Luis Fernando Camachoimprisoned governor of Santa Cruz, has become a central figure for the articulation of democratic unity against the authoritarian government of Luis Arce. His violent kidnapping and consequent imprisonment, which we talked about in Infobae last year, and which was intended to marginalize him from the political scene, has had the opposite effect of increasing his profile and intensifying his symbolism as a representative of a region and a sector of society that demands respect for democratic freedoms and human rights. humans.
Today Camacho celebrates two years of “preventively” and unjustly kidnapped in the “maximum security prison” of Chonchocoro (once reserved for drug traffickers, murderers and in general for the most dangerous criminals), one of the most dangerous and inhospitable in the country, located in the cold and high altitude of El Alto, a species from Bolivian Siberia, which remember the type of gulags and punishment dungeons where even today the Russian regime of Vladimir Putin sends its main opponents, and where political prisoner Alexei Navalny recently died.
As legal director of the Human Rights Foundation (HRF), a human rights organization based in New York that legally represents Camacho before the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions, along with 10 other political prisoners globally (including in Iran, Russia, Cuba and Vietnam), I personally visited the governor of Santa Cruz in Chonchocoro in May 2024 and I was able to verify first-hand the situation of isolation and the cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment that he has suffered in prison.and which include limited access to clean water and medical services, the inclusion of a spy camera to observe his wife’s conjugal visits, and the very restricted access to visits, which was only made more flexible in May of this year, after the extensive human rights report from the United States Department of State, where their case was mentioned.
Until then, despite having preventive detention, the government illegally prevented the visit of anyone other than his wife or his lawyer in Bolivia. Two months later, on the occasion of a court hearing in July 2024 in Santa Cruz (in one of the 9 arbitrary judicial processes he faces), I traveled to La Paz, together with his lawyer, Dr. Martin Camachoto visit the governor again in Chonchocoro, but the police arbitrarily denied me entry to the prison alleging “superior orders,” without saying who had given those orders. The lawyer, on behalf of Camacho, filed a formal complaint about this arbitrary denial of the Santa Cruz governor’s right to defense, which remains unanswered.
Camacho’s political imprisonment, and the mistreatment he suffers in Chonchocoro, underlines the arbitrary persecution faced by the democratic opposition in Bolivia, since it is not an isolated case. In March 2025, former president Jeanine Áñez will serve four years unjustly imprisoned in the also cold and inhospitable women’s prison of La Paz for having assumed the presidency after the resignation of Evo Moraleswhile the civic and indigenous leader Marco PumariCamacho’s companion in the massive protests of 2019, has just served three years in the Cantumarca prison, also in the Potosí highlands.
Both Camacho, Áñez and Pumari are victims of a corrupt and subservient judicial system to the executive branch which is used to persecute opponents and seeks to rewrite history, calling the peaceful and massive protests after the scandalous electoral fraud of 2019 perpetrated by the then authoritarian president Evo Morales a “coup d’état”, and certified as such by the Observation Mission Electoral of the Organization of American States (OAS).
In addition to these three, the majority of opponents in Bolivia face multiple arbitrary judicial processes, which operate like swords of Damocles on their freedom. This permanent danger, and the presidential elections that must be held in 2025, have led, in recent days, to important opposition figures such as former presidents Carlos Mesa (winner of the presidential elections in which the MAS committed fraud) and Tuto Quirogaas well as the former presidential candidate Samuel Doria Medina (close to former President Áñez), all possible contenders for the 2025 elections, have visited Camacho in prison, and have signed a hopeful unity agreement, which, although it has been initiated by these four actors, is open to the rest of the democratic opposition.
If this unit is consolidated, The democratic opposition in Bolivia should have a real chance of winning the August 2025 electionsdespite the multiple electoral traps that the MAS regime will undoubtedly throw at them from here to there. This is because Bolivia is clearly suffering from a financial crisis caused by the incompetence of the Arce regime, and because the MAS is currently divided, among other things, by Morales’ excessive ambition to return to power, and the consequent discomfort of Arce and a good part of the MAS, which has led them to recognize, and no longer try to judicially stop, the old and credible allegations of statutory rape and pedophilia against Morales.
The problem of the almost 300 political prisoners and persecuted people in Bolivia could be the catalyst that drives the much-needed unity in the face of a government that threatens to consolidate an authoritarian model. The situation of Camacho, Áñez and Pumari continues to put on the table the need for a plural democratic system and an independent judiciary. Their cases underscore the urgency of a coordinated response by democratic forces in Bolivia to the authoritarianism of the MAS.
For this democratic unity ahead of the 2025 presidential elections to be effective, leadership, vision and capacity for dialogue are required of all the actors of the democratic opposition in Bolivia. Camacho, despite his imprisonment and making good use of the popularity he maintains as governor of the department of Santa Cruz, has played a crucial role in calling for concertation and understanding between the various opposition forces.
Like any message of opposition to authoritarianism, the message of political prisoners is a message of hope for the construction of a more inclusive future that respects differences. In Bolivia, as in all countries that have suffered from authoritarianism, this more democratic future must necessarily involve the decriminalization of dissent and the release of political prisoners.
* Javier El-Hage is the legal director of the Human Rights Foundation, a New York-based human rights organization that focuses on authoritarian countries.
