BOLIVIA’S OPPOSITION claimed yesterday the government bribed a key witness in the investigation into the events surrounding the killing of Tipperary man Michael Dwyer.
The opposition claims the government is trying to involve its leaders in an alleged plot to assassinate the country’s president.
The bribery claim follows the emergence of a video in which unidentified men are apparently recorded giving US$31,500 to Ignacio Villa Vargas and ordering him to flee to Argentina. Mr Villa Vargas had told authorities during interrogation that the group Dwyer was with in Bolivia was in contact with leading opponents of the president, Evo Morales.
Dwyer and two other men were killed in a police raid on their hotel in the eastern city of Santa Cruz in April 2009. Authorities say they moved against the men after they initiated a terrorist campaign with the aim of killing Mr Morales and securing independence for the east of the country. Dwyer’s family and Bolivia’s opposition say he was summarily executed as he slept. After the hotel raid Mr Villa Vargas was quickly picked up and identified as a local fixer for Eduardo Rózsa Flores, the supposed leader of Dwyer’s group.
In the video he receives the money and the order to stay out of the country for at least six months, when those paying him would contact him again. A public official identified by Bolivian media as the man handing over the money in the video has since disappeared.
Luis Núñez, head of the opposition-led Santa Cruz autonomy movement, says the video proves the government is orchestrating the entire affair to discredit the opposition. “There was never any terrorism . . . but a plot set to destroy the autonomy leadership,” he said in a statement.
Two months after the police raid on the hotel, Mr Villa Vargas was reported missing. The video is the latest in a series of videos and photographs anonymously leaked to the media which complicate the Bolivian government’s version of events surrounding the police raid on Dwyer’s hotel and the motives for his group’s presence in the country.
Bolivia’s government has sought to downplay the importance of the video and of Mr Villa Vargas to the investigation.