Bolivia: Court Issues Arrest Warrant for Jeanine Añez

A Bolivian court has issued arrest warrants for Jeanine Añez, the former interim president who seized power in a coup d'etat in late 2019, alongside several of her senior ministers, claiming that they are a "flight risk."

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According to the court filing shared by Bolivian news outlet Kawsachun News, Añez and nine other senior officials from her administration are charged with terrorism, sedition, and conspiracy.

Añez has resorted to Twitter to claim a political vendetta.​"The political persecution has begun," she wrote. "The MAS has decided to return to the styles of the dictatorship. A shame because Bolivia does not need dictators, it needs freedom and solutions."

Early in November, general elections in Bolivia were three times delayed by the Añez de facto government, which nonetheless saw Luis Arce from the Movement for Socialism (MAS) take office when he won in a landslide election in October 18. 

Añez, a former senator from the Beni region in Bolivia, rose to power in the chaos of November 2019, when a coordinated campaign by domestic and international forces attempted to void the re-election of MAS leader and then-President Evo Morales the previous month. After right-wing militias and sympathetic police forces locked out MAS lawmakers and Añez found herself the head of a rump parliament, she declared herself the interim president on November 12.

U.S. media and the U.S. government both provided support to the de facto government, with then-U.S. President Donald Trump and allies like Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro quickly extending recognition to Añez's self-declared interim government. However, after months of terrible decisions by the usurper government, media outlets in the U.S., such as the Washington Post, had to recognize that the Organization of American States report on the election was "deeply flawed."

“There is not any statistical evidence of fraud that we can find - the trends in the preliminary count, the lack of any big jump in support for Morales after the halt, and the size of Morales’s margin all appear legitimate,” the Post wrote in February 2020, after months of street violence between Añez's police and military forces and the indigenous-led protests against them had solidified her rule.