The Bolivian Justice has extended for the fifth time the preventive imprisonment of the opponent Jeanine Áñez, imprisoned since March 2021 for the case known as ‘Coup d’Etat I’ for her participation in the political crisis that caused the former president Evo Morales to have to renounce his electoral triumph in 2019.
Áñez has protested on Twitter that he is being the victim of an «unjust detention» since he would be «innocent of the hoax» that has been mounted against him. «The fiscal and judicial persecution against a former president of Bolivia and hundreds of political prisoners is criminal,» he said.
Thus, Áñez will be in prison for three more months while the investigation against her for the crime of terrorism of which she was accused after being arrested on February 13, 2021, at which time the charges of sedition and conspiracy were also filed, later removed from the Penal Code by the Constitutional Court.
«It is clear that this is a process of a political nature, which has no legal way out, because legally nothing is achieved, although we have presented all possible resources and actions that in a state of law would determine her freedom,» protested Áñez’s lawyer, Alaín de Canedo.
«The Prosecutor’s Office cannot collect a new element of evidence that has occurred in the events of October and November 2019 in which the former president has placed a bomb, has caused public anxiety or any of the elements that make up the crime of terrorism,» his lawyer has said, reports ‘El Deber’.
De Canedo has insisted that the defense has presented witnesses and evidence that Añez was at the time of the events in the opposition protests in the city of Trinidad. However, prosecutors consider that her non-presence in La Paz is not an obstacle to exclude her from the process that removed Morales from power.
The ‘Coup d’Etat I’ case is related to the events of 2019, which led to the resignation of Morales, amid allegations of alleged electoral fraud and a violent political and social crisis, with protests from both sides, a police riot and pressure from the military.
