Bolivian Escapade investigates a mysterious police raid in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, in which three European men were shot dead by special forces inside the Hotel de las Américas. Bolivian authorities claimed the men were part of a plot to assassinate President Evo Morales and destabilise the country. Their families and others have questioned whether they were instead caught in a far deeper political struggle.
Filmmaker Risteard O’Domhnaill follows the story across Bolivia, Hungary, Romania and Ireland, tracing the lives of the men who died and the murky network that drew them to South America. At the centre of the story is Eduardo Rózsa-Flores, a Bolivian-Hungarian journalist, writer and former fighter whose life had already crossed continents and conflicts. During the war in Croatia, Rózsa-Flores fought on the Croatian side and became known as one of the more unusual foreign figures to emerge from the Balkan wars — part journalist, part soldier, part political adventurer.
His extraordinary life later inspired the semi-biographical film Chico, directed by Ibolya Fekete, in which Rózsa-Flores played a version of himself. That strange overlap between fact, myth and self-invention gives Bolivian Escapade an even more unsettling edge, as the film asks how a man shaped by one war came to be at the centre of a deadly political mystery in another continent.
Moving through Bolivia’s regional divisions, the politics of autonomy in Santa Cruz, the legacy of the Balkans war and the world of private security networks, Bolivian Escapade becomes part political mystery, part human tragedy. It asks who these men really were, why they were killed before they could stand trial, and whether the official version of events tells the full story behind a case that remains one of Bolivia’s most contested political mysteries.
