Carlos Alberto Sonnenschein Antelo (born 28 January 1961) is a Bolivian businessman, politician, and rancher who served as senator for Beni from 2010 to 2015. A member of the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement, he previously served as a member of the Chamber of Deputies from Beni, representing circumscription 64 from 2002 to 2010.
Born into a wealthy upper-class family from Riberalta, Sonnenschein's early career was characteristic of many of Beni's economic elite. He held executive positions in the most relevant corporate entities handling the department's export and cattle industries and played prominent roles in the civic sector, including chairing Riberalta's civic committee as well as its major utility cooperatives and sports associations.
Having served in leadership within the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement's Riberalta affiliate, Sonnenschein won a seat representing the municipality in the Chamber of Deputies in 2002. Reelected to a second term in 2005, he survived the party's dramatic fall from grace, a decline that, by 2009, led him to join National Convergence for his final electoral bid for Senate. Despite serving a collective twelve years between his three parliamentary terms, Sonnenschein was conspicuously absent most of the time, preferring to remain in his home region than deal with the goings on at the capital.
Early life and career
Carlos Alberto Sonnenschein was born on 28 January 1961 in Riberalta to a regionally influential family of wealthy Amazonian landowners. Descended from European emigrants that first settled northern Beni during the early 20th-century rubber boom, Sonnenschein's family comprises part of the Riberalta's economic elite; in the absence of the state apparatus, white-mestizo clans like Sonnenschein's exercised immense, semi-autonomous societal influence, projecting their power through the accumulation of capital and control over major local industriesprimarily the cattle ranching business.
Owing to his affluent upbringing, Sonnenschein quickly rose to high-level positions within northern Beni's leading private and public entities. A graduate of Riberalta's prestigious Pedro Kramer School, he chaired the Northeast Chamber of Exporters from 1996 to 1998 and was vice president of its parent organization, the National Chamber of Exporters, from 1997 to 1999. In the civic sector, he directed the local electricity and telecommunications cooperatives, headed Riberalta's football and basketball associations, and was president of the Riberalta Civic Committee.
Chamber of Deputies
Election
Among Beni's elites, participation in politics came as a natural evolution of their regional economic influence. After the democratic transition, many wealthy families aligned themselves with either Nationalist Democratic Action or the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR)the parties most receptive to their demands and needsin effect creating a two-party system in which each front asserted its influence by proxy of competing clans; political conflicts translated to intrafamily ones, party membership drew more from familial tradition than ideological conviction, and the department's electoral bipolarity, in turn, prevented the emergence of significant counterweights to either side's socioeconomic hegemony.
By the turn of the century, Riberalta had established itself as an electoral bastion of the MNR, with the region's elites having monopolized northern Beni's most important executive and legislative positions. As chair of the local civic community, Sonnenschein enjoyed important political and lobbying connections and by 2001, he had been named deputy leader of the MNR's Riberalta affiliate. When in 2002 Sonnenschein's brother-in-law, Sandro Soriano, vacated his seat in the Chamber of Deputies to run for Senate, Sonnenschein was given the opportunity to contest the 64th district, in which he easily prevailed.
Reelected in 2005, Sonnenschein's political career survived the dramatic decline of the MNRhit hard by the stigma of its role in the 2003 gas conflict, the party saw its worst electoral showing in its organizational history. In part, Sonnenschein's success owed to the continued degree of support afforded to the MNR in one of its traditional regions of support: the Amazon, in particularly Beni, where it won its only senator and two single-member constituency victoriesincluding Sonnenschein. Even then, Sonnenschein's personal popularity cannot be discounted as a factor, especially since, on the presidential ballot, Michiaki Nagatani took second place in the same district.