“A TOP OFFICIAL in the outgoing Bolivian government plotted to deploy hundreds of mercenaries from the United States to overturn the results of the South American country’s October 2020 election, according to documents and audio recordings of telephone calls obtained by The Intercept.”
“The aim of the mercenary recruitment was to forcibly block Luis Arce from taking up the presidency for Movimiento al Socialismo, or MAS, the party of former Bolivian President Evo Morales. The plot continued even though Arce, a protégé of Morales, trounced a crowded field, winning 55 percent of first-round votes and eliminating the need for a runoff election.”
“In one of the leaked recordings, a person identified as the Bolivian minister of defense said he was “working to avoid the annihilation of my country.” The armed forces and the people needed to “rise up,” he added, “and block an Arce administration. … The next 72 hours are crucial.””
“Disagreements between ministers and divisions within the armed forces, strained under the weight of Arce’s convincing victory on October 18, 2020, appear to have undermined the plan. It was never executed, and several top officials of the outgoing government have either fled Bolivia or been arrested on separate charges linked to corruption and their alleged role in the 2019 coup.”
“The call with Áñez’s defense minister, in which the speakers suggest several other top officials are likely to be on board, sketches a coup plot even more flagrant than the one in October 2019.”
“Several of the plotters discussed flying hundreds of foreign mercenaries into Bolivia from a U.S. military base outside Miami. These would join forces with elite Bolivian military units, renegade police squadrons, and vigilante mobs in a desperate bid to keep the country’s largest political movement from returning to power.”
“Two U.S. military sources confirmed that the Special Operations commands that they work for had gotten wind of the Bolivia coup plot. But nothing ever came of it, they told The Intercept. One special ops source added, “No one really took them seriously as far as I know.””
“A day before Arce’s inauguration, Morales — at that point still in exile in Buenos Aires — claimed that Orellana had been trying to persuade senior officers to establish a “military junta,” using the rationale that Arce planned to replace the armed forces with militias. Morales suggested that a pro-MAS general had overruled Orellana — and that although orders had been given to mobilize elite troops, these had quickly been canceled. At the time, international media largely ignored Morales’s claim.”
The “suggestion that top generals were deliberating about how to block the MAS from returning to power under Arce a year later — disregarding the 2020 election result and contravening the constitution — indicates that distrust of the country’s dominant popular movement among some senior military figures has strayed into paranoia.”
“In January 2020, while in exile in Buenos Aires, Morales told MAS supporters that if he returned to Bolivia, he would seek to organize “armed militias of the people” along Venezuelan lines.”
“Had the planned coup in 2020 gotten off the ground, […] “there would have been so much bloodletting in Bolivia.””
Read more: BOLIVIAN EX-MINISTER OF DEFENSE PLOTTED A SECOND COUP USING U.S. MERCENARIES
2021-week24
