A La Paz court began, this Thursday (17), the criminal trial against the former Bolivian president Jeanine Anezfor allegedly planning a “coup d’état” in 2019 against the then president Evo Morales.
Handcuffed and wearing a bulletproof vest, Áñez was taken to court from prison in La Paz where she is serving a 10-year prison sentence since 2022 for unconstitutionally assuming the Presidency.
“It wasn’t a coup, it was electoral fraud” by Evo Morales, shouted the 57-year-old former president upon leaving prison.
Along with her, the former governor of Santa Cruz, Luis Fernando Camacho, and six other people will be tried, including former ministers, former military and police commanders and a social leader.
Outside the court, heavily protected by police, around twenty people demonstrated against the accused.
“These coup plotters must receive the maximum sentence for the coup and the massacres of civilians,” said peasant leader Esteban Alavi.
The Public Ministry (MP) accuses Áñez and the other defendants of “terrorism, criminal association and improper use of influence”, due to the violent protests that forced Morales to resign in 2019.
The opposition accused him at the time of committing alleged fraud in the elections in which he was seeking a third term.
The MP asks for sentences of between 15 and 20 years in prison for the accused, depending on the degree of participation in “terrorism”, the most serious charge charged against them.
Camacho is accused as the author of this crime and Áñez as an accomplice.
According to the MP, their actions constituted “the rupture of the constitutional order and the premature departure of the government” of Morales.
In November 2019, Áñez, an opposition senator, assumed the presidency of Bolivia two days after Morales and his then vice-president, Álvaro García, resigned amid social upheaval.
Morales began governing in 2006. He was re-elected in 2009, 2014 and 2019, when he sought a fourth term until 2025.
“Fantastic, illegal, a scam”
Áñez, who remained in the Presidency for a year, this week described the trial called “Coup d’état I” as “illegal, fanciful” and a “farce”.
In her opinion, the ruling party decided to arrest her without “any proof of anything”.
She also rejects the ordinary criminal trial and requests that, as a former president, the country’s main court examine her case, with prior authorization from Congress.
The former right-wing president faces several other lawsuits, all related to the 2019 crisis, such as the massacre of civilians in Senkata (El Alto) and Sacaba (Cochabamba), which left around 20 people dead in the military repression that followed the change. of government.
The trial against Áñez received determined support from the government of President Luis Arce and Morales from the beginning.
However, the bitter dispute between the two for the ruling party’s presidential candidacy in the 2025 elections could affect the judicial process.
A court in El Alto ordered Morales to testify as a witness for alleged political manipulation of the case against Áñez.
The former president remains sheltered in the coca-growing region of Chapare, where he has his political base, due to the possibility of the Public Prosecutor’s Office ordering his arrest.
Morales is being investigated for rape, human trafficking and smuggling, after the alleged abuse of a minor under 15 with whom, according to the accusation, he had a daughter in 2016.
The indigenous leader, who rejects the process as “another lie”, accuses Arce of orchestrating his possible arrest.
Gustavo Flores-Macías, a researcher at Cornell University in the United States, told AFP that Bolivian justice is immersed in political ups and downs.
The judicial system now faces “a higher level of political manipulation” compared to others in the region, he noted.
