The questions raised by the extraordinary death of Michael Dwyer, killed by police in a Bolivian hotel last April, have distorted the picture of the generous, good-humoured and apolitical son they remember, his parents tell CARL O'BRIEN
IT WAS A Friday afternoon at the Dwyer family home in north Co Tipperary when the phone rang. “Do you have a son, Michael Dwyer?” asked the journalist on the end of the line. Martin Dwyer, an electrician and father of four, said he did. “And is he in South America at the moment?” He is, Dwyer answered. Then the phone hung up.
A few minutes later, it rang again. It was another journalist, saying it appeared that Michael Dwyer had been killed in a gun battle.
There were photographs of the dead body. The paper could e-mail them over, to confirm it was Martin Dwyer’s son. Soon, people were calling to the house, journalists were at the door, a TV crew wanted to speak to the family.
“We didn’t know what was happening,” Martin Dwyer recalls. “We had no confirmation of anything. This whole thing was blowing up in public and we had no idea of what was going on.”
Six thousand miles away in Bolivia, in room 457 of the Hotel Las Americas, Santa Cruz, Michael Dwyer (24) lay dead.
He had been shot once in the heart by an elite unit of the Bolivian police. Two of his colleagues in adjoining rooms were also killed: Árpád Magyarosi, aged 39, a Romanian of Hungarian descent, and Eduardo Rózsa Flores, 49, a Bolivian with Hungarian and Croatian passports and a shadowy past as a leader of foreigners fighting for Croatian freedom.
As the bodies were displayed on national television, authorities claimed to have foiled a plot by “mercenary terrorists” to kill the country’s president, Evo Morales. Locally, though, many believed that the men were summarily executed, victims of an escalation in a regional struggle between Santa Cruz (a bastion of opposition to Morales) and poorer highland areas where support for Morales is strongest.
The saga has raised a host of unanswered questions. What were the three men doing in Santa Cruz? Is there any evidence that they were seeking to assassinate the president? Who was financing their stay? Why did police say there was a 30-minute shoot-out when at least one of them was killed by a single wound to the chest? But most of all, how did a young north Tipperary man, recently graduated from college, lose his life in such bizarre and brutal circumstances? Did Dwyer knowingly get involved in something murky, dangerous and, ultimately, life-threatening? Or was he just foolish, an innocent abroad, caught in a web of political intrigue of which he understood nothing?
It’s a sunny Wednesday afternoon in the Dwyer family home outside Ballinderry, a small village in north Tipperary. Michael’s parents, Martin and Caroline, are seated in the front room of their neatly maintained bungalow. Pictures of Michael are everywhere – on the mantelpiece, on the wall, on the screen-saver of the computer.
“The house is so quiet without him,” says his mother, Caroline. “He was larger than life in every respect. Everything would be 100 decibels. He’d either be chasing his younger brother Emmet around the house, or putting his arms around you if you were cooking.”
“Or he’d be listening to his music,” says his father. “And the noise of that car of his!”
The eldest of four children, he was particularly close to his two sisters, Aisling (23) and Ciara (22), while he doted on his brother Emmet (14). “He was a real father figure to him,” says his mother. “He’d bring him over to Galway for weekends . . . he was just very generous with his time, and was always there for his family and friends.”
His bedroom is just as he left it before departing for Bolivia. There are football stickers on his bedside cabinet, Simpsons beer mats and glasses on a shelf, a guitar and a hurley standing in a corner. “It’s a place where I can go to sit and think of him,” says his mother. “So many people have been coming to the house since he died, lots of friends, former girlfriends. We all have so many happy memories of him . . . He was one of those people who could make everyone in a room laugh.”
The images stand in stark contrast to the picture painted in much of the media in the weeks after his death. Tabloids described him as a “gun-obsessed hard man”, and there were claims that he was part of a racist right-wing separatist group. There were photographs of him in fatigues, wielding what looked like a gun, printed in newspapers and flashed across TV screens. There were claims that he had a tattoo on his shoulder with a fascist SS symbol, and reports of Nazi salutes at his funeral.
“Losing your son is difficult, but all that stuff has been just as bad,” says his father. “It’s been very upsetting for the whole family . . . His reputation has been destroyed. That image just isn’t true.” Most claims have a simple explanation, he says. The army-fatigues picture, for example, was from an “airsoft” outing – involving a form of air rifle – he went on with his friends at Halloween. The supposed “SS” tattoo is a Celtic tribal symbol he chose with his girlfriend. And the Nazi salutes? One of the newspapers which published this claim has since retracted it. Meanwhile, the claims about Dwyer being part of a racist right-wing group are ludicrous, according to the family. They say he’s from a mixed-race extended family and never showed any interest in politics.
WHILE MANY OF the accusations haven’t stuck, some nettlesome questions remain. Photographs of Dwyer and his associates, released by Bolivian police, show them posing with what appear to be real guns and a rifle. One shows him posing with what seem to be two semi-automatic pistols tucked into his trousers, and two in his hands. His parents had never seen them before. “We don’t know where they were taken, what context it was in, or were they posing like young fellas do?” says his mother. “Do ‘mercenaries’ really pose for those kinds of pictures?”
There is also the troubling question of what exactly Michael Dwyer was doing in Bolivia. And what was he doing consorting with Flores, who claimed in a video released posthumously that he was in Bolivia to organise self-defence groups to take on “pro-government elements”?
“I think it was just a job to him,” says Michael’s father. “If he knew there was something illegal or chancy about it, he wouldn’t have done it. I’m 100 per cent about that.”
Before leaving for South America, the 24-year-old had just graduated with an honours degree in construction management studies at Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology. He had worked in a few pubs throughout college and, later, as a doorman. As part of his work experience, he was involved in a construction management job in Dublin. While waiting for college results he got a six-month job as a team leader with Integrated Risk Management Services (I-RMS) at the Shell gas pipeline site in Co Mayo.
When the contract ended in October, he returned home, telling his parents he was going to Bolivia in November for two months to take part in a bodyguard course with others he had met through his security work. But the course, it seems, never materialised. Dwyer stayed on in Bolivia, he told friends, because the economic climate at home was bad, and he had the prospect of security work.
His actions in the months leading up to his death in April hardly hinted at someone who thought he was involved in surreptitious activities. He had a girlfriend, was out on the town regularly, and posted pictures on his Facebook page. Neither do Dwyer’s e-mails home point to anything sinister. In one, from early February, he told his mother he had got a temporary work visa and had recently started working in a security job: “not bad at all the guy really just has me for show mostly. rich people !!!!!!! his favourite line when someone asks who i am is, im his personel bodygaurd.”
His girlfriend, Rafaela Moreira, 25, a Brazilian medical student, also said there was no sign of anything untoward. She had met Michael just before Christmas 2008 and they became very close over the following months.
“She’s a lovely, lovely girl,” says Dwyer’s mother, Caroline. “We’ve had a lot of conversations with her since . . . She really loved him . . . She said all her friends were mad about him. She was so shocked at what happened.”
In another e-mail home, on March 22nd, Dwyer wished his mum a “happy mother’s day”, adding “all good here . . .”. He was planning to return home in late April, but never did. Three weeks later he was shot dead.
If questions continue to swirl around what Dwyer was doing in Bolivia, there are even more hovering over the circumstances of his death. On April 16th, at around 4am, police burst into the hotel where Dwyer and others were staying. Authorities claimed they were greeted with gunfire and that a 30-minute shoot-out occurred. Yet the hotel owner says there was no such shoot-out, and photographs show the men nude or in their underwear.
Several days after the raid, security forces claimed the men were heavily armed. Yet there is no evidence in any of the photographs of weapons in the rooms.
As for Flores, it seems he was involved in a kind of bizarre misadventure, recruiting an unlikely group to defend, as he saw it, the province of Santa Cruz from attack. Whether Dwyer had any real understanding or role in these apparent plans, we will never know.
AT THE DWYER family home, there is relief that some of the contradictions surrounding his death are now known to the public. The State pathologist, Marie Cassidy, told the coroner’s court this week that Dwyer was killed by a single shot to the heart. Most likely, it was shot from above, indicating that Dwyer was in bed. This contradicts the findings of Bolivian authorities who claimed Dwyer was shot six times. Bolivian authorities also said that Dwyer had two guns in his room and that gunshot residue was found on him. However, Dr Cassidy said she had no evidence of this.
“The man on the street can see he was executed,” says Caroline Dwyer. “You don’t have to be a ballistics or forensics expert to see that.”
“These details will change people’s minds, especially those who had doubts,” adds Martin Dwyer. “We’ve waited six months to get official confirmation of these details, and now we have them.”
It’s a closure of sorts. But the Dwyers feel the full truth will never be established unless there is an international investigation into the the deaths. “We’re determined to get the truth. We’ve nothing to hide . . . We’re stuck and can’t move on until we get those answers,” says Caroline Dwyer.
Six months since Michael Dwyer’s life ended in room 457, life still feels on hold for the Dwyers. His mother hasn’t returned to her job at Elan. In contrast, his father has, by his own admission, absorbed himself in work to take his mind off everything. No one in the family has been able to sleep properly.
“When a family member dies, you can normally begin to grieve and come to terms with it. But we haven’t had a chance to really grieve yet. It’s all been so public . . . Whether that will really ever happen, I don’t know.”