A KEY witness into events surrounding the killing of Irishman Michael Dwyer by Bolivian police has said his confession implicating Dwyer in terrorism was obtained under torture.
Ignacio Villa Vargas showed a Bolivian television station what he claimed were torture marks and said he had feared for his safety ever since his testimony in April 2009 in which he declared that a group of which Dwyer was a member was involved with Bolivia’s political opposition in a plot to overthrow President Evo Morales.
Dwyer and two other men were killed in a police raid on their hotel in the eastern city of Santa Cruz on April 16th, 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.
Mr Villa Vargas told the Red Uno channel that Rózsa Flores did indeed head a group with the goal of partitioning Bolivia. “A group was formed . . . to divide the country. This is not a lie,” he said. But he told Red Uno that authorities had tortured him with electric cables into confessing that the country’s political opposition was behind the plot.
Following his testimony Mr Villa Vargas had disappeared. Last month a video leaked to Bolivia’s media showed a public official giving $31,500 to Mr Villa Vargas and ordering him to flee to Argentina. He told Red Uno that once the cameras were switched off the money was taken off him. He said he did go to Argentina but returned after seven months as he had no means of sustaining himself.
Red Uno tracked down Mr Villa Vargas in Santa Cruz living clandestinely.
A spokesman for Bolivia’s government ignored Mr Villa Vargas’s claim that he was tortured in the office of a public prosecutor and instead has seized on his statement that a group with the intention of dividing the country had existed.
The Bolivian authorities have always claimed Dwyer was part of a group hired by leading opposition figures to assassinate President Morales and foment secessionist violence in Santa Cruz.
In a 28-page submission to the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, Dwyer’s family says eyewitness and video evidence, along with autopsy and ballistic reports, contradict the Bolivian government’s claim that their son was killed in an armed confrontation with police.
The family is calling for an independent international inquiry, and says the evidence they have presented to the UN shows “there was no shoot-out, just a cold-blooded execution”.
In December a diplomatic cable from the US embassy in La Paz quoted a local source as saying that Dwyer’s group had been hired by Bolivian intelligence to mount a phony terrorist campaign.
The cable said this campaign would then be used to justify the persecution of political opponents of the country’s left-wing government.