Human Rights Watch Urges Bolivia to Drop Terrorism Charges Against Evo Morales

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The well-known NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW), urged the Bolivian Prosecutor’s Office to drop the terrorism charges against ex-President Evo Morales for allegedly organizing roadblocks against the country’s interim president, Jeanine Áñez, last November.

The HRW believes that the judicial proceedings against Morales are “disproportionate,” because they are based solely on the recording of a phone call between himself and a rural leader in which the former – who denied being the voice heard – supposedly advocated a permanent and effective blockade to prevent food from entering urban centers.

“The roadblock is a common form of protest in Bolivia and other countries in the region,” points out the HRW. The international body recalls that these interruptions were used against Morales himself in the weeks before he was overthrown.

It further notes that the blockades allegedly organized by Morales were suspended shortly after the conversation that supports the indictment. HRW also considers that the situation described is far from being considered terrorism “by any reasonable definition,” although it acknowledges that its classification in Bolivian law is very broad and includes deeds that could be protected by constitutional guarantees of free speech and association.

The NGO considers that Bolivia may, if it wishes, prosecute the perpetrators of road blockades, but it should not consider this deed as a terrorist act, a crime that may lead to up to 20 years imprisonment.

The human rights organization argues that the 1,500-page indictment against Morales fails to prove a direct link between the ex-president and other acts of violence, such as setting houses on fire, part of the protests against the handover of the presidency to Áñez and assigned to his followers. “The evidence in the case, which the Human Rights Watch reviewed and consisting mainly of the November 2019 phone call, simply does not support that indictment.”

The report, which has just been released in Washington, recalls that Áñez’s government minister Arturo Murillo pledged to “go hunting” and “persecute” Morales and members of his government. For the HRW, this political decision resulted in the lodging of 150 lawsuits against Morales’ followers for rebellion and terrorism, which violates the independence of the Judiciary, since judges and prosecutors who refused to comply with the official direction suffered pressure in several ways, including arrests.

Accordingly, Áñez maintains the practice of manipulating the judicial system, something the organization once ascribed to Evo Morales’ left-wing government, says the HRW. When they were in opposition, Minister Murillo and other current officials criticized Morales’ alleged control over justice officials.

The Human Rights Watch investigation in Bolivia was conducted in February and included 80 interviews with people involved in the events, including Minister Murillo. Of the 150 lawsuits against members of the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS), Morales’ party, the international human rights organization audited 21, and found in them “abusive proceedings and arbitrary arrests”.

“We detected evidence of unsubstantiated accusations, violations of due process, curtailment of freedom of expression and excessive and arbitrary use of pre-trial detention,” the document states, which stresses the proceedings against Patricia Hermosa, Evo Morales’ secretary, internaut Mauricio Jara and Edith Chávez, nanny of the ex-minister of the presidency’s daughter and “strong man” of the former government, Juan Ramón Quintana.

Regarding Hermosa, now under house arrest, the HRW says that the indictment hinges exclusively on the fact that she called Morales, who is in exile in Argentina, given that the prosecutors have no record of the content of these conversations. Hermosa suffered a miscarriage in prison.

In turn, Jara is imprisoned for being an active member of groups on social media that classify Jeanine Áñez’s government as a “dictatorship” and for promoting “massacres”. The HRW also denounces that the Prosecutor’s Office changed the real circumstances of nanny Edith Chávez’s arrest so that she could be held in prison.

Áñez’s office has yet to comment. With respect to past criticism of the judicial persecution of the MAS, authorities said they were due to a paternalistic and ideological view of the political process in Bolivia and that the rapporteurs were unwilling to accept the truth of what occurred during the October and November 2019 crisis, which led to Morales’ renunciation after suffering an ultimatum from the Armed Forces.

Source: El País