Prisoners and Abandoned | Presos y abandonados

By Humberto Vacaflor, El Dia:

The political prisoners left behind by the MAS number a thousand and they remain imprisoned under the new government, forgotten even by the media.

In Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez approved a partial amnesty to free half of the prisoners of Chavismo, and is now preparing an unrestricted amnesty.

But in Bolivia no one, except the newsletter Siglo 21, mentions the political prisoners detained during the two infamous decades of MAS rule.

Former president Luis Arce even said last year that, at least those prisoners detained in the Golpe I and Golpe II cases, were victims of the “whim of Evo Morales.”

This coca grower, accused of being a pedophile yet unpunished, ceased to be president in 2019 and, nevertheless, seems to remain the owner of Bolivian justice.

And he also commands the police, who do not dare to arrest him, while the army continues to allow Chapare to be a territory where Bolivian sovereignty is not enforced.

The military have not opened their mouths to defend half a hundred of their comrades in prison, including four generals.

Does this mean that the Chapare Cartel continues to run the country’s institutions with some sort of extraordinary payroll?

Or perhaps it is also that the monarch of Chapare continues to run the country despite the fact that his party has supposedly been separated from the government.

At least 90% of citizens are hoping that the MAS will truly, and not as a mockery, be excluded from running the country and that its leaders be convicted as corrupt.

But the style of that party remains intact, with acts of corruption identical to those with which it burdened the country with infamy for two decades.

The opposition criticizes the government of Rodrigo Paz for not having approved any economic law in its first hundred days in office, which could be explained by the fact that it does not have support in parliament.

After all, the composition of the two chambers of the legislative branch arose from elections in which the current president had mysterious, or outright hidden, alliances.

The international credit agencies themselves, so willing to grant all the resources the country needs, are asking the government to finally approve the laws that restore legal certainty for private investment.

But what cannot be explained is the silence with which the government remains complicit in the MAS dictatorship and does not lift a finger to free the political prisoners.

Humberto Vacaflor | Columnist

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