Yesterday, Bolivia’s Interior Minister, Eduardo del Castillo, announced in an extensive press conference that the government of President Luis Arce had uncovered documents related to a plan from October of 2020 to assassinate then-Presidential candidate Luis Arce either before or after that year’s Oct. 18 election (which Arce won with 55% of the vote) and unleash violence and upheaval to destabilize the country and prevent Arce’s MAS party from taking power. Most significant in Del Castillo’s revelations, is that the individuals he named as the culprits in this plot were some of the same people involved in the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moise nine months later—on July 7, 2021. The Bolivian ringleader of the plot was then-Defense Minister Luis Fernando Lopez, now a fugitive. But the Colombian who traveled to Bolivia in October of 2020 to participate in the plot to kill Arce, German Alejandro Ribera, was one of the ringleaders of the Colombian group that killed Jovenel Moise..
The Bolivian plot never came to fruition for several reasons, not the least of which was the chaos within the government of “president” Jeanine Anez, who had illegally seized power a year earlier after then-President Evo Morales was forced from power. What is relevant is that this crew of mercenaries, some of whom admitted to working for Blackwater, were tied into some very dirty, drug-related networks. In the Haitian case, several of the Colombians arrested admitted to being informants for the DEA and FBI. Like the Colombians hired for Moise’s murder, the Colombians who traveled to Bolivia were also hired by a shady South Florida security firm, CTU, run by Venezuelan Antonio Emanuel Intriago, himself a mercenary for hire, who also helped organize the July 2020 “Bay of Piglets” fiasco that was a pathetic attempt to kill Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro using former special forces personnel and other mercenaries.
