PEACE – Bolivian general Juan José Zúñiga and two others military High-ranking officials, accused of leading the alleged failed coup against President Luis Arce, were held this Saturday in a jail maximum security by order of a judge who imposed six months of preventive detention.
Zúñiga, former army commander; Vice Admiral Juan Arnez, former head of the Navy (Navy); and Alejandro Irahola, former head of the army’s mechanized brigade, entered the Chonchocoro prison under strong escort, on the outskirts of El Alto, a municipality neighboring La Paz.
General Juan José Zúñiga, who led an alleged failed coup attempt in Bolivia this week, said that “at some point the truth will be known” about those events as he was transferred on Saturday to a high-security prison outside La Paz.
“The rest are innocent, there are innocent people,” Zúñiga managed to tell the press in an apparent reference to the other 21 detainees, while he was introduced into a vehicle in the middle of a strong police force. The former army commander was handcuffed and guarded by two police officers.
The Chonchocoro maximum security prison, where Zúñiga was taken, is located about 50 minutes by road from La Paz in the neighboring city of El Alto. The governor of Santa Cruz and opposition leader Luis Fernando Camacho has also been held there as a preventive measure for a year and a half due to the political crisis of 2019, following the electoral fraud of the government of Evo Morales, which triggered a series of protests that left dozens dead and injured. Morales left the presidency and fled to Mexico.
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On Friday, the court ordered his confinement in the maximum security prison while investigations continue into the armed uprising last Wednesday, when troops with tanks besieged the government headquarters for several hours before withdrawing.
The police set up an intense security device for his transfer from a prison in La Paz.
“At some point the truth will be known,” said Zúñiga, handcuffed and without a bulletproof vest, as he was led to a police vehicle.
Maple behind the self-coup
At the time of his capture last Wednesday, the former military chief stated that it was Arce who asked him to prepare something “to raise his popularity,” which was denied by the Bolivian president.
Zúñiga and the other two officers face charges of terrorism and armed uprising, for which they could receive a sentence of up to 20 years in prison, according to the prosecutor’s office.
Along with them, 18 other active and retired military personnel and civilians have been arrested for the alleged failed coup d’état.
On Saturday, the government said it had found evidence of a plan by the military to send special forces by plane from the department of Tarija (south) to La Paz, with the intention of striking at Arce.
“We have found a radiogram with which it had been instructed that the plane that is (…) in the Ministry of Government be transferred to the department of Tarija, to bring the satin groups,” the Minister of Government told the press ( Interior), Eduardo Del Castillo.
General Zúñiga has been identified from the beginning as the main person responsible for the “conspiracy” against the leftist president of Bolivia, who took office in 2020 for a five-year term.
The former army commander was arrested after troops and armoured vehicles withdrew, without clashes with forces loyal to the government.
Evo sows doubt about “coup attempt”
Former President Evo Morales called for a thorough investigation to find out “the truth” about the “coup attempt” last Wednesday, since he wonders “what kind of coup” is one in which the ministers walk around “happy” when theoretically they already is underway.
Morales confirmed in a public appearance that on Wednesday afternoon he received a call from the Minister of the Presidency, María Nela Prada, in which she in turn passed him on to the president, Luis Arce. “She told me: ‘the coup has begun’,” he recalled.
Arce and Morales have gone from allies to political enemies in a few years and the former president made it clear, criticizing for example that his successor gave him “so much power” to the alleged mastermind of the coupGeneral Juan José Zúñiga, commander of the Army, a close associate of Arce, until he tried to attack the government headquarters with a group of soldiers.
Zúñiga raised the hypothesis of a self-coup before the media shortly before his arrest, assuring that Arce himself wanted to raise his popularity, a version that people around Morales have adhered to but not the former president himself, who has expressed his doubts. .
“I don’t know what kind of coup it will be. The coup begins and the ministers (are) happy walking around Plaza Murillo,” he said, referring to an uprising with “zero injuries, zero shots fired,” reports the Bolivian newspaper ‘La Razón’.
Zúñiga, in his interrogation before the Police, named Aníbal Aguilar, brother of the former Minister of Education, as the “ideologist” of the coup. According to the version, Aguilar had already been proposing an “uprising” since May to “take power and call elections,” according to statements collected by the ABI agency.
Source: With information from Europa Press and AP
