The former president of Bolivia Evo Morales defended himself this Friday against the accusation of child abuse that the Bolivian prosecutor’s office has reactivated against him in recent days: “All false. It’s closed [este caso]. [Lo] “They are managing politically to erode Evo’s image,” he said in a press conference he gave in his stronghold, Chapare, the coca growing area of ​​Bolivia. A journalist asked him if he had a daughter in 2016 and Morales, annoyed, replied: “How many children do you have? Fought [Arce, el presidente boliviano] He said, ‘Don’t mess with the family.’ The family is sacred. The family is sacred,” he repeated.

The allusion to Arce is due to the fact that he has asked several times that the internal war with his former political mentor not touch his children. Morales has criticized them several times because they supposedly intervene in government decisions and for suspicions of corruption.

The complaint that in 2016 the former president had a daughter with a 15-year-old teenager is the same one that was already made against him after his overthrow in November 2019. “I perfectly remember that [la entonces presidenta Jeanine] Áñez prosecuted and investigated me. And it was proven false. On December 10, in Yacuiba, there was a resolution [del] “rejection prosecutor” of the accusation of statutory rape, he assured. He cited a resolution from a prosecutor from Tupiza, a town in southern Bolivia where the alleged victim comes from. “There is nothing and there will be nothing. I fight just like Áñez. “I fight for Áñez,” he said, surrounded by more than a dozen leaders of his movement. Morales recalled that, according to Bolivian legislation, no one can be tried twice for the same charge. “Doesn’t the Minister of Justice know [César Siles] the code of criminal procedure?” he asked.

Evo Morales denounced that the Government wanted to arrest him on October 1 and take him out of Chapare in an Armed Forces helicopter. He gave the names of the police officers supposedly in charge of arresting him. He congratulated Judge Lilian Moreno, who canceled the arrest warrant against him because, as the lawyer explained, the prosecution tried to present a five-year-old complaint as a flagrant crime and did not notify the former president that the case had been filed. reactivated. This ruling is now being evaluated by the Constitutional Court.

According to Morales, members of the ruling party are concerned about the political consequences of him being imprisoned in Bolivia, so they have thought about the possibility of extraditing him to the United States. At this moment, the extradition to that country of Maximiliano Dávila, the anti-drug chief of the last Morales Government (2015-2019), who is wanted by a New York court for narcotics trafficking, is underway. Morales rejected the expulsion of Bolivians which, if Dávila’s case is approved, would occur again after decades. “I always refused,” he said. He repeated what he has already stated several times: that they want to use the former police officer to convict him of drug trafficking.

The Puebla Group, created in 2019 to promote progressive dialogue in Latin America and Southern Europe, which earlier this year tried to reconcile the two wings of the Movement towards Socialism, has opted, at least on this issue, for Morales. He expressed in a statement “his deep concern about the lawfare campaign that is beginning to develop against comrade Evo Morales in Bolivia.”

He was grateful for the gesture that, as he said, “I did not negotiate.” He showed several surveys in which he appears first in voting intention for next year’s elections, while Arce’s numbers are at the bottom. He attributed the judicial siege that is closing around him, and which consists of three other processes in addition to statutory rape, to his political success and Arce’s parallel fall in the polls. “What a dirty campaign, so lying. All against Evo. The right also supports Lucho Arce against Evo,” he indicated in relation to the opposition’s statements so that this time the process against Morales goes to the end.

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