García Linera denies assassination order in Hotel Las Américas case
The former vice-president asserts that the instruction was to detain the foreigners, not kill them. He faces a trial of responsibilities alongside Evo Morales.
García Linera defends his version of the 2009 operation in Santa Cruz
From his exile in Mexico, former vice-president Álvaro García Linera stated that in the Hotel Las Américas operation, carried out on 16 April 2009 in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, there was never an order to kill. According to opinion.com.bo, the former official maintained that the instruction was to detain the foreigners and refer them to Bolivian justice.
"What was instructed was for the Police to monitor these foreign mercenaries who had come armed to Bolivia to want to confront us and provoke a civil war and that they detain them and refer them to justice so that they could be prosecuted (…) nobody has instructed anyone to kill, nobody," García Linera declared in an interview with DTV.
In that operation three people died: Eduardo Rózsa-Flores, identified as the leader of the group and of Hungarian-Bolivian nationality; Árpád Magyarosi, Hungarian-Romanian; and Michael Martin Dwyer, of Irish nationality.
More than 17 years after the events, in October of this year a formal accusatory proposal was presented to initiate a trial of responsibilities against former president Evo Morales and García Linera himself. The former vice-president stated that he is prepared to present "our truth before an impartial court and one that knows how to respect the procedures of an impeachment trial".
García Linera argued that, following Morales's electoral victory, oligarchic sectors from both the east and west of the country resorted to hiring paramilitaries and foreign mercenaries with the aim of destabilising the Government. "Foreign mercenaries came wanting to carry out a civil war and separate Santa Cruz from Bolivia, they came to form a new country as they did in Yugoslavia," he affirmed.
The former official also cited reports from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) to support his account. According to García Linera, those documents acknowledge that on the day of the operation an armed confrontation took place. "The police acted and confronted very dangerous people, terrorists, armed mercenaries," he reiterated, while lamenting the three deaths.
"That is what happened, a matter of national security, handled by the Police with professionalism, an armed confrontation with very dangerous people, terrorists and the regrettable death of three foreign citizens," the former vice-president emphasised.
Source: Google News BO — Crime