The governor of Potosí, Jhonny Mamani, was sentenced to six months in preventive detention for illicit enrichment and being a partner in a Pakistani trafficker who operated from Chile to illegally introduce cars into Bolivia.
The Pakistani Umar Siyab had created the Stefais Logistic company in Iquique, which he used to buy used vehicles in the port and send them to Bolivia, in a business in which he earned 500 dollars for each motorized vehicle and in Potosí Governor Mamani was in charge of the business through a front man.
Vehicles of this origin circulate in all the cities of Bolivia with false documentation, with illegal license plates, authorized to circulate by mayors who supplant legal records and that way the owners can buy subsidized fuel without problems.
Governor Mamani had bought 41 ambulances with this method, paying close to 3 million dollars, although they never arrived. He was charged for it, but judges friendly to the ruling party found him not guilty.
Internal fight between Morales and Arce in the MAS
The judges who obey the government party are now subject to the rivalry of Evo Morales with Luis Arce for the leadership of the MAS and the candidacy in the 2025 elections. Some of the migrant judges, who have changed the trend within the party, now obey and Arce are making decisions contrary to the interests of the cocalero.
With Mamani in jail, Morales accuses the judges of having acted with “racist” criteria, reinforcing suspicions that his family is involved in the used car business.
That a Pakistani mafia is operating in Bolivia is a novelty in a society that is used to news about Brazilian, Mexican, Colombian and also Russian mafias, but in relation to the drug business. Pakistani mobsters had never been heard of.
The judges who are changing patterns among the MAS caudillos have antagonized Morales by ordering the closure of a parallel Yungas coca market in La Paz, which was run by followers of the Chapare “commander”.
Bolivian President Luis Arce (left) and former Bolivian President and leader of the Movement for Socialism (MAS), Evo Morales, in a file photograph. EFE/Jorge Abrego
The rivalry produced this weekend a battle between agricultural leaders in the Congress of the Confederation of Peasants, with the result of 450 wounded but with two leaders facing each other.
Lucio Quispe is the leader of the union confederation chosen by the Arce wing and Ponciano Colque is the one chosen by the Morales current, which leaves the peasants in a conflict, although everyone knows that they are wage-earning structures.
Morales blamed Arce for having ordered the use of tear gas in the closed premises where the congress was being held, just because he wanted to prevent the election of a rival current leader.
He said that Arce has criminal attitudes and went so far as to say that the current president, who was his economy minister for thirteen years, is “neoliberal” because he worked at the Central Bank since 1987, when Víctor Paz Estenssoro governed, who remained in office. in the governments of Jaime Paz Zamora and later Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, of the democratic and liberal current.
File image of a coca seller showing her product to buyers in a market in La Paz, Bolivia (REUTERS / Claudia Morales)
All this seems to confirm that Arce and Morales are not faking when they face each other, as some analysts suspect that these characters will unite for the elections, before or after them, and will continue to govern Bolivia with the help of the fraud they have set up.
Morales’s followers have told Arce that he should look for a party that allows him to be a candidate in 2025, because the MAS already has a defined candidate.
Analysts say that Morales traveled to Caracas twice in recent weeks to be sure that the Venezuelan experts who set up the fraud will be in Bolivia in 2025 to put it right.
The polls do not give many possibilities to the masista leaders, but it always happens in the elections that the results give them surprising majorities.
In 2019, the OAS experts who observed the elections came to detect 27 different ways that the MAS uses to modify the actual results. The electoral authorities have not reported on the actions they took to prevent these forms of fraud from recurring, but in 2020, surprisingly, Luis Arce obtained 55% of the votes.
Opponents have asked for a review of the electoral roll or the arrival of experts to carry out an audit that will allow knowing how many inhabitants and how many voters there are in Bolivia.
At the moment, with the case of the Uruguayan drug lord Sebastián Marset, who is still a fugitive, it has been confirmed that any person, national or foreign, can obtain two or more identity documents, in addition to passports, due to the fact that personal identification systems are out of control. .
