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La Paz (AFP) – A Bolivian judge ordered this Friday the preventive detention for four months of the opposition governor of the Santa Cruz region, Luis Fernando Camacho, accused of “terrorism”, in a case related to the departure of the leftist Evo Morales from the presidency in 2019.
The criminal judge Sergio Pacheco said that “orders the application of preventive detention for the accused Luis Fernando Camacho Vaca, preventive detention that must be served for a period of four months in the Chonchocoro prison,” a maximum security prison in Peace.
Prosecutor Omar Mejillones requested his six-month detention on Wednesday, arguing that there was a risk of flight. The hearing began on Thursday and lasted until dawn this Friday.
During the hearing, which was held through an Internet platform, Camacho, a 43-year-old lawyer and businessman, declared: “I’m never going to give up.”
He called on Bolivians to prevent “masismo [partido gobernante Movimiento Al Socialismo, MAS] impose a dictatorship like in Venezuela and Cuba”. La Paz, Caracas and Havana are political allies.
Arrested by the police on Wednesday and taken from Santa Cruz (east) to La Paz, he was an important piece in promoting Morales’s resignation from the presidency at the end of 2019, while the ruling party and the prosecutor’s office assure that he and other opponents promoted a ” coup”.
Opponents accused Morales, who has been in power since 2006, of alleged fraud in the 2019 presidential election.
The governor’s arrest sparked protests on Wednesday in Santa Cruz, a city of nearly 2 million people. His supporters seized two airports to prevent, without success, his transfer to La Paz and then burned the offices of the Prosecutor’s Office, others of the government and the house of a minister.
The Civic Committee of Santa Cruz, a powerful civil-business conglomerate, also called for this Friday to carry out a 24-hour “strike” in protest against the capture of the region’s political authority.
The city began early to gradually comply with the call, with the closure of roads and little public transportation.
