Bolivian Coup Regime Sought to Assassinate Luis Arce

Bolivia’s Interior Minister Eduardo Del Castillo informs of an assassination attempt against Luis Arce in 2020 at a press conference on October 18, 2021. Photo: Ministerio De Gobierno
Kawsachan News | October 18, 2021
Bolivia’s Interior Ministry has revealed that Colombian mercenaries, who participated in the assassination of President Jovenel Moise in Haiti, entered Bolivia days before the 2020 election. Fernando Lopez, Defense Minister under Jeanine Añez, was in contact with mercenary groups, with whom he intended to carry out a second coup.
In a press conference, Interior Minister Eduardo del Castillo named Germán Alejandro Rivera García, a Colombian citizen who entered Bolivia on October 16, 2020 and who was later arrested for the assassination of Jovenel Moise. He was followed by Colombian citizen Arcángel Pretel Ortiz and Venezuelan citizen Antonio Intriago, who run the Miami-based ‘security firm’ Counter Terrorist Unit Security (CTU), which hired the mercenaries who murdered Moise.
The mercenaries stayed at the high-end Hotel Presidente in La Paz, just two blocks away from the presidential palace. The purpose of their meeting was to pursue leads with then Defense Minister Fernando Lopez for lucrative contracts for a hit on Luis Arce.
Castillo said, “Days before the elections, the paramilitaries who would go on to kill the President of Haiti, as well as mercenary contractors such as Mr. Arcángel Pretel and Mr. Antonio Intriago were in the country. According to the information we obtained, their intention was to end the life of President Luis Arce”.
Earlier in the year, leaked audios published by The Intercept revealed that Lopez was in contact with other Miami-based mercenaries to coordinate a second coup. In one audio, Lopez said, “The military high command is already in preliminary talks… the struggle, the rallying cry, is that [the MAS] wants to replace the Bolivian armed forces and the police with militias, Cubans, and Venezuelans. That is the key point. They (the police and armed forces) are going to allow Bolivia to rise up again and block an Arce administration. That’s the reality.”
President Luis Arce addressed the revelations today at a summit with social movement in La Paz, saying, “Our Interior Minister revealed this information at an opportune time, brothers; They wanted to make an attempt on my life. To those right-wing murderers, we are going to respond with a phrase from (historic Bolivian socialist leader) Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz: We know that sooner or later they will make us pay for what we are doing, we are willing to pay that price, we were always willing. We will never shy away from danger because there is something more fearsome than that enemy who is looking for a way to kill us. A guilty conscience is much worse, we would not bear ourselves if we did not fulfill our duty.”
Opus Dei Ignores Complaint of 43 Women Held in Slavery

Some of the women enslaved by Opus Dei. | Photo: Twitter/ @meneame_net
teleSUR | October 10, 2021
Between 1974 and 2015, the Opus Dei held 43 women working without pay and in conditions similar to slavery in Argentina, Paraguay, and Bolivia.
This Catholic lay and clerical organization recruited the women as teenagers by promising to provide them with an education. Subsequently, however, they worked without pay as janitors, chefs, and maids in the service of the Opus Dei members and their guests.
In a letter sent to Pope Francis earlier this year, the exploited women emphasized they were deceived because they did not expect to become servants of the elite “in the name of God.” They also requested that the Catholic authorities apologize, compensate them for the damages, and stop these types of labor practices.
Among those involved in this violation of labor rights are ex-Regional Vicar Victor Urrestarazu, the Opus Dai highest authority Monsignor Fernando Ocariz, and Auxiliary Vicar of Rome Mariano Fazio Fernandez.
The women’s complaint was submitted to the Abuse Section of the Congregation for the Faith Doctrine of the Vatican Tribunal. On Sept. 29, Ocariz signed a decree to carry out a change in the Opus Dei’s South American structures.
In order to “improve the promotion and coordination of apostolic work,” he created the La Plata Region Vicar, which comprises Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Argentina.
This and other purely administrative changes, however, have not solved the underlying problem. So far, the Opus Dei has not done justice to 43 Latin American women it affected.
Bolivia: General Montero Arrested for Senkata Massacre
teleSUR | September 8, 2021
Former Commander-General of the Bolivian Police Rodolfo Montero was arrested on Tuesday after giving his statement about the episodes of violence which occurred in the Senkata massacre on Nov. 19, 2019.
“The Public Prosecutor’s Office has determined the arrest of the former Commander of the Bolivian Police, Rodolfo Montero, for the crimes of genocide, homicide, and serious injuries in relation to the Senkata massacre” Interior Minister Carlos Del Castillo tweeted.
The resolution of the Prosecutor’s Office is part of a judicial process that will continue through a precautionary hearing, in which the judges may or may not ratify the imprisonment of Montero.
In Nov. 2019, the United States supported a coup against President Evo Morales which was executed on the pretext that the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) had committed fraud in the presidential elections. The breakdown of the constitutional order was led by Jeanine Añez, a senator who proclaimed herself “Interim President.”
Workers, farmers, students, and MAS supporters took the streets to repudiate the coup. After being inaugurated as Commander-General, Montero spearheaded repressive actions that were brutal, disproportionate, and unjustified.
On Nov. 15, the Bolivian security forces repressed a demonstration in Sacaba, leaving ten people dead from gunfire. The same happened only four days later, when citizens protesting against the Añez regime blocked the Bolivian Oilfields plant in Senkata, where 11 citizens were killed and 78 wounded.
Currently, some military and police chiefs have been prosecuted for Sacaba and Senkata massacres, while others have left the country. This week, relatives of the victims, activists and public officials held a march in La Paz to demand results from the Prosecutor’s Office and the judiciary.
The Añez Regime Tried To Assassinate Morales, Mexico Reveals
teleSUR | September 1, 2021
On Tuesday, Mexican Air Force (FAM) pilot Miguel Hernandez disclosed that a projectile could have been fired at the aircraft in which he rescued former President Evo Morales after the 2019 coup in Bolivia.
“Upon taking off from Cochabamba airport in Bolivia, the pilot observed a rocket-like trail of light from the left side of the cockpit when he nearly reached 1,500 feet over the ground,” FAM stated.
To avoid the projectile, Hernandez made a turn to the opposite side of its trajectory and increased the ascent speed. While making this maneuver, he observed that the projectile returned to the ground in a parabola-shaped trace without reaching much height.
The pilot did not communicate the incident to his crew so as not to increase tension during a diplomatic mission whose purpose was to lead Morales to Mexico as a political asylee. The aircraft was chased by a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) while taking off from Cochabamba airport. Therefore, he suspects that the rocket could have come from this launcher.
“I got a lump in my throat when I thought what could have happened in our country if Morales had been murdered. The shadows of terror sown over the Bolivian people cannot go unpunished,” Gabriela Montaño, Health Ministry during the Morales administration, tweeted.
In a plenary meeting of the Bolivian Congress, President Luis Arce affirmed that he would not rest until Jeanine Añez’s facto government is punished for torture, persecution, illegal detentions, and murders that it committed during the coup d’état.
On Aug. 19, the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) confirmed that 38 citizens were killed and over 100 were injured during the protests against the Añez regime, which allowed Armed Forces and the Police to act with impunity during their repressive operations against Bolivians.
Report Confirms Human Rights Violations in the 2019 U.S.-Backed Coup in Bolivia
By Ramona Wadi | Strategic Culture Foundation | August 23, 2021
A 471-page report by the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts for Bolivia (GIEI-Bolivia) recently presented to Bolivian President Luis Arce in La Paz on Tuesday this week confirms the U.S.-backed coup’s persecution of opponents, including “systematic torture and summary executions” in 2019. The report is based on interviews with 400 victims of the Anez regime and other witnesses, as well as 120,000 files related to abuses between September 1 and December 31, 2019.
The findings prompted Bolivian prosecutors to charge the self-styled “interim leader” Jeanine Anez with genocide. Anez faces charges over the massacres in Sacaba and Senkata, where 20 protestors were killed by the security forces.
At the announcement of her arrest in March this year, Anez tweeted, “They are sending me to detention for four months to await a trial for a ‘coup’ that never happened.”
Yet the U.S. was swift to recognize Anez as interim president as well as to endorse the Organization of American State’s (OAS) report in 2019, which alleged electoral fraud in Bolivia with the intent to keep Evo Morales in power.
The former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s address to the OAS office in Washington gives quite a succinct summary of U.S. interference in Latin America – a twisted narrative of alleged democratic intent trickling down from the U.S., when the facts speak otherwise. Pompeo spoke of the U.S. role in recognizing Juan Guaido as Venezuela’s interim president and how members of the OAS followed suit, as well as a historical overview which attempted to disfigure the leftist movements in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s as “producing repression for their own kind at home.”
Pompeo also described Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela as the countries through which “we face stains of tyranny on a great canvas of freedom in our hemisphere,” before moving on to praise the OAS for its role in ousting Morales. And as is typical of the U.S., with its long history of supporting military coups in the region, not a word was uttered about Anez’s persecution of the indigenous in Bolivia.
Yet the OAS report was denounced by the New York Times as having “relied on incorrect data and inappropriate statistical techniques.” The Center for Economic and Policy Research’s Co-Director Mark Weisbrot declared, “If the OAS and Secretary General Luis Almagro are allowed to get away with such politically driven falsification of their electoral observation results again, this threatens not only Bolivian democracy but the democracy of any country where the OAS may be involved in elections in the future.”
The GIEI report has established that the Anez regime committed summary executions, torture and sexual violence against indigenous people. Through the report, the Sacaba and Senkata massacres were revisited and will once again form part of Bolivia’s most recent memory of U.S.-backed violence. Just a day prior to the Sacaba massacres, on November 14, 2019, Anez signed a decree which established impunity for Bolivia’s armed forces.
Contrary to the rushed way in which the Trump Administration had recognised Anez as Bolivia’s legitimate leader, the U.S. is reluctant to comment on the GIEI report findings which established the U.S.-backed regime as having committed human rights violations. This year, however, the U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken issued a statement in March after Anez’s arrest, stating he was “deeply concerned by growing signs of anti-democratic behavior and politicization” with regard to Bolivia’s quest for justice.
Of Bolivia’s quest for justice now, the U.S. can hardly be expected to voice support. Yet the report goes a long way in overturning the U.S. intervention narrative. Bolivia’s victims are victims of a U.S.-backed coup, and U.S.-funded political violence should equally share the spotlight now highlighting Anez’s short-lived legacy of human rights violations in Bolivia.
Lima Group Loses Lima
By Yves Engler · August 11, 2021
The Canadian instigated Lima Group has been dealt a probably fatal blow that ought to elicit serious discussion about this country’s foreign policy. But, don’t expect the media or politicians to even mention it.
In a likely death knell for a coalition seeking to overthrow the Venezuelan government, Peru’s new Foreign Affairs Minister called the Lima Group the country’s “most disastrous” ever foreign policy initiative. Héctor Béjar said, “the Lima Group must be the most disastrous thing we have done in international politics in the history of Perú.”
Two days after Béjar’s statement St Lucia’s external affairs minister, Alva Baptiste, declared: “With immediate effect, we are going to get out of the Lima Group arrangement – that morally bankrupt, mongoose gang, we are going to get out of it because this group has imposed needless hardship on the children, men and women of Venezuela.”
Prior to Baptiste and Béjar’s statements, the Lima Group had lost a handful of members and its support for Juan Guaidó’s bid to declare himself president had failed. Considering its name, the Peruvian government’s aggressive turn against the Lima Group probably marks the end of it. As Kawsachun News tweeted a Peruvian congressman noting, “the Lima Group has been left without Lima.”
The Lima Group’s demise would be a major blow to Trudeau’s foreign policy. Ottawa founded it with Peru. Amidst discussions between the two countries foreign ministers in Spring 2017, Trudeau called his Peruvian counterpart, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, to “stress the need for dialogue and respect for the democratic rights of Venezuelan citizens, as enshrined in the charter of the Organization of American States and the Inter-American Democratic Charter.” But the Lima Group was established in August 2017 as a structure outside of the OAS largely because that organization’s members refused to back Washington and Ottawa’s bid to interfere in Venezuelan affairs, which they believed defied the OAS’ charter.
Canada has been maybe the most active member of the coalition. Former Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland participated in a half dozen Lima Group meetings and its second meeting was held in Toronto. That October 2017 meeting urged regional governments to take steps to “further isolate” Venezuela.
At the second Lima Group meeting in Canada, a few weeks after Juan Guaidó proclaimed himself president, Trudeau declared, “the international community must immediately unite behind the interim president.” The final declaration of the February 2019 meeting called on Venezuela’s armed forces “to demonstrate their loyalty to the interim president” and remove the elected president.
Freeland repeatedly prodded Caribbean and Central American countries to join the Lima Group and its anti-Maduro efforts. In May 2019 Trudeau called Cuban president Miguel Díaz-Canel to pressure him to join Ottawa’s effort to oust President Maduro. The release noted, “the Prime Minister, on behalf of the Lima Group, underscored the desire to see free and fair elections and the constitution upheld in Venezuela.”
In a sign of the importance Canadian diplomats placed on the Lima Group, the Professional Association of Foreign Service Officers gave Patricia Atkinson, Head of the Venezuela Task Force at Global Affairs, its Foreign Service Officers award in June 2019. The write-up explained, “Patricia, and the superb team she assembled and led, supported the Minister’s engagement and played key roles in the substance and organization of 11 meetings of the 13 country Lima group which coordinates action on Venezuela.”
Solidarity activists have protested the Lima Group since its first meeting in Toronto. There were also protests at the second Lima Group meeting in Canada, including an impressive disruption of the final press conference. At a talk last year, NDP MP Matthew Green declared “we ought not be a part of a pseudo-imperialist group like the Lima Group” while a resolution submitted (though never discussed) to that party’s April convention called for Canada to leave the Lima Group.
Hopefully the Peruvian and St Lucia governments’ recent criticism marks the end of the Lima Group. But, we should seek to ensure it doesn’t disappear quietly. We need a discussion of how Canada became a central player in this interventionist alliance.
Peru To Withdraw From the US-Controlled Lima Group
teleSUR | August 6, 2021
On Tuesday, Peru’s Foreign Affairs Minister Hector Bejar announced that his country would withdraw from the Lima Group, which supported the Venezuelan opposition to overthrow the Bolivarian Revolution in 2019.
“From a democratic foreign policy, we will contribute to the understanding of the various political tendencies that exist in Venezuela without intervening in its internal affairs,” Bejar stated.
Conservative politicians and former presidents from Peru, Mexico, Bolivia, and Argentina formed the Lima Group, an institution that operates as an instrument of U.S. geopolitics towards Latin America.
In his inaugural address, Bejar also assured that he will work to strengthen cooperation and integration among Latin American countries without making ideological distinctions.
“Under the international law and the Charter of the United Nations, we support the self-determination of all peoples and condemn any unilateral sanctions,” Bejar stated regarding U.S. blockades against Cuba and Venezuela.
On Tuesday, he also announced that Peru will return to the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and strengthen the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) and the Andean Community of Nations (CAN).
“Latin America is the geographical and sociological priority of the Peruvian foreign policy. It is our territorial, economic, and sociocultural environment. It is the space of our history,” Bejar stressed.



