AFP - Bolivian President Evo Morales is preparing to turn an expected easy re-election victory in weekend polls into a legal club to crush his distant conservative rival. Morales, 50, has accused Manfred Reyes Villa, a former governor and candidate in Sunday's election, of corruption and links to the murders of at least 12 pro-Morales supporters during 2007 unrest. Early this week, Morales charged that Reyes Villa, 54, and his running mate were "thieves" who would be jailed under a new law he intends to introduce once the election was out of the way. On Thursday, Morales's government also claimed Reyes Villa had bought an airline ticket to leave Bolivia the day after the election in violation of a travel ban pending his trial.
In the government's version, a group of five mercenaries paid by the opposition was preparing to assassinate Morales, and resisted when police tried to arrest them in a hotel, with 3 terrorists dying in the shootout. The two survivors were put on trial. To prevent the opposition from foiling the trial, the case had to be taken away from the judges in the city where the attack happened.
In the opposition's version, there was no shootout and the group was liquidated in their sleep, and the government is trying to keep control of the legal process to conceal that the Flores group was tricked by its own agents, as evidenced by a 2007 photo showing Flores and the leader of the special unit that stormed them.
In Flores's version, according to an interview made before he left for Bolivia but aired only after his death in the police attack, he is an international revolutionary (he was indeed a colorful personality: got into political activism as comunist youth in Allende's Chile, then got to meet Carlos the Jackal as member of a special group of communist Hungary's border police, then worked as reporter covering all the crises erupting after 1989, then was a volunteer in Croatia's army in the Yugoslav War, then settled down and worked as poet, actor playing himself in a film on his own life, became a Jewish anti-Israel activist taking up Islam, which made him good friends with one faction of the Hungarian far-right...). He told he went to Western Bolivia to organise self-defense units against Morales's police, army, and indio militias from East Bolivia, relying on his experience from Croatia.
Now, Eduardo Rózsa-Flores was a Bolivian-Hungarian, two of his team (one of them among the killed) were nationalist ethnic-Hungarians from Romania; the two others, an Irishman and a Bolivian-Croatian were Flores's former comrades from the foreign volunteers' legion in Croatia. Thus, in the Hungarian and Irish governments' version, we don't know enough about the circumstances and Bolivia is not cooperative enough. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
Michael Dwyer (1984-2009) was from Ballinderry, County Tipperary. Ireland. He was shot dead on April 16th 2009. by Police Special Forces, in the Los Americas Hotel, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia....The Irish State Pathologist Marie Cassidy told the inquest into his death that the 24-year-old died from a single gunshot wound to the heart. She said that the Tipperary man had been shot once, and that the post mortem carried out in Bolivia was incomplete.[9] The Bolivian Autopsy by Antonio Torres Bulanza and Rafael Vargas Peña, of the Instituto de Investigaciones Forenses, showed he had six bullet entrace wounds with three exit wounds and the trajectory was from the back to the front, slightly from below to above. That his heart was intact and the cause of death was Hypovolaemic shock (acute blood loss) from multiple thoracic injuries by bullets.
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The Irish State Pathologist Marie Cassidy told the inquest into his death that the 24-year-old died from a single gunshot wound to the heart. She said that the Tipperary man had been shot once, and that the post mortem carried out in Bolivia was incomplete.[9]
The Bolivian Autopsy by Antonio Torres Bulanza and Rafael Vargas Peña, of the Instituto de Investigaciones Forenses, showed he had six bullet entrace wounds with three exit wounds and the trajectory was from the back to the front, slightly from below to above. That his heart was intact and the cause of death was Hypovolaemic shock (acute blood loss) from multiple thoracic injuries by bullets.
