Bolivia Arrests Attorney General in Drug Graft Probe
The Facts
- Bolivian Interior Minister Marco Antonio Oviedo said in a press conference on Thursday that police arrested the country's Attorney General Roger Mariaca and 13 others in an operation targeting an alleged criminal organization helping drug trafficking from inside the judicial system.
- He was detained on suspicion of money laundering and drug trafficking inside Viru Viru International Airport in Santa Cruz on Wednesday, after local media released a video showing alleged Uruguayan drug kingpin Sebastián Marset, now in U.S. custody, saying he was friends with Mariaca while getting arrested in March.
- The Attorney General's Office has framed the whole police operation as illegal, describing the arrest of Mariaca as a "kidnapping" and denouncing search operations in Mariaca's house and in prosecutors' offices in Santa Cruz and Sucre. Prosecutors arrested Santa Cruz prosecutor Alberto Zeballos along with Mariaca.
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The Spin
Government-critical narrative
Grabbing the one prosecutor digging into allegations that a presidential adviser attempted to murder a witness to an international drug trafficking plot sounds like evidence destruction with a badge, just days after the U.S. imposed sanctions on him. That masked cops seized prosecutors' offices is the blueprint of the police state that Paz brought back to Bolivia.
Pro-government narrative
A prosecutor who takes bribes to wave cartel planes through and spring violent criminals is anything but a corruption fighter. Whenever an office is called independent, it cannot mean unaccountable: a democratically elected president has every right to clean out organs of the state that organized crime has bought. Holding that kind of official to account strengthens Bolivian democracy rather than threatening it.