The sitting governor of Bolivia’s eastern department of Santa Cruz, Luis Fernando Camacho, a prominent opposition leader to the central government in La Paz, was arrested Wednesday in a violent ambush of his vehicle by government forces on charges in connection with the toppling of former president Evo Morales in 2019.
A video and audio of the arrest show the surprise within the governor’s vehicle as a white heavy vehicle cuts off their path, stopping diagonally across the road directly in front of the motorcade. As the driver attempts to evade the snare, the governor is heard telling his driver to stop as his car is rammed and he fears it will be overturned. Then, in rapid succession, windows are broken, shots are fired, the vehicle fills with smoke, and its occupants are dragged among shouts and putdowns.
Camacho is seen face down on the street as he is taken into custody. Then, in a separate video, one of the security forces is seen on the grass, handcuffed, while hooded operatives pointed AR-15-style rifles at civilians who were asking for explanations about the incident. Other videos by bystanders show one of the white vehicles parked near a waiting helicopter as hooded men transfer an apparently hooded Camacho. While the population of Santa Cruz erupted and invaded airport runways in a desperate attempt to stop the transfer of the governor to La Paz, it was announced that Camacho was already in the capital, arriving by helicopter.
The arrest comes on the heels of a 36-day general strike that shot down the Santa Cruz department and the city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia’s economic centre, in a dispute over the timing of a census to determine representation and allocation of funds.
The right-wing Camacho has been at odds with the leftist government of Morales’s political party among recurrent and escalating calls for more autonomy, federalism, and potential independence from Bolivia. The strike, which put severe strains on the population, was resolved when the central government addressed the demands to the satisfaction of Camacho and leaders in Santa Cruz.
The charges, however, stem from a general-strike-turned-revolution in 2019 that accused former president Evo Morales of fraud in an election that showed he had beaten his opponent exceeding the required 10 per cent margin of victory to avoid a runoff. Camacho, in coordination with Potosi-department political leader Marco Pumari, called huge town halls, called cabildos —which in Bolivia are said to have the force of law as citizens approve demands by acclamation— resulting in million-people protest sessions that yielded resolutions which led to a countrywide revolution. Revolutions in Bolivia have typically begun as small brush fires of protest that conflagrate into a runway wildfire, which ends in the removal of a government.
The resulting turmoil led the armed forces to withdraw support for Morales and his claim of election victory, which led to Morales’s resignation and flight into exile in Mexico on a plane sent by Mexican President Manuel Lopez Obrador. Obscure right-wing retiring politician Jeanine Áñez assumed the presidency as a caretaker until new elections, but immediately turned the country on a right-wing ideological bend with heavy repression of demonstrators which resulted in several deaths.
After the victory of the left-wing Morales friend Alberto Fernandez, the former president left Mexico and relocated to Argentina, from where he rallied his partisans to elect his handpicked choice Luis Alberto Arce Catacora, who served under him as minister of economy and public finance from 2006 to 2017, and in 2019, and was widely credited for the country’s well-performing economy. Arce won the election by a landslide.
Once Morales’s political party took office under the presidency of Arce, it began a series of arrests to bring those involved in the 2019 revolution to account, arresting first Yassir Molina, leader of a youth armed paramilitary brigade in the central region of Cochabamba that held violent anti-Morales protests in 2019.
In March 2021, the then-former president, after losing a bid for governor of her home department of Beni, was arrested after several days of police operation which found her hiding under a bed in her mother’s house. She was quickly transferred to La Paz, where she eventually was held in preventative detention in a common women’s prison for 15 months before being sentenced to 10 years on charges of sedition stemming from her assumption of the presidency and acts while in office.
In December of the same year, Pumari was also arrested on unclear charges related to the 2019 revolution that kept Morales from remaining in office. The Arce government has been criticized for what the opposition and the international community consider excessive political repression through a politicized use of the country’s judicial system. Then came Camacho’s violent arrest on Wednesday.
Former Bolivian presidents Tuto Quiroga and Carlos Mesa took to Twitter to express their dismay at the arrest, qualified it as “kidnapping,” and called on the international community to take note of what they say is a destruction of democracy in Bolivia.
“The violent and illegal kidnapping of Governor LF Camacho is outrageous. It violates constitutional and human rights principles. It shows once again the government's decision to continue the persecution of opposition leaders, under any legal disguise. He must be released immediately,” posted Mesa on the platform. “This violates international principles of human rights.”
Refuting claims that Camacho had been injured in the violent arrest, Bolivian interior minister, Carlos Eduardo Del Castillo, said on Twitter that Camacho had undergone a medical assessment and said his health was “stable”.
“Finally, after 3 years, Luis Fernando Camacho will answer for the coup that led to theft, persecutions, arrests and massacres by the de-facto government,” tweeted Evo Morales celebrating the arrest. “We trust that this decision will be upheld with the firmness demanded by the people's cry for justice.”
In a subsequent tweet, Moralles called for the prosecution of others involved in the 2018 uprising. “Out of respect for the memory of our brothers murdered in Sacaba and Senkata and the dignity of those who were persecuted, detained and tortured, justice should also prosecute Camacho's accomplices so that the coup adventures never happen again.”
“The dictatorship in Bolivia repeats the state terrorism of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua with the kidnapping of Luis F. Camacho who is political prisoner #194,” said exiled former Interior Minister Carlos Sanchez Berzain from his home in the United States, where he is director Interamerican Institute for Democracy.
The US state department said the department was aware of the situation with Camacho and monitoring developments. “We urge the Bolivian government to refrain from excessive use of force against its opposition, including those elected democratically and their supporters. We also call upon the authorities to respect the due process of law against those charged,” said the US.
From the European Parliament, Hermann Tertsch, Vice-Chair of the Delegation to the Euro-Latin American Parliamentary Assembly tweeted, "From the ECR Group of the European Parliament we inform the President of Bolivia Luís Arce that we make him responsible for the safety of Luis Fernando Camacho, the governor of Santa Cruz in Bolivia, apparently kidnapped by his police in the middle of the street in a violent armed assault”.
In Bolivia, however, people took to the streets. In Santa Cruz protest groups blocked intersections and some burned Bolivian govern offices calling for secession. Long lines at gas stations and grocery stores showed that the population was expecting turmoil and another interruption of their daily lives.
In the capital, La Paz, supporters of the ruling party surrounded offices where Camacho was presumably held, waiving the wiphala multi-coloured flag identified with the people of the Andes, rejecting any leniency for the arrested lowlands leader.
Camacho forces posted on its official Twitter account, “Tonight our leader and governor made it clear that he is proud of his land, of his people who spent 21 days in the streets against (the monumental fraud)” echoing 2019 accusations that the election that showed Morales a winner was a fraud. “I am not afraid of the prison of the dictatorship. I will always defend Santa Cruz and Bolivia, I will defend democracy and I will defend the path to federalism,” said a tweeted statement by Camacho after his arrest and appearance before a judge in La Paz.
