By Felipe Yapur on June 7, 2020
Like every dictatorship, the one that governs Bolivia, with Jeanine Áñez at its head, launched a communicational siege on that country’s society from the first minute of the coup against Evo Morales. However, this tight control did not prevent the facts of this illegal government from coming to light through social networks. Consider the case of the suspicious and repeated flights of the Bolivian presidential plane to Brazil that, at first, the unconstitutional government sought to deny. However, data from the U.S. flight monitoring company FlightAware, which was accessed by Página 12, shows that the aircraft was in Brasilia in the early hours of the first day of the coup, on November 11, 2019. Jair Bolsonaro’s government is one of the few allies Áñez has, and the Brazilian president, together with then-President Mauricio Macri of Argentina, was one of those who denied the existence of an institutional breakdown in Bolivia.
The Bolivian electoral process in 2019, where Morales sought to be re-elected, was subject to attacks not only internally but also externally in order to prevent the Bolivian leader from continuing to lead the country. This was the scenario that played out with a series of police uprisings and later pressure from the Armed Forces and even betrayal by some political-union organizations. Evo Morales announced his resignation from the presidency on the morning of Nov. 10, 2019 and left, on the presidential plane, for the Chapare where he would stay until he managed to go into exile in Argentina. From that moment on, the Bolivian Air Force 001 or FAB001 – as the presidential plane is called – began a series of flights that could well trace the links between the Bolivian coup leaders and the government of Bolsonaro.
In fact, in the early hours of November 11, when Áñez had not yet taken office, FAB001 was taking off from the airport of Campina Grande, Sao Paulo, to the international airport of Brasilia. According to FlightAware’s records, it stayed for four days and on November 15 left for Sao Paulo to return to Brasilia two days later. On November 22, it went to Rio de Janeiro and returned to the Brazilian capital the next day. On the 23rd it flew to Manaus airport in the Amazon where it stayed until November 26th. On the 27th the flight finally returned to La Paz. During all this time, Áñez was in the Bolivian capital.
The data provided by FlightAware is reliable. The company is based in Houston, Texas, and is a well-known global aviation software company that provides flight tracking for both private and commercial aircraft around the world. Their archives include the FAB001 trips that continued after the coup. And what is striking is that the flights of the presidential plane abroad from November 11 to May 8 were exclusively to Brazil. Twenty-five flights are recorded, not counting the days the plane was stationed in Brazilian airports and not detailing the flights between different cities in that country. As for transfers in Bolivian territory, it mostly flew to Santa Cruz, the district where the coup against Morales was born and organized. The presidential plane practically never visited the rest of the departments of Bolivia during this time.
Flight sheet data recorded by FlightAware
In fact, what allowed the existence of these suspicious flights to become known was that through social networks it was reported that on May 7 the Bolivian presidential plane had returned from Brazil after being there for several days. At that time there was no explanation for the back and forth of the aircraft to that country. The Áñez government claimed this information was false. However, in reading the FlightAware form, one can see that FAB001 had flown to Brasilia on April 30 and then moved to Sao Paulo and after a few hours returned to the Brazilian capital. The Bolivian plane was in Brasilia until May 8 when it returned to La Paz.
Although the legal status of the presidency of Áñez can be discussed, the truth is that if she had travelled on those flights to Brazil, she should have notified the Bolivian parliament so that she could be replaced by the person who holds the presidency of the Assembly. In this case, it would have been up to the head of the Senate, Eva Copa, who belongs to MAS, Morales’ party.
At the end of 2019, a scandal arose due to the existence of surcharges in the purchase of non-lethal weapons by the Ministry of Defense between November and December 2019. The specialized portal Defensa.com gave details of the complaints involving a Brazilian company. All this happened at the same time of the highest intensity of FAB001 flights between Bolivia and Brazil.
Among Evo Morales’ supporters and trusted people there is virtually no doubt as to at least the presence and involvement of Brazilian officials in last November’s coup. For example, they usually cite information published, and never denied by Áñez, by the journalist María Galindo who published on the Bolivian website paginasiete.bo The journalist was a staunch opponent of Morales but in her last column in that medium she described the presence and participation of the Brazilian ambassador in La Paz, Octávio Henrique Dias García Côrtes, in a meeting held at the Catholic University. Galindo called the diplomat “a representative of U.S. interests and of Bolsonaro. The note says that “Tuto Quiroga, as representative of the CIA; Fernando Camacho, as head of fascism and owner of the process of overthrowing Evo Morales” also participated. According to Galindo, in that meeting these men decided who should take over the presidency. Everything indicates that they chose Áñez, whom they defined as “a peripheral senator from the right,” whom they went to find and who ended up entering the national seat of government, accompanied by Camacho carrying a bible.
In principle, Áñez’s task was to quickly call for elections and it had been decided as May 3. However, the covid-19 pandemic postponed everything but did not stop the presidential plane from flying to Brazil. Interestingly, all this was discovered because complaints were made about the use of other official aircraft by Áñez’s daughter, who even used one of those planes to celebrate a birthday in the middle of a quarantine.
Source: Pagina 12, translation Resumen Latinoamericano