Alain Mesili (born 24 February 1949 in Paris) is a climber and mountain guide, photographer and political activist based in La Paz, Bolivia. [1] [2]
He was a political activist in France during the 1968 student riots. In 1969 he left the country, disgusted by the French Communist Party's failures, for Argentina. [2] Over the period of a year Mesili explored Patagonia, crossing the Southern Patagonian Ice Field; he may have been the first person to travel through modern-day Los Glaciares National Park. He further explored the Cordillera Darwin and crossed into Chile. He later moved to La Paz, where he worked as a mountain guide. [2]
In 1991 Mesili was accused of being driver for the extreme left Commission Nestor Paz Zamora (CPNZ) during an attack on the US Marine barracks in La Paz in October 1990. He fled, eventually to his native France. In May 1994, he was arrested at Miami airport and held without trial for 9 months. He was then extradited to Bolivia in February 1995, in exchange for a Bolivian colonel accused of drug trafficking by the US authorities. [3] He was released in 1997 without facing trial. [2] [4] [5] By 1999, he had resumed his career as a mountain guide. [1]
Gérard Xavier Marcel Depardieu is a French actor, known to be one of the most prolific in film history. Icon of French cinema, a world star in the same way as Alain Delon or Brigitte Bardot, he has completed over 250 films since 1967, almost exclusively as a lead. Depardieu has worked with over 150 film directors whose most notable collaborations include Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Maurice Pialat, Alain Resnais, Claude Chabrol, Ridley Scott, and Bernardo Bertolucci. He is the second highest-grossing actor in the history of French cinema behind Louis de Funès. As of January 2022, his body of work also includes countless television productions, 18 stage plays, 16 records and 9 books. He is known for having portrayed numerous leading historical and fictitious figures of the Western world including Georges Danton, Joseph Stalin, Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, Auguste Rodin, Cyrano de Bergerac, Jean Valjean, Edmond Dantès, Christopher Columbus, Obélix, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
Alain Fabien Maurice Marcel Delon was a French actor, film producer, screenwriter, singer, and businessman. Acknowledged as a cultural and cinematic leading man of the 20th century, Delon emerged as one of the foremost European actors of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and became an international sex symbol. He is regarded as one of the most well-known figures of the French cultural landscape. His style, looks, and roles, which made him an international icon, earned him enduring popularity.
Groupe Union Défense, better known as GUD, was a French far-right students' union formed in the 1960s. After a period of inactivity it relaunched in 2022.
Roland Gaucher was the pseudonym of Roland Goguillot, a French far-right journalist and politician. One of the main thinkers of the French far-right, he had participated in Marcel Déat's fascist party Rassemblement National Populaire (RNP) under the Vichy regime. Sentenced to five years of prison for Collaborationism after the war, he then engaged in a career of journalism, while continuing political activism. One of the co-founders of the National Front (FN) in October 1972, he became a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the FN in 1986.
A series of attacks targeted public transport systems in Paris and Lyon, as well as a school in Villeurbanne, in 1995. They were carried out by the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria (GIA), who sought to expand the Algerian Civil War to France. The attacks killed eight people, all during the first attack on 25 July. The attack also injured 190 people.
Illimani is the highest mountain in the Cordillera Real of western Bolivia. It lies near the cities of El Alto and La Paz at the eastern edge of the Altiplano. It is the second highest peak in Bolivia, after Nevado Sajama, and the eighteenth highest peak in South America. The snow line lies at about 4,570 metres (15,000 ft) above sea level, and glaciers are found on the northern face at 4,982 m (16,350 ft). The mountain has four main peaks; the highest is the south summit, Nevado Illimani, which is a popular ascent for mountain climbers.
Bernard Le Nail was a French writer and Breton militant. After studying commerce at HEC Paris, he headed the promotional office of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Nantes. In 1979 he became Secretary General of the Comité d'Etude et de Liaison des Intérêts Bretons (CELIB) at Lanester. Between 1983 and 2000 he was director of the Cultural Institute of Brittany and had an important role in the conception and publication of the collection Les Bretons au-delà des mers : Explorateurs et grands voyageurs. He was also involved in the conception and publication of the following works: 500 Bretons à connaître, revising the Guide Bleu Bretagne, Guides Gallimard Bretagne, Les noms qui ont fait l’histoire de Bretagne, Dictionnaire des femmes en Bretagne, La Bretagne entre Armor et Argoat.
Abdellatif Laâbi is a Moroccan poet, journalist, novelist, playwright, translator and political activist.
Dieudonné M'bala M'bala, generally known by his stage name Dieudo, is a French comedian, actor and political activist. He has been convicted for hate speech, advocating terrorism, and slander in Belgium, France and Switzerland.
Alain Bonnet, known as Alain Soral, is a far-right Franco-Swiss ideologue, essayist, filmmaker, and actor.
Alain Decaux was a French historian. He was elected to the Académie française on 15 February 1979.
The Vel' d'Hiv' Roundup was a mass arrest of Jewish families in Paris on 16–17 July 1942 by French police and gendarmes at the behest of the German authorities. The roundup was one of several aimed at eradicating the Jewish population in France, in both the occupied zone and the free zone, that took place in 1942 as part of Opération Vent printanier. Planned by René Bousquet, Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, Theodor Dannecker and Helmut Knochen, it was the largest deportation of Jews from France.
Alain Rey was a French linguist, lexicographer and radio personality. He was the editor-in-chief at French dictionary publisher Dictionnaires Le Robert. His wife, Josette Rey-Debove, was also his colleague.
The history of Bolivia since 1982 begins with the restorations of democracy after the rule of the military junta of 1982. Evo Morales held the presidency from 2006 to 2019. A new constitution was enacted in 2009. Bolivia's population has roughly doubled over this period, from 5 million in 1980 to 10 million as of 2012.
Adolfo Costa du Rels was a Bolivian writer and diplomat who became the last President of the Council of the League of Nations. He was the author of many plays, novels, and other writings, mostly in French, and received several literary awards.
The Nationalists, also known as Parti Nationaliste Français, is a far-right neo-fascist political movement in France originally established in 1983 by former National Front (FN) members, including former Waffen-SS members like Pierre Bousquet, Jean Castrillo, and Henri Simon, around the magazine Militant. Inactive after the early 1990s, it was reactivated in 2015 following the dissolution of the néo-Pétainist movement L'Œuvre Française by the French authorities in 2013. Far-right militant Yvan Benedetti serves as its current leader.
Francis Szpiner is a French lawyer, writer and politician of The Republicans who serves as the mayor of the 16th arrondissement of Paris between 2020 and 2023. He was elected Senator of Paris in September 2023. He was an attorney for several prominent French politicians.
Christophe Ruggia is a French film director and screenwriter.
Henri Leclerc was a French criminal defense lawyer.
L'absence de preuves devrait toutefois jouer en faveur du Français et permettre son acquittement lors du procès, qui se tiendra en juin prochain, si l'on s'en tient aux recommandations du Parquet bolivien (Trans: The lack of evidence should play in favor of the Frenchman and allow his acquittal at trial, to be held next June, if we stick to the recommendations of the prosecution of Bolivia.)