Bolivia’s government has accused former president Evo Morales of staging an attempt on his own life, saying that shots fired at his car on Sunday came after he tried to run a police checkpoint.
“Mr Morales, nobody believes the theater you have staged,” the interior minister, Eduardo del Castillo, told a news conference.
He added that Morales, who claims the government tried to kill him, would “have to answer … for the crime of attempted murder” of a police officer.
Del Castillo claimed the car in which Morales was traveling failed to stop at a checkpoint set up by police to combat drug trafficking in central Chapare province, one of the country’s biggest producers of coca, the raw material for cocaine.
He said that the police motioned for the vehicle to slow down and stop but that the driver instead accelerated, and that “shots were fired from a vehicle”.
He said that an officer was run over but survived, before a police patrol gave chase to Morales’s car and fired on it.
Morales, who is engaged in a weeks-long standoff with his former ally turned rival President Luís Arce, said on Sunday his car was riddled with bullets by assailants with their faces covered while he was travelling to a radio station in the city of Cochabamba.
The competing claims mark a dangerous new chapter of tension within the ruling party that has been torn apart by the enmity between Morales and his once protege Arce, economy minister during Morales’ near 14-year rule which ended in 2019.
Morales, 66, resigned after a disputed election result that plunged the country into turmoil. Arce was elected the following year, but has increasingly looked to distance himself from his former boss.
In an interview with Reuters on Monday, Morales claimed Arce’s government was behind the alleged attack.
Morales denied his team had been carrying any weapons, called the attack an “ambush”, and said that the government’s version was a “montage of lies”.
“I heard three shots in a burst … there were at least seven, eight, nine shots,” he said, adding that since then they had found as many as 20 bullets.
Asked if the attack could have been carried out by individuals acting alone, Morales said: “No. That’s to say it was an instruction from the government.” He did not provide evidence of his claim.
On Sunday he said his driver was wounded but he himself was unharmed.
The radio station released a video that it said was of the pickup truck in which Morales was travelling. It shows three bullet holes on the windshield and the driver with blood on his head.
Agence France-Presse and Reuters contributed to this report
Source: theguardian.com
