They reveal a foiled plot by the government of Áñez c …

Bolivian putschists frustrated by President Luis Arce Catacora’s devastating electoral victory have planned a covert operation to prevent him from gaining access to government in October 2020. They certainly did not achieve their goal, but they were denounced by an investigation on digital. to place Interception. The book was released on Thursday 17th and has already sparked a response from the current Minister of Justice and Institutional Transparency, Iván Lima Magne. The plot which is described in great detail is attributed to Luis Fernando López, former Minister of Defense and Health of the regime led by Jeannine Añez, now detained. This was according to audios, emails and documents published by the media in the hiring of a group of American mercenaries based in Miami to prevent the MAS from coming to power. The sources consulted by the authors of the article differ in the extent of the destabilizing operation.

The report by journalists Laurence Blair and Ryan Grim touched Bolivia in different ways. The government reacted through the voice of its Minister of Justice: “To think that our armed forces could have been involved in a second coup would be serious (…) A serious investigation must be carried out to give explanations to the country”, declared Lima. He also clarified that although recordings without consent do not constitute judicial evidence in Bolivia, “the evidence they represent obliges us to investigate.” Commercial media like The duty de Santa Cruz tried to disqualify the investigation for ideological bias. “The information was published by a left-oriented online media,” the newspaper published.

The story of the plot according to Interception It has its origins in the return to the government of the Movement towards Socialism of former President Evo Morales. With the electoral result defined on October 18, 2020, the idea of ​​stopping the arrival of Arce Catacora at the Casa Grande del Pueblo, seat of executive power in the heart of La Paz, began to flourish. But on November 8, the president disliked them and took the oath.

Blair and Grim wrote: “Several of the conspirators discussed sending hundreds of foreign mercenaries to Bolivia from a US military base outside of Miami. They would join forces with elite Bolivian military units, renegade police squads and vigilantes in a desperate attempt to prevent the country’s largest political movement from returning to power. The plan was never executed, but left traces of its preparation, according to reporters. They also describe it as “an even more blatant coup plot than that of October 2019”.

López and Murillo ran away together

López currently has asylum in Brazil and the Bolivian state has already requested his extradition. El actual ministro de Gobierno, Eduardo del Castillo, declared in coferencia de prensa el 10 de junio that the habían solicitado “por el caso de la compra de gases lacrimógenos, por sus vínculos con el narcotráfico y una serie de delitos que se cometieron en nuestro Country”.

The former coup leader is a military specialist in marketing, even if he was not effective in regaining power. When he held the two portfolios of the Añez government, he said in an October 2020 speech to commemorate the anniversary of the assassination of Ernesto Che Guevara, that foreign invaders “of any nationality, Cuban, Venezuelan or Argentina, will find death in our country. . territory “. Days later, He managed to escape with former government minister Arturo Murillo across the Brazilian border and thanks to the logistics provided by the air force. The latter is already on the run after being arrested on May 24 in the United States for corruption.

In the recordings The Intercept described as proven, he compared Lopez’s voice to his public speeches. The longest of all, around 15 minutes, allows you to hear your interlocutor calling you “Mr. Minister”. The person with whom he would speak would be Joe Pereira, “a former civilian administrator of the American army who was based in Bolivia at the time”, specifies the digital medium. In addition, two of the people involved in the emails indicated their authenticity and that “Pereira was the main organizer”. The fugitive soldier never responded to journalists’ messages to give his version of the plot that allegedly developed between the day of the elections that Arce won with 55% of the vote and November 5, 2020.

General Sergio Orellana, execution arm

“The struggle, the battle cry, is that they want to replace the Bolivian armed forces and police with Cuban and Venezuelan militias. This is the key point, ”is heard in one of López’s recordings. Identified by the media, in another section of the audio, he is credited with saying that “weapons and other military equipment are obviously very important in strengthening what we do.” The conspirator hidden in Brazil involved the head of the armed forces of the government of the coup, General Sergio Orellana, in talks with Pereira, now a refugee in Colombia and with a request for arrest for his responsibility in the massacres of Sacaba and Senkata . and in the overthrow of Morales. López said of the senior army officer who fled Bolivia on November 16 that he was “working on all of this”, referring to the plot.

The former minister’s obsession with returning MAS to government is reflected in another part of the recording Blair and Grim released of the Dialogue with Pereira: “My work at the moment is focused on preventing the disease. annihilation of my country and the arrival of Venezuelan, Cuban and Iranian troops ”. His interlocutor, who in the audios appears under the mediation of a translator, gives details of what they were doing. “I can get up to 10,000 men with no problem. I don’t think we need 10,000, ”he told López. Also that the mercenaries seemed to be hired under “phantom contracts” by Bolivian companies and that they would fly to the country from the United States “undercover as if they were photographers, shepherds, doctors. and tourists.

Former Áñez minister gives details of how they would transport infiltrators when he says there are only three C-130s in all of Bolivia, and that as defense minister he has only one. The others were detained by the national police. Pereira, his partner in the mercenary adventure, was not alone either. The private part of the Blackwater operation – the American company that has gained a bad reputation for killing civilians with its Rambos in Iraq – was completed by Americans David Shearman and Joe Milligan, according to the investigation. Counterinsurgency specialists, these characters may have intended to emulate the La Higuera experience that ended with the execution of Che Guevara on October 9, 1967.

He will never be known. The plan to prevent Arce from assuming the presidency was cut short halfway.

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