The Bolivian prosecution filed on Friday (20) an indictment against the former interim president Jeanine ñez for “genocide” and other crimes, due to the death of twenty opposition protesters in 2019.
Opponent to former President Evo Morales, ñez was the Senate’s second vice-president when he resigned in November 2019 and was proclaimed interim president.
She left power in November after the election of Luis Arce, an ally of Morales, and was arrested in March on charges of conspiracy, sedition and terrorism.
Attorney General Juan Lanchipa said he had filed with the Supreme Court “a petition for a complaint against citizen Jeanine Áñez”, who has been in preventive detention since March, but the decision of a trial rests with Congress.
The most serious crime of which she is accused, that of genocide, is punishable by 10 to 20 years in prison, according to the Bolivian Penal Code.
The accusation stems from the denunciation of family members of victims of the repression on November 15, 2019 in the town of Sacaba, near the center of Cochabamba, and on November 19, at the Senkata gas plant in the city of El Alto, neighbor La Paix, said the prosecutor.
According to an investigation by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) Inter-American Committee of Independent Experts (GIEI), presented this week in La Paz, 22 people died in the two events (11 in each), out of one total of 37 deaths recorded after the resignation of leftist president Evo Morales.
Lanchipa, in turn, said that in Sacaba and Senkata there were “20 dead”.
These events were “provisionally classified as genocide, serious and light injuries and injuries followed by death,” said the prosecutor.
The Supreme Court must ask Congress for authorization of a “liability or privilege lawsuit”, which must be passed by two-thirds of parliament, monitored by the Movement for Evo Socialism (MAS).
The former president did not comment on the complaint, but posted on Twitter on Tuesday (17): “We demand respect for the Constitution, guarantees of due process and equal conditions.”
Áñez, several of his ministers and former military and police chiefs are accused by the current government and the ruling party of carrying out a coup against Evo in 2019, with the support of the Catholic Church, the European Union, politicians of the Bolivian right. and the center, in addition to the governments of Argentinian Mauricio Macri and Ecuadorian Lenín Moreno.
Bolivia entered turmoil after the October 2019 elections. The official results favored Evo, who was running for re-election by 2025, but the opposition denounced a fraud.