Jeanine Áñez asks the OAS “not to forget” the “political prisoners” in Bolivia

The former president of Bolivia Jeanine Áñez has sent this Thursday a letter to the secretary general of the Organization of American States (OAS), Luis Almagro, asking him “not to forget” about “the political prisoners in Bolivia” and other countries.

“I call your attention and, through you, to the governments and democratic institutions of the continent, Mr. Almagro, so that the political prisoners of Bolivia and the continent are not forgotten,” Áñez said in a letter addressed to the OAS and published on his Twitter account.

In the missive, written last September 13 and subsequently sent to the delegation of the Union Network of Latin American Parties (UPLA), the former Bolivian president recalled that she has been in prison since March 13, 2021.

“The political imprisonment I have been suffering since March 13, 2021, should call the attention and concern of the OAS, its political organizations, its democratic institutions and its institutions for the defense of human rights”, demanded the former president of Bolivia.

However, she assured that her country was the “first country in the Americas to deprive a former president accused of terrorism of her freedom”, arguing that her actions and “the essence of her mandate” arose from the “constitutional succession of 2019 due to the resignation, the abandonment of the country and of her functions by the government authorities, at that time Evo Morales and Álvaro García Linera”.

In this sense, he has reiterated that the Government of Luis Arce “does not differ in its autocratic behaviors” from the “tyrannies implemented in Cuba, Nicaragua or Venezuela”.

“Justice for them, is the apprehension and imprisonment of whoever does not respond to their doctrines, their ideology and their political interests,” Áñez has maintained in the missive.

The former president, — in preventive detention since March 2021 — is accused in the framework of what happened in November 2019, when the then president, Evo Morales, left office. Two days later, Áñez herself, then a senator, assumed the Presidency of Bolivia.

Already in the middle of last June, the former president was sentenced to ten years in prison for the ‘Coup d’Etat II’, one of the cases she has open against her for what happened in 2019, and in which she was accused of acting against the Bolivian Constitution by self-proclaiming herself president.