By Carlos Sánchez Berzain*
(Opinion) Santa Cruz de la Sierra is the most populous city, the main and the most developed in Bolivia.
It is the Capital of Santa Cruz, the Department with the highest gross regional product in the country, and is the most important center for the defense of freedom, national unity, and the Bolivian Nation.
This city of 2 million inhabitants is today the victim of a physical and economic blockade by the government of 21st-century socialism or Castrochavism, which executes open aggression violating human rights and committing state terrorism.
It is urgent that the Americas and the world attend to what is happening in Santa Cruz, where a planned action of state terrorism is taking place -already applied in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua- destined to subjugate the only zone of freedom that remains in Bolivia.
The cause of this aggression is to demand -in peaceful civil resistance- that the government comply with its own law and carry out the National Population and Housing Census in November 2022.
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The Bolivian regime is deliberately postponing the Census because the results of this population register will confirm that for 2009, 2014, 2019, and 2020 elections.
The government altered the number of Bolivians, increasing the list of voters to about 1.5 million citizens who do not exist in a register of 7 million, subjecting the country to the condition of “electoral dictatorship where citizens vote but do not choose.”
The government of Luis Arce Catacora is the prolongation of the dictatorship of Evo Morales.
Arce is the head of government and Morales the dictator in chief, of a system implanted and sustained by Castrochavism that began with the 2003 coup d’état, which does not respect any of the essential elements of democracy, which has more than 180 political prisoners and 8,000 exiles.
They hold power with the label of democracy due to the falsified electoral victory of 2020, precisely based on the adulterated electoral roll.
They cannot carry out a census that gives results applicable to the 2025 elections, because in addition to confirming Arce’s illegitimacy, they will lose the elections.
Bolivia is the invisible dictatorship of Castrochavism made up of Cuba as leader, Venezuela and Nicaragua.
It is the victim disguised as a democracy because after the electoral fraud of 2019 proved red-handed by the crimes of Evo Morales, who resigned and fled to Mexico-Cuba-Argentina, they manipulated the government that should have been a transitional one and turned it into continuity to retake power in the 2020 elections.
They presented the 2019 electoral fraud as a coup and with the full judicial control they exercise, they sentenced former president Jeanine Añez and members of her government to jail.
To recognize the nature of the organized crime of the regime that holds power in Bolivia, one only has to review the reports of the Organization of American States, the European Union, and the most recent of the United States Department of State regarding the 2019 elections
These reports prove the electoral fraud committed by Evo Morales, the same one that Arce Catacora and his justice system have turned into a coup d’état and judicial conviction of dozens of innocents so that Morales, Arce, and their accomplices have impunity.
Santa Cruz and its leaders have always been the target of the Castrochavista regime that in 2009 perpetrated the Hotel las Américas massacre, when Santa Cruz defended the Constitution and the Republic of Bolivia, supplanted by the currently imposed plurinational state.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, in its Merits Report 394/21, Case 13,546, certifies the massacre ordered by Evo Morales and full proof of the crimes when it concludes that “the Bolivian State is responsible for the violation of the rights to life, personal integrity, personal freedom, judicial guarantees, and judicial protection….”
Today the violence is again concentrated against Santa Cruz.
It has been planned by the Castrochavista intervention and executed by the government that manipulates the public force and civil groups, which it calls social movements, the version of the paramilitary groups of the Cuban dictatorship with which it attacks the defenseless population that asks for “Homeland and Life” since July 11, 2021, the groups of the dictatorship of Venezuela and the Sandinistas of the dictatorship of Nicaragua.
The mobilization of civilians to violate human rights is part of State terrorism.
The aggravating circumstance is that they come from areas controlled by drug traffickers, from the illegal coca federations and cocaine producers of which Evo Morales is the head and with which they have turned Bolivia into a Narco-State.
What the regime considers to be the “final attack to subdue Santa Cruz” is being perpetrated in Bolivia, and these are human rights violations, crimes against humanity, and state terrorism.
* Lawyer and Political Scientist. Director of the Interamerican Institute for Democracy