Third-generation gangs are the social phenomenon that mark the history of Ibero-America in the last decade of the 20th century and the first two of the 21st. These new actors of transnational crime, using some variant of populist discourse, took power in Venezuela, Ecuador , Argentina, Nicaragua and Bolivia, although Fidel Castro had already managed to do the same in 1959.
In the gang governments, apparently, the mechanisms that sustain democracy are respected. However, political parties are suffocated, private property is dynamited, the press is silenced, the justice system is corrupted, electoral fraud is normalized, and constitutions are modified with the aim of holding power indefinitely. tyrant on duty
In parallel, gangs use state terrorism to suppress dissenting voices, even from members of their own organization. It is about substituting democracy for the dictatorship of the gangs. Let’s look at the Bolivian case.
In the early hours of April 16, 2009, an elite commando of the Bolivian Police entered the Hotel Las Américas in the City of Santa Cruz. According to the first accounts, the policemen faced a terrorist group equipped with military weapons and explosives, the same ones that would have been used against the uniformed men.
The Hungarian-Bolivian Eduardo Rozsa Flores, the Romanian Árpad Magyarosi and the Irishman Michael Dwyer were reportedly riddled with bullets in the shooting. The Bolivian-Croat Mario Tadic and the Hungarian Elod Toaso were detained in the city of La Paz.
Evo Morales, who was in Venezuela the day of the operation, accused the “right”, the United States embassy and the “fascist oligarchy” of conspiring against his life and his government. Furthermore, in front of Hugo Chávez and Raúl Castro, he confessed that he ordered the operation against that irregular group.
That same script was repeated by high officials of the ruling party. However, in a television interview, the then national police commander, Víctor Hugo Escobar, acknowledged that the elite group used an explosive device to enter the rooms, contradicting previous police reports.
Similarly, forensic studies – especially those carried out outside of Bolivia – reveal that the three deceased were executed without any confrontation. They were murdered in the typical style of the Colombian cartels of the 1980s.
The Bolivian regime used the alleged assassination attempt to imprison several opponents from the Santa Cruz region for more than 10 years, including the current President of the Departmental Legislative Assembly, Zvonko Matkovic Rivera.
In the midst of so many scandals and social explosions, the case was forgotten. However, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) determined, in a substantive report that was leaked to the newspaper El Deber on September 23, 2022, that there were extrajudicial executions and torture ordered by the Government at the Las Américas hotel, and urged that those responsible are prosecuted by the Bolivian justice, which would be Morales himself.
An important detail, the extrajudicial execution, worse at the sole order of Evo, equates police action to that of a group of hired gunmen.
The cruel death of those mentioned above is not the first of the massacres carried out by Morales and his henchmen. It is necessary to remember the 2000 gas war, the 2002 coca war and the October 2003 coup d’état. governments of those years.
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