Maite Rico wrote this on 12/30/2010 in El Pais, Madrid, Spain:
Wikileaks revelations
The papers of the Department of State
U.S. Government suspects that the Bolivian Government simulated a terrorist plot
A witness says at the Embassy in La Paz that the intelligence services [Bolivian] prepared a fake plot to kill Evo Morales and blame the opposition.
The split in the leadership of the Iranian regime after protests of the election fraud June 2009 went so far that the head of the Revolutionary Guards slapped President Ahmadinejad in a meeting of the Security Council. The U.S. diplomatic cables leaked by Wikileaks to El Pais also account for a dark disjointed terrorist plot in Bolivia that the U.S. suspected was concocted by Evo Morales to discredit his political rivals in the department of Santa Cruz.
Morning of April 16, 2009. An elite commando of the Bolivian police break the Hotel Las Americas in Santa Cruz, the capital of the East of the country. Twenty minutes later, the naked bodies of three men lying shot dead in their rooms. Were Eduardo Rózsa Flores, Hungarian-Bolivian; Árpad Magyarosi, Hungarian, and Michael Dwyer, Irish. The commando carries two other survivors: Mario Tadic, a Bolivian of Croatian origin, and Elod Toaso, Hungarian. And so begins one of the darkest episodes in the recent history of Bolivia. The Government argues that the five foreigners were terrorists recruited by opposition leaders of Santa Cruz to promote armed rebellion and assassinate President Evo Morales.
However, a source close to the case offers the U.S. Embassy a very different version: the mercenaries, says this witness, were hired in reality by the Bolivian intelligence services to mount a fake terrorist plot and then justify the persecution against Santa Cruz leaders, the government opposition stronghold.
According to this story, collected in a May 2009 cable, the same secret services that liquidated Rózsa, Dwyer and Magyarosi to clear tracks, and planted false evidence. The other two, Tadic and Toaso, saved their lives because they were not aware of the plot and that the authorities would use them as witnesses to bolster the setup. Both were tortured, as attested by U.S. diplomats in photographs that were given to them by the witness, and show the two men “bloody, with missing teeth, broken ribs, bruises and lacerations caused by knife cuts.”
The Embassy says it has no way to check the version, but adds that the source is well-connected character and with a solvent path.
His testimony underpins the theory that both are holding, the Bolivian opposition as some journalistic investigations, insisting that the plot was a fabrication of the government to give a final blow to the leaders of the rebellious Santa Cruz, the richest of the nine departments of the country. Cradle of large hydrocarbon deposits, the region, mainly criolla [creole], voted in 2008 in favor of the autonomy and has become the standard bearer against Evo Morales and his socialist project.
Last weekend, in fact, the prosecution filed formal charges against 39 involved in the “conspiracy”, which include prominent politicians and businessmen from Santa Cruz [cruceños].
The case has been an irregularity from the beginning. According to a cable from April 23, 2009, Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera said to the diplomatic corps that the five terrorists attacked with firearms and explosives to the police when they went to stop them. However, the expert evidence gathered in rooms 456, 457 and 458, which echoed in its day the Bolivian press, was pointing to an extrajudicial execution. The circuit surveillance cameras the hotel had been turned off before the operation, and Internet records were deleted. The Embassy informant adds that the weapons found were new and had been placed by the police, who had not even bothered to remove the seals.
The origin of the story also remains in a twilight fed by the strange profile of Eduardo Rózsa, son of a Hungarian and Bolivian mother, who had participated in the war in the Balkans, had converted to Islam, defended Iran and the Palestinians and was a friend of Venezuelan terrorist Ilich Ramirez, Carlos, who refused the idea that Rózsa was a “right-wing hitman,” as presented by the Government of La Paz.
Shortly after he died, a video was released in which Rózsa announced returning from his native Hungary to Santa Cruz, to help “defend” the region, but clarified that he was not interested in taking “Evo Morales down.” The official video reinforced the thesis that Rózsa and his colleagues had been hired by the Santa Cruz separatists, who, according to the government had proven by its infiltrators, were preparing a “movement of self-defense” to address a possible attack by government forces.
However, according to the witness interviewed by the U.S. Embassy, who actually hired Rózsa was Colonel Jorge Santiesteban, then intelligence chief of police, and his deputy, Captain Walter Andrade. The aim was to entrap separatist groups and also politically liquidate key regional leaders.
It is not known what was the link between Rózsa and Santiesteban. Indeed, according to the witness, the colonel led the assault on the hotel and killed the three men “to cover their tracks.” Furthermore, the police “planted” the evidence put forward by the prosecution as a “false memory device with lists of Santa Cruz businessmen involved”, a “business card of a suspect” [Hugo Acha is a human rights activist who has fled to the U.S.] and a video, unintelligible, in which Rózsa supposedly speaks of a plot to kill Evo Morales.
As in every good conspiracy that prices itself to be, the U.S. could not be missed. The embassy is concerned from the outset. And their fears are confirmed earlier this year, when the attorney general announced he had found Rózsa emails showing that he had “contact with the CIA.” “The Bolivian government is almost certain to take advantage of this opportunity to link the ’empire’ in the alleged conspiracy and thus confirm the craziest accusations of Evo Morales regarding Americans involvement,” as the Chargé writes with dismay, last February.
According to the embassy, “it will be many months before the full truth of this case is known. If it ever gets out.”
http://elpais.com/diario/2010/12/30/internacional/1293663603_850215.html
Five years have gone since this happened… we demand to know the TRUTH and Justice be made, whoever falls!
On April 17, 2004, another related news appeared, the Irish Examiner:
Mother renews call for inquiry into death of Irish man in Bolivia
An Irish woman is calling for international pressure to be put on Bolivia over the investigation into her son’s death there five years ago.
Michael Dwyer was shot dead, along with two other men, in a police raid at a Santa Cruz hotel on April 16, 2009.
The Bolivian authorities’ account of what happened that day has been contradicted a number of times and his family has been demanding an international investigation.
Two other men arrested during the raid are on trial in the south American country, and authorities from the EU and UN are waiting for that to be complete before they take action.
However, Michael’s mother Caroline is demanding they move sooner.
“What we want is an independent investigation and what we want now is…a fresh initiative to exert external pressure for gathering of evidence to support and build a case for an independent investigation,” she said.
“As time goes on, it’s more difficult to, I suppose, gather that evidence.”
If this coca-grower ochlocracy currently in power believes that they can get away with it? … they are flat out wrong, the world will push until the truth is unveiled!
Bolivian Thoughts 