Bolivian community leaders asked the federal government this week to investigate after an opposition lawmaker claimed that socialist ex-president Evo Morales, a fugitive charged with pedophilia who has been hiding for months in his stronghold Cochabamba, has fled to Mexico.
“Evo Morales is not in Bolivia anymore, he is in Mexico,” lawmaker Edgar Zegarra Bernal told local media on Monday. Bernal – opposed to the government of current President Rodrigo Paz, a centrist – condemned the government for not doing enough to imprison Morales given the various outstanding criminal charges against him.
“Why have they not yet executed the arrest warrant for Evo Morales?” he asked. “Why don’t they do it? … Is he an emperor not subject to the law?”
Zegarra did not divulge any evidence backing his claim that Morales has fled. When asked about his sources, he simply replied, “you’ll find out.”
The claims have prompted pressure from community groups on the government to investigate the whereabouts of Morales, which have remained a mystery for months.
“We are asking that this situation be clarified, if Mr. Evo Morales has left the country,” a former leader with the community group Fejuve Sur, Roberto Menacho, told local media. “And in this moment, the person who has to show his face, the one who has to pronounce himself in front of the Bolivian people is the minister of government. We will always ask authorities that sincerely, if Evo Morales has left the country, they have truly lost credibility before the Bolivian people.”
“As authorities, they have not known how to control the exits or entries of former authorities and we lament it very much,” he continued. “We hope that Mr. Evo Morales remains in the country because, let’s not forget, he has accounts to settle with Bolivian justice and in his time he once said, ‘anyone who can escape and mock justice is a confessed criminal.’ Therefore, Mr. Evo Morales would be confirming that situation.”
Morales, the founder of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party, ruled the country from 2006 to 2019. His tenure was marked by his open support for coca leaf harvesting, endorsement of violent communist regimes in Cuba and Venezuela, and silencing of political dissent. In 2019, following an unconstitutional attempt to remain in power, the Organization of American States (OAS) announced that its observers had found evidence of potential irregularities in that year’s presidential election, benefitting Morales. Morales and his senior MAS leaders immediately fled the country to Mexico, where he remained in exile until the MAS party regained the presidency under the tenure of former President Luis Arce.
Mexico, under former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, offered Morales political asylum, even as the Bolivian government began criminal proceedings to investigate accusations against the Bolivian leader. The Bolivian government during the presidency of Jeanine Áñez, a conservative senator who was next in the line of succession after Morales and his cronies fled the country, found a birth certificate allegedly showing that Morales had fathered a child with a 15-year-old and video evidence of Morales ordering his leftist union syndicates to not “let food into the cities,” triggering mass starvation to promote the overthrow of the Áñez government. Bolivia formally requested that the International Criminal Court (ICC) open a case against Morales for crimes against humanity in 2019 in response to the starvation plan.
Arce attempted to clean up the mess upon assuming the presidency in 2020, imprisoning Áñez for doing her constitutional duty following the flight of the MAS officials and repressing conservative opposition leaders.
File photograph of Bolivian Evo Morales Ayma, leftist presidential candidate in Oruro in 1967. (AIZAR RALDES/AFP via Getty Images)
Morales returned to Bolivia, but attempted to wrestle control of MAS away from Arce while he remained president, ultimately resulting in the collapse of the party and Arce refusing to run for re-election. Morales, meanwhile, was expelled from the party he founded and banned from running for another term as president.
Since the collapse of the MAS – and especially following President Rodrigo Paz’s decision to allow the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to operate in the country again – Morales has been in hiding in Cochabamba, deep in Bolivia’s coca-growing territory. While the coca grower unions that Morales has long depended on for political clout continued to protect his from any police action to arrest him, throughout January reports began surfacing that even they have lost track of the former president. Morales had previously appeared on social media and regularly produced a commentary program on Sundays, but stopped doing so on January 8, when the DEA reportedly flew a helicopter over Cochabamba.
Morales’s Twitter page most recently published a story on Monday appearing to accuse the DEA of planting evidence of drug trafficking on leftists in the country.
Last week, prior to the accusations that Morales had left to Mexico, a leftist union leader Isidro Auca made a public statement claiming Morales remained in hiding in the country and would soon reappear.
“They say that Brother Evo went to another country, but Brother Evo is here in Bolivia,” Auca claimed, “together with his base, together with his social organizations. He has clearly said he will not leave Bolivia, he will be with his people.”
Auca claimed that Morales had been suffering from health issues, following rumors that Morales was suffering from Dengue fever.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.