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In Bolivia, the main political opponent, Luis Fernando Camacho, has been imprisoned in La Paz for six months. The governor of Santa Cruz was arrested at the end of December 2022 by order of a prosecutor who accused him of “terrorism” in connection with the 2019 coup. Despite this, he remains very present in Bolivian politics. His supporters accuse the judiciary of being under the orders of the ruling party.
First modification:
With the RFI correspondent in La Paz, Nils Sabin.
“Camacho is a symbol of democracy”, reads on the walls of the streets of Santa Cruz. Many here believe that his governor was illegally arrested six months ago, for crimes he did not commit.
“His arrest is like a trophy for the ruling party. What he has done is punish him for having led the fight against the Evo Morales government ”, assures RFI Jean Carla Rivera de Terrazas, president of the Association of Relatives of Victims, Persecuted and Political Prisoners (AFAVIM). The collective denounces the lack of neutrality of Bolivian justice.
For Rivera de Terrazas, the arrest of Governor Luis Fernando Camacho is purely political. “What they are wanting is to weaken Santa Cruz, the main opposition force in the country,” he says.
read alsoDetention of Bolivia’s governor and main opponent sparks street protests
The Pro Santa Cruz Committee, for its part, is the largest civil organization in the department and the main critic of the Movement for Socialism (MAS) that governs Bolivia. “The governor is not in jail, he is kidnapped in a jail,” says Fernando Larach, its president.
In the courtyard of the headquarters of the Pro Santa Cruz Committee they have placed three flags of the department of Santa Cruz, with two green bands and one white. The Bolivian flag is kept inside the building. It also reads big: “Autonomy and democracy.”
“The truth is that, in general, justice has acted very skilfully against the governor. He does not respond the same when the court belongs to the opposition and when he is related to the opposition party, ”denounces Larach.
Bolivian federalism
Marcos Fernandez, departmental leader of the MAS in Santa Cruz, for his part, rejects these accusations. “We applaud the Bolivian justice system, which has been following the steps it has to follow,” he says.
According to him, there is no doubt about the role that Luis Fernando Camacho played in the events of 2019. “He and other characters are the intellectual and material authors of the coup,” he says.
Camacho was one of the visible faces of the 2019 mobilizations that led to the resignation of Morales. The governor traveled on those dates from Santa Cruz to La Paz with the president’s resignation letter in his left hand and a Bible in his right hand.
The political fracture predates the events of 2019. The department has been asking for greater autonomy for years. Camacho published from prison a road map to achieve a Bolivian federalism.
“We demand that the government give us greater competition, greater financial resources and that they decide everything from La Paz, that there be greater decentralization,” Larach estimates. The request is unacceptable for the Bolivian government and for the MAS. Prior to his arrest, government ministers had branded Camacho a “separatist.” His federalist project has no chance of prospering.
