Bolivian President Luis Arce (Portal/Manuel Claure/File)
president Luis Arce He returned from Cuba a week ago and decided to make decisions as dictator even on the Day of the Holy Innocents when he ordered the arrest of the governor of Santa Cruz, Luis Fernando Camacho.
Despite the angry reaction from the cruceños, Arce said his decision was aimed at punishing him for facilitating the fall Evo Morales in 2019, a fall that paradoxically allowed him to become president a year later.
The episode is filled with doubt, reminiscent of the hectic times of the Cold War, when it was not known who was conspiring against whom, but more importantly who would take over the government the next day or immediately.
The initial reaction of the protests was torched the offices of the Santa Cruz District Attorney’s Office, which strangely was completely unprotected by police, with the even stranger detail that it was empty. a few days before someone had ordered it cleared, a very well calculated forecast. Few vehicles were burned, but not a single document.
The violent arrest of the governor, who received a higher share of the vote in his department than Arce himself in the 2020 election, occurred as he arrived at his home and his guards were not at his side but in another vehicle.
Men take photos of the Attorney General’s Office building damaged in the protests following the arrest of Santa Cruz Gov. Luis Fernando Camacho (Portal / Lesly Moyano)
The kidnappers, according to social networks, They spoke with a Caribbean accentalthough it is not known if the accent was Cuban either Venezuelana detail difficult to distinguish in the Bolivian offices, where they have swarmed since 2006.
The truth is these hooded agents never showed the warrant and smashed the windows of the vehicle that Camacho was coming home in, they beat him, they handcuffed him and then they took him to Viru Viru International Airport but they couldn’t send him to La Peace because the airstrip was already controlled by the protesters.
Then, as apparently also intended in this operation full of mysterious supplies, they took him in a Puma helicopter to Chimoré Airport in Chapare, where Cocalero Morales could see him handcuffed, which Arce wanted. The helicopter could have taken him to the city of Cochabamba, from where he could have boarded a plane to La Paz.
A few days earlier, Arce had managed to persuade the Cuban leadership to demand by phone that Evo Morales support it Approval of the Budget Law 2023 that it was delayed by the internal struggles of the MAS.
This time it was Arce’s turn to meet the Cubans’ demands, and he immediately gave orders Expulsion of a young Cuban blogger from Bolivia busy denouncing his country’s dictatorship. Arce was entrusted with another task in Havana: Camacho’s capture. Incidentally, it has created a curtain capable of covering up painful economic measures that are already very much needed.
Luis Fernando Camacho after his arrest (TWITTER/Carlos Eduardo del Castillo del Carpio/Handout via Portal)
From Chimore Coca Growing Airport, Camacho was flown to La Paz, to the prosecutor’s office, where it also happened that there were crowds of government protesters demanding the immediate execution of Camacho or his hanging in the historic Plaza Murillo, where lanterns were already being used for these types of emergencies. . In one of them is the bronze plaque that marks the spot where former President Gualberto Villarroel was hanged in 1946.
The prosecutor asked Camacho has six months of preventive detention, because according to him there is a risk of absconding. Now he has been taken to Chonchocoro prison in La Paz for four months of preventive detention. In a few hours he went from his Santa Cruz, 350 meters above sea level, to a prison in the highlands of La Paz, 4,000 meters above sea level.
The intersection is outraged. They continue their intention to review the relationship that this department, which makes up a third of Bolivian territory, will have with the state.
They don’t like that the state has been hijacked by a party committing misdeeds. They don’t understand why they are being judged and persecuted. They say it is not separatism but a new instance to decide what kind of relationship this region, which produces 70% of the country’s food, will have with this state hostage to a base party.
Or whatever it’s called Juan Francisco “Buby” Gonzalez Urgel: “Let’s see: oppose the encroachment on our fields to grow coca; that our national parks become havens for drug trafficking; that our natural resources are handed over to the Chinese and our strategic resources to the Russians and that our security as a state is entrusted to the Cubans and Venezuelans does not divide the country…”.
This hasty move by Arce could result in a new way of relating all regions to a conquered state voter fraud. La Paz’s centralism is being questioned, but above all the dominance of cocaleros and drug dealers in the country’s government.
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