U.S. returns heirloom to Bolivia’s president in ‘special moment’

When it comes to gifts, they say it’s better to give than to receive. But what if you could experience the joy of both giving and receiving the same special gift — decades apart?

On May 8, 1990, when President Jaime Paz Zamora of Bolivia visited the White House with his two sons, he gave then-U.S. President George H.W. Bush a golden cross that was a Paz family heirloom.

In a letter to the Bolivian president after the meeting, Bush wrote that it was “a special pleasure … meeting those two fine sons of yours.” But Bush was reluctant to accept a family heirloom as a gift.

“He told me he couldn’t take it because of its symbolic value — but I insisted, and in the end, he agreed,” Paz told Bolivia’s Brújula Digital . “But on one condition: If one of my sons were ever elected president, then the crucifix would return to Bolivia.”

Fast forward a few decades to 2025 when Paz’s eldest son, Rodrigo Paz Pereira, was elected president of Bolivia. The U.S. Embassy in Bolivia documented the former U.S. president’s wish that the cross be returned and reached out to the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum  to track down the cross. (Bush died in November 2018.)

That began what Dawn Hammatt, director of the Bush library, called “an amazing collaboration among three agencies” — the U.S. Department of State, the General Services Administration and the National Archives, the steward of government records held at presidential libraries — to fulfill a decades-old promise.

The library located the cross among its 63,000 objects and began the process of transferring the heirloom out of their collection. It also retrieved copies of Bush’s handwritten letter thanking Paz Zamora for the gift.

“I will place it in a very special place of honor in my library,” Bush says in the letter. “Since it comes from your personal or family possession, I will save it. I will instruct that it be returned to you when one of your boys is sworn in as president.”

By the time Bolivia’s new president met President Trump at the Shield of the Americas Summit  on March 7 in Doral, Florida, outside Miami, arrangements to return the cross were complete.

On the sidelines of the summit, Secretary of State Marco Rubio returned the precious heirloom to Paz Pereira 36 years after his father gave it to Bush. Speaking in Spanish, Rubio said, “The promise was kept.”

Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau says the return of the cross is one of his favorite diplomatic anecdotes — from the former U.S. president’s careful instructions to the former Bolivian president, now 86, learning that his son received the heirloom he once gave as a gesture of goodwill.

Jay Patton, chief curator at the Bush library and museum, calls the story “a really special moment,” noting it shows the everyday experience of gift giving playing out in international diplomacy.

The journey of this cross “represents a really important history of gift giving, of diplomacy, of building relationships between nations, between leaders, building alliances,” Patton says. “It’s a microcosm of all of those things that make our world run.”