MIAMI — Victor Manuel Rocha, former United States ambassador to Bolivia, was sentenced this Friday to 15 years in prison for acting as an undercover agent of Cuba for four decades, in a hearing held in a federal court in Miami (Florida).
“The court is going to sentence him to the maximum punishment allowed by law,” Judge Beth Bloom declared, before announcing the sentence. jail to which he added the payment of $500,000 in fines.
Rocha, 73, appeared in the afternoon before Judge Beth Bloom in a hearing that lasted three and a half hours.
The former diplomat, who reached a collaboration agreement with the Prosecutor’s Office, He first pleaded guilty to having collected U.S. intelligence for Cuba’s communist government since around 1981.
After he acknowledged those facts, Judge Bloom sentenced him.
US police detained Rocha in Miami in December and accused him of acting as an agent of a foreign government without the prior consent of his administration.
In his years as a mole, he held important positions in the State Department, where he was able to access high-level confidential information and influence American foreign policy.
Greater infiltration
Born in Colombia and a naturalized American, Rocha carried out “one of the most far-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign agent,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in December.
Between 1999 and mid-2002, he was ambassador in La Paz, where he caused great controversy by threatening to withdraw US aid to the Bolivian war on drugs if the leftist and former coca grower unionist Evo Morales won the elections.
According to the Prosecutor’s Office, Rocha continued spying for Havana after leaving the State Department in 2002, when he became an advisor to the United States Southern Command, the body that coordinates the armed forces of the North American country in Latin America, including Cuba.
Spy for 4 decades
The former diplomat admitted having worked for the communist regime in Cuba for “40 years” in meetings held in 2022 and 2023 with an undercover FBI agent, who was posing as a representative of the island’s General Directorate of Intelligence.
During these meetings, Rocha celebrated her activity as a Cuban intelligence agent, which she described as “meticulous” and “very disciplined,” and she referred again and again to the United States as “the enemy” and to her Cuban contacts as “comrades.”
Numerous cases of espionage have tarnished relations between the United States and Cuba, enemies since the island’s communist revolution in 1959, in the midst of the Cold War.
In 2001, Ana Belén Montes, a military intelligence analyst, was arrested for espionage after admitting that she had been collecting information for Cuba for almost a decade.
The CIA, the US secret service, made numerous attempts to assassinate Cuban leaders after the failed landing at the Bay of Pigs in 1961.
Relations between Washington and the communist island, subject to a US embargo since 1962, remain tense.
Source: With information from AFP
