On December 11, Bolivian police and military troops arrested eight campesino coca growers, cocaleros, in a massive operation involving dozens of searches in the Chapare region of the Cochabamba department. Four of those arrested are local activists from the Movement to Socialism (MAS) and two are local cocalero union leaders. Prosecutors in La Paz charged the eight with terrorism, armed uprising and criminal association. According to the prosecutor’s office, another 23 cocaleros were being sought on the same charges.
At a press conference the same day, René Arzabe, one of 15 prosecutors on the case who led the arrest operations, announced that the eight detainees are linked to the National Liberation Army (ELN) in Colombia. Arzabe said the eight were caught with a rifle, an explosive device, bomb-making materials and ELN pamphlets. Arzabe and fellow prosecutor Silvia Blacutt said the suspects had been under investigation since last April, when Bolivian police arrested Colombian campesino activist Francisco Cortés Aguilar and Bolivian cocalero leaders Claudio Ramírez Cuevas and Carmelo Peñaranda Rosas near La Paz. Arzabe said the latest detainees are linked to Cortés, Ramirez and Peñaranda, who remain jailed in La Paz, accused of terrorism and involvement with the ELN.
The eight people arrested were also accused of involvement in the recent killings of government troops carrying out coca eradication in the Chapare. Three police agents and one soldier, all members of the Joint Task Forces (FTC) in charge of coca eradication operations in the Chapare, have recently been killed, either by homemade landmines known as “cazabobos” (fool-hunters) or in sniper ambushes. Cocalero leader and MAS deputy Evo Morales criticized the search and arrest operation, saying that government forces took repressive action against men, women “and even children who were tortured physically and psychologically.” Morales called the raids “the work of the [U.S.] embassy,” part of a U.S. strategy to impose “a dictatorship” in Bolivia. The raids coincided with a visit to Bolivia by Rogelio Pardo-Maurer, U.S. Deputy Under-Secretary of Defense for Western Hemisphere Affairs.
Chapare cocalero leader Luis Cutipa said on December 12 that the cocaleros had declared an “emergency” and might carry out highway blockades to protest the “illegal arrests.” Judge Carlos Sánchez Castelu authorized the operation and issued search warrants for the homes of 27 campesinos in the Cochabamba tropics, including top union leaders.
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