[ad_1]
PEACE: The former acting president of Bolivia, Jeanine Anez, was arrested yesterday on charges of terrorism and sedition for what her predecessor and political rival Evo Morales denounced as a “coup” that overthrew him.
Police were also detaining former ministers who backed the conservative politician’s interim government, who was in place for a year after Morales fled the country in November 2019 amid disputed elections, media reports said.
The arrests came months after Morales returned to Bolivia from exile after a new electoral victory in October 2020 for the left-wing Movement for Socialism (MAS) party that he founded.
The presidency and congress are now under the control of the MAS.
“I inform the Bolivian people that Mrs. Jeanine Anez has already been apprehended and is currently in the hands of the police,” wrote Government Minister Carlos Eduardo del Castillo on Twitter and Facebook.
Del Castillo congratulated the Police for their “great work” in the “historic task of doing justice” to the Bolivian people.
From a police station in La Paz, Anez sent letters to the European Union and the Organization of American States asking them to send observation missions to follow up on the case.
He asked them to “objectively and impartially evaluate the illegal arrest of which I and my two former ministers have been victims, on Friday and at dawn this Saturday,” Anez wrote in the letters, a copy of which was obtained by AFP.
Morales, for his part, demanded in a tweet that the “perpetrators and accomplices” of what he denounced as a “coup” against him be “investigated and punished.”
Bolivia’s prosecutor issued an arrest warrant for Anez and others accused of terrorism, sedition and conspiracy on Friday.
Ánez tweeted a copy of the court order with the reply: “The political persecution has begun.”
She added that the government accused her of “having participated in a coup that never happened.”
‘Illegal’
At dawn yesterday, Bolivian television showed images of Anez, not handcuffed, arriving at the El Alto airport in La Paz, accompanied by Del Castillo and several policemen.
In brief statements to the press, he denounced his detention as “illegal”.
She was later taken to a government ministry building for questioning.
The former Minister of Energy of Ánez, Rodrigo Guzmán, and his justice counterpart, Álvaro Coimbra, both included in the order of the prosecution, were arrested on Friday.
Coimbra protested the “illegal and abusive” arrest of his former colleague Guzmán, before he was brought in as well.
“We have said that we will always be available to the law,” Coimbra told Bolivian television as he was loaded into a police vehicle.
Ánez, a former senator, took over as interim president after Morales left Bolivia. He had lost the support of the armed forces amid violent protests against his reelection to an unconstitutional fourth term.
Several Morales allies who held high-level positions also fled, leaving Anez as the highest-ranking Senate official still standing.
Morales himself was the target of charges of sedition and terrorism in an investigation opened shortly after Áñez assumed power.
But he returned from exile last November after his MAS achieved victory in the October 2020 general elections in which Luis Arce, of the party, won the presidency.
Since then, Morales has assumed leadership of the party.
‘Dictatorship’
Last month, Congress voted to grant amnesty to those prosecuted during Áñez’s presidency for acts of violence during the chaos that followed Morales’ resignation.
MAS militant Lidia Patty filed a complaint against Anez last December, alleging that she, several of her former ministers, ex-military, police and others had promoted the overthrow of Morales, who had been in power for 14 years.
“The MAS has decided to return to the dictatorship style. It’s a shame because Bolivia doesn’t need dictators, it needs freedom and solutions, ”Anez tweeted on Friday.
Luis Fernando Camacho, who recently won the elections for governor of the Bolivian region of Santa Cruz, is also facing prosecution.
He promised that “Bolivians will not sit idly by in the face of abuse” and said he had no intention of leaving the country.
Ánez, a former lawyer, is a longtime critic of the leftist Morales, who has called her “a right-wing coup senator.”
He has said that Anez “declared herself … interim president without a legislative quorum, surrounded by a group of accomplices.”
Former presidents Jorge Quiroga and Carlos Mesa separately condemned the arrests.
“We are in a process of political persecution worse than in dictatorships. It is executed against those who defended democracy and freedom in 2019, ”Mesa said on Twitter.
Quiroga accused Arce of being “an apprentice tyrant.”
But Justice Minister Iván Lima insisted that the system was independent from the government.
“We cannot interfere in the cases presented by the prosecutor and the justice. These cases must be prosecuted within the framework of objectivity and independence, ”said Lima.
For his part, the president of the Senate, Andrónico Rodríguez, repeated the claims of an attempted coup and said: “This is not persecution, it is justice.”
Investigators from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) are in Bolivia to investigate the post-election violence of 2019. – AFP
[ad_2]
