The former president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, leaves the hotel in Buenos Aires on October 22.Natacha Pisarenko / AP
Former President Evo Morales will be able to return to Bolivia without problems from his Argentine exile.
The return is announced for November 11 and it only remained to know if the former president would be arrested as soon as he stepped onto Bolivian soil.
A judge has now cleared the way for him, by suspending the arrest warrant he faced.
Morales faces 30 judicial processes for crimes of the most varied, according to the balance that the ex-president himself made.
The most advanced is the one presented by the Minister of the Interior (Interior) Arturo Murillo for “sedition and terrorism” following an audio in which Morales, who had just been overthrown, supposedly speaks by phone with a peasant leader and instructs him "Fence the cities" to prevent the arrival of food.
The authorities affirmed that this audio was recorded in November 2019, when the followers of Morales protested against the interim government of Jeanine Áñez.
Morales always maintained that it was not his voice.
The judge hearing this case issued an arrest warrant after Morales failed to appear to testify.
At that time he was in exile in Argentina.
Now the defense of the former president has managed to convince the judge that his absence was due to the fact that he had not been correctly summoned.
With this, this judge has concluded, the defense rights of the former president were violated (who does not receive special treatment because the events of which he is accused occurred after he left his inauguration).
This resolution does not stop the investigation as such, but establishes that Morales can defend himself in freedom.
At the beginning of September, the human rights defender organization Human Rights Watch demanded that Áñez's Cabinet drop the charges of terrorism against Morales, since, in its opinion, they were “disproportionate” and there was no evidence against him to sustain an accusation of this type, with sentences of up to 20 years in prison.
This is the second good judicial news received by the senior officials of the Morales Government (2006-2019), who consider themselves persecuted by the current Executive.
Another judge annulled the arrest warrant held by former Justice Minister Héctor Arce, in another investigation.
Arce lives as a refugee in the residence of the Mexican ambassador in La Paz.
In theory, the judge's ruling allows him to freely leave this house located in the most elegant neighborhood of La Paz, where he has been held since the political crisis last year.
This was recognized by Minister Murillo, who made the permanence in the residence of Héctor Arce and six other leaders of the previous Government one of his main management objectives.
“That is the justice we have in our country.
What can be done ”, complained Murillo after hearing the news.
He promised that he would respect the decisions of the Judiciary, "even if it is run by corrupt and crooked people", because "we do not persecute as the Government of the Movement to Socialism (MAS) did."
This Monday, police movements have been reported around the Mexican residence, which also houses Morales's former "strong man", former Army captain Juan Ramón Quintana.
Mexican diplomacy has complained in the past about the "harassment" that its representation in La Paz has suffered.
"Héctor Arce may leave, but if any of the others, for example Quintana, tries to do so, we are going to put him in prison," warned Murillo.
"Now, if the judge lets him go free and says he is a little angel, what can be done?"
All of this occurs days after the Bolivian elections, which gave a resounding victory to the MAS candidate, Luis Arce.
He has promised to adopt a neutral position in the face of justice and let his colleagues defend themselves "without pressure."
It has also anticipated that, with respect to the seven leaders stranded in the residence of Mexico, it will grant them the safe conducts that Áñez has denied them so far, so that they can qualify for the asylum granted by the North American country.
MAS legislators are preparing several legal suits against President Áñez y Murillo and other members of the current government, especially for the repression of the protests in November last year.
In its report on the situation of human rights in Bolivia, Human Rights Watch mentioned the lack of institutionality of the courts, which, due to external pressures and their own decisions, tend to become instruments in favor of political power and against those who oppose it.