Bolivia Probe, Brazil Coup Allegations: Did Washington Pressure the Prosecutor?
The United States revoked the visa of Bolivia’s attorney general, Roger Mariaca, on September 28, accusing him of taking bribes to protect drug traffickers. Two days later, Bolivian authorities arrested him. The sequence is striking: before his arrest, Mariaca had said he would continue investigating Argentine political consultant Fernando Cerimedo, an adviser to President Rodrigo Paz and a figure with ties to Donald Trump’s political circle. The Associated Press reported both the visa action and Mariaca’s vow to continue the Cerimedo investigation.
Bolivia’s government says the arrest followed evidence that Mariaca protected traffickers; Mariaca’s office called it an abduction and he described Washington’s move as interference. Reuters reported the allegations and the arrest. Those claims need independent scrutiny. The U.S. accusation is not proof of guilt, and the Bolivian government’s explanation does not settle whether the timing also served a political purpose.
A prosecutor, a political operator and a shooting
Cerimedo entered Bolivia’s political orbit through the campaign and administration of Paz, after working with right-wing politicians across Latin America. In August, lawyer and political analyst Nadia Beller was shot outside a hotel in Santa Cruz. She accused Cerimedo, her former partner, of arranging the attack to silence her over information she said she possessed about political and business dealings. Cerimedo denies the allegations; his lawyers have called the case a political setup. The Washington Post reviewed court files and interviewed Beller about her accusations.
Those are serious, unresolved claims—not a verdict. Bolivian prosecutors have also pursued inquiries into Cerimedo’s finances and alleged misuse of public influence. The case matters politically because Cerimedo was not an ordinary campaign contractor: he built a regional network around digital strategy, hard-line messaging and candidates aligned with the new Latin American right.
The coup allegation is in Brazil
There is another part of Cerimedo’s record that should not be blurred with Beller’s case. In 2024, Brazil’s Federal Police named him among people accused of participating in an alleged plot to keep Jair Bolsonaro in power after his election loss. That accusation concerns Brazil; it is not proof of a coup plot in Bolivia, and it is not a conviction. The Guardian’s report on the police investigation identifies Cerimedo among those accused.
The cross-border pattern is still relevant. Cerimedo’s campaign work, his proximity to Trump-aligned political circles and the growing legal cases around him form a network worth investigating. The unresolved question is whether Washington’s treatment of the Bolivian prosecutor affected that scrutiny—or whether the visa action was unrelated to Cerimedo, as U.S. officials’ stated corruption rationale implies.
Bolivia’s coup history gives the question weight
This is not Bolivia’s first political crisis in which U.S. policy and contested claims about democracy intersected. In November 2019, Evo Morales resigned after weeks of protests over a disputed election and after the military command urged him to step down. The OAS audit alleged serious irregularities. Washington publicly praised the audit and said Bolivia’s transitional government should move quickly to new elections. The State Department’s statement shows what Washington endorsed. Critics later disputed the audit’s statistical reasoning and its treatment of the vote-count evidence. The Center for Economic and Policy Research lays out that counter-analysis.
That record does not prove that Washington directed Morales’s removal. It does show that the United States publicly backed a contested account of the election as Bolivia’s elected president was pushed out and a new government took power. For Bolivians who remember 2019 as a coup, today’s U.S. visa action lands in a history where diplomatic recognition and official narratives have helped shape political outcomes.
What the timeline can—and cannot—show
The strongest claim supported by the public record is that Washington sanctioned a prosecutor who said he was pursuing a politically sensitive case involving a Trump-linked consultant; Bolivia then arrested that prosecutor on separate allegations. That chronology warrants investigation. It does not yet show that the U.S. ordered Mariaca’s arrest, that the visa action was retaliation for his Cerimedo inquiry, or that Cerimedo directed a coup in Bolivia.
The questions now are concrete: What evidence did Washington use to revoke Mariaca’s visa? Did U.S. officials discuss the Cerimedo investigation with Bolivia’s government? What do the full court records, phone evidence and financial documents show in the Beller case? And will investigators publish the evidence behind the accusations against Mariaca?
Until those records are available, both governments’ claims deserve scrutiny. The story is not settled by a U.S. press statement or a Bolivian arrest announcement. It is the collision of an alleged attack on Nadia Beller, a political consultant accused in a separate Brazilian coup plot, and a sudden use of U.S. leverage against the Bolivian prosecutor investigating him.
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