Bolivia’s most important city besieged by a government that violates human rights and commits state terrorism

(Interamerican Institute for Democracy) Santa Cruz de la Sierra is the most populated, most important, and most developed city in Bolivia. It is the capital of the Santa Cruz Department, a city with the country’s greatest gross regional product and is the most important epicenter for the defense of freedom, national unity, and the Bolivian nation. This city of two-million people is today the victim of a physical and economic blockade perpetrated by the 21st Century Socialism -or Castrochavism’s- government that pursues an open attack violating human rights and committing State terrorism.

It behooves the Americas and the world to understand what is taking place in Santa Cruz where a well-planned operation of State terrorism previously applied in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, is now underway aimed at subjecting the only free zone that remains in Bolivia. The cause for this attack is to have petitioned -through peaceful civil resistance- for the government to abide by its own laws and conduct the National Census of Population and Housing in November of 2022.

The aforementioned census is being deliberately postponed by the Bolivian regime because the results of this population registry will confirm that for the elections of 2009, 2014, 2019, and 2020, the government tampered with the number of Bolivians, increasing the list of voters by nearly 1.5 million voters that do not exist in a voters’ registry of 7 million people, thus subjecting the country to the condition of being “an electoralist dictatorship wherein citizens vote but do not elect”.

The government of Luis Arce Catacora is the continuation of Evo Morales’ dictatorship. Arce is the Head of State and Morales is the Dictator-In-Chief of a system implanted and sustained by Castrochavism, a system that began with a coup d’état in 2003, a system that does not respect any of the essential components of democracy and that has over 180 political prisoners and 8,000 exiled. They wield power with a label of democracy due to the fraudulent electoral victory in 2020, a victory that was based precisely on the tampered electoral registry. They cannot conduct a census that will yield results that will be applicable to the elections slated for 2025 because, besides confirming Arce’s illegitimacy, they will lose the elections.

Bolivia is the invisible dictatorship of Castrochavism’s dictatorship comprised by Cuba as the head, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. It is the victim, disguised as democracy, after the proved electoral fraud in 2019 and the flagrant crimes of Evo Morales who resigned and fled to Mexico-Cuba-Argentina, manipulated the successional government that should have been a Transitional Government and turned it into a government of continuity to then be able to retake power in the 2020 elections.

They presented the electoral fraud of 2019 as a coup d’état and with the tight and total control over the Judicial System they sentenced former President Jeanine Añez and members of her cabinet to jail.

To be able to see the Organized Crime’s nature of the regime wielding power in Bolivia, we only must read the reports from the Organization of American States, the European Union, and most recently the United States Department of State regarding the elections of 2019, these reports prove the electoral fraud committed by Evo Morales. This very same fraud is what President Luis Arce Catacora and his Judicial System have counterfeited turning it into a coup d’état and have prevaricated the legal process by condemning dozens of innocent people to jail so that Morales, Arce, and their accomplices continue to remain unpunished.

Santa Cruz and its leaders have always been the target for the Castrochavist regime that in 2009 committed the massacre at the Las Americas Hotel when Santa Cruz was defending the Constitution and the Republic of Bolivia, supplanted by the Plurinational State currently imposed. The Interamerican Commission on Human Rights in its formal detailed report 394/21, Case # 13.546, certifies the massacre was ordered by Evo Morales and offers ample proof of the crimes committed when it concludes that “the Bolivian State is responsible for the violation of the rights to; life, physical well-being, personal freedom, judicial guarantees and judicial protection. . .”

Today, violence is again being directed against Santa Cruz, this is a planned Castrochavist intervention executed by the government who manipulates the Police, and other civilian groups it calls movements, another name for the paramilitary groups the Cuban dictatorship attacks a defenseless population with for their asking for “Homeland and Life” since 11 July of 2021, another name for the “Collectives” from Venezuela and the “Sandinistas” from the Nicaraguan dictatorship. The mobilization of civilians to violate human rights is part of State terrorism. The aggravating part is that it originates in areas controlled by narcotics’ traffickers, by “federations” of illicit coca leaf harvesters, by producers of cocaine all of whom under the leadership of Evo Morales and with which they have transformed Bolivia into a narco-State.

What is now happening in Bolivia is what the regime considers to be “the final assault to subject Santa Cruz” and these are flagrant violations of human rights, crimes against humanity, and State-terrorism.

*Attorney & Political Scientist. Director of the Interamerican Institute for Democracy.

Translation from Spanish by Edgar L. Terrazas