A Bolivian court on Monday held socialist ex-president Evo Morales in contempt and ordered his arrest after he failed to appear in court for his trial on accusations of pedophilia.
Morales is a failed wannabe socialist dictator that ruled Bolivia between 2006 and 2019, extending his rule beyond the nation’s constitutional two-term limits by using dubious legal loopholes. Morales voluntary resigned from the presidency in late 2019 and fled to Mexico after evidence surfaced of massive fraud in that year’s sham elections in which he sought to continue ruling for an unconstitutional fourth term. He eventually returned to Bolivia during the presidency of his former protegé, Luis Arce.
Morales has avoided authorities for two years after an extensive investigation found evidence in the southern Tarija Department indicating that he had a sexual relationship with a then 15-year-old child in 2016, who eventually gave birth to a child when she was 16. The investigation remained largely dormant for years until 2024, when a birth certificate was found at a local civil registry office listing Morales as the father of the child. According to Bolivian prosecutors, the mother of the presumed victim consented to having her then-minor daughter trafficked into a sexual relationship with Morales in exchange for political benefits.
Initially, Morales responded to the investigation by bunkering himself in the central Department of Cochabamba, a region described as his political “bastion” under the protection of his loyalists. Reports published in January indicated that Morales may have fled to Mexico.
On Monday, the First Criminal Court of Tarija was scheduled to begin the trial against Morales, but the court suspended the trial process after Morales and his lawyers all failed to appear before the court. The court immediately held Morales in contempt and renewed an arrest warrant issued against him. The Bolivian newspaper El Deber reported that, in addition to Morales, the court also ordered the arrest of the victim’s mother, Idelsa Pozo Saavedra, who also failed to appear before the court on Monday.
“This hearing has been postponed indefinitely because two specific conditions must be met — either the defendant’s arrest or their voluntary appearance at the trial — before the hearing can begin,” Justice Luis Esteban Ortiz, head of the Bolivian Departmental Court of Justice, reportedly said.
Morales’ legal team, led by lawyer Wilfredo Chávez, spoke to the press on Monday. The lawyers argued that Morales did not show up because he was “not notified” of the start of the trial. Unitel reported that another of Morales’ lawyers, Cecilia Urquieta, presented a document signed by the presumptive victim in which she allegedly claims that she was not a victim of Morales — which, according to the lawyer, clears Morales of the pedophilia charges brought forward against him.
“She states in this brief that she is not a victim. Over the course of more than 15 pages, she has made it very clear that Evo Morales has not committed any crime and that she does not consider herself a victim,” Urquieta reportedly said.
Morales’ presumptive victim, Cindy Saraí Vargas, originally went missing with her child in October 2024 at a time when the investigation against Morales resurged. She later resurfaced in late December 2024 and asserted that Morales was the father of her child. Last week, she reportedly presented a document to a court in Tarija claiming that she was never a “victim” of the former president and called for the trial’s dismissal.
The former Bolivian president denied the accusations through a lengthy social media rant last week, in which he claimed — without evidence — that the Bolivian government is carrying out a “brutal judicial and media” persecution campaign against him seeking his moral and physical “annihilation.” Morales further claimed that the Bolivian government is “asking” the administration of President Donald Trump to eradicate “anti-imperialist” forces in the country.
“I am not seeking impunity. I want my accusers to prove — with legal and factual evidence — the alleged crimes I committed. I am calling for justice that is impartial, honest, objective, and independent of political influence,” Morales’s message read in part.
Morales was eventually succeeded in 2020 by his former protegé, Luis Arce. In the following years, the two socialists were embroiled in a fierce power struggle over control of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party that fractured the party and shattered MAS’s once monolithic rule of Bolivia. MAS suffered a resounding defeat in the 2025 elections that reduced the party’s power down to just two seats in Congress. In 2024, former President Arce, after he broke with Morales, claimed to a Mexican magazine that the pedophilia rumors against his former mentor were an “open secret” throughout Morales’ rule.
“Who knows why it was kept quiet, because it was an open secret. We all knew about it, but it was kept there,” Arce said at the time.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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