales to the dictatorships of Banzer and García Meza and released "Bolivia dijo no", about the 21 February 2016 referendum. He also composed songs with young people with Down syndrome and spoke of sharing what he knew with anyone willing to learn.

He received Bolivia's Premio Nacional de Cultura in 2013 and the Premio Maya Internacional in 2024. In May 2026 he marked his birthday with a long interview looking back on almost sixty years of song, and in the weeks before his death he was honoured in the Plurinational Legislative Assembly and at the Teatro Municipal Alberto Saavedra Pérez in La Paz. One of his last projects was a new video of "Matrimonio en el conventillo" with Banda Boulevard.

Luis Rico died on the night of Monday 2 November 2026, at about 23:45, aged 81, as reported by the journalist John Arandia and confirmed by his family, who wrote that his powerful voice would never be silenced. No cause of death was made public. Former president Carlos Mesa said he had never turned his songs into pamphlets but had always stood beside the weakest and the most alone.