Bolivia’s Coup: What Was Washington’s Role?
Washington used its visa power against Bolivia’s attorney general, Roger Mariaca, as he said his office would continue investigating Fernando Cerimedo, a political strategist tied to Donald Trump’s Latin American network. Bolivia arrested Mariaca within days. That sequence puts U.S. pressure inside a politically explosive case—and brings Washington’s role in Bolivia’s 2019 crisis back into view. The Associated Press reported the visa action and Mariaca’s pledge to continue the Cerimedo inquiry.
The Trump administration said it revoked Mariaca’s visa over alleged corruption and protection of drug traffickers. Bolivia’s government later announced his arrest after releasing recordings it says implicate him in a $500,000 bribe from a trafficker. Mariaca called the U.S. move political interference; his office called the arrest an abduction. Reuters reported the arrest, the government’s allegations and the evidence it cited.
These competing allegations do not cancel out the central fact: Washington publicly targeted the prosecutor while his office was pursuing a politically sensitive case involving Cerimedo. The visa sanction was an exercise of U.S. power in the middle of Bolivia’s political struggle, whatever justification Washington gave for it.
Cerimedo’s cases reach across the region
Cerimedo is no peripheral figure. He has advised right-wing campaigns and political leaders across Latin America, including Bolivia’s Rodrigo Paz. In August, Bolivian lawyer and political commentator Nadia Beller was shot outside a hotel in Santa Cruz. She accused Cerimedo, her former partner, of arranging the attack. Bolivian prosecutors charged him in the case; Cerimedo denies responsibility and says he is the target of a political setup. The Washington Post reviewed court records and reported on Beller’s allegations and the investigation.
Brazilian Federal Police also named Cerimedo among those accused in a 2024 plot to keep Jair Bolsonaro in power after his election defeat. That is a Brazilian case, but it establishes why Cerimedo’s political network draws scrutiny beyond one country. The Guardian reported on the police allegations.
Washington’s 2019 record matters
Bolivia’s current crisis lands in the shadow of 2019, when Evo Morales resigned after weeks of protests and the military command urged him to step down. The OAS alleged serious election irregularities; Washington praised its audit and backed a rapid transition to new elections. The State Department’s statement shows the position Washington took. Critics challenged the audit’s statistical analysis and its handling of the vote count. CEPR published a detailed critique.
For Bolivians who regard Morales’s removal as a coup, Washington’s endorsement of the post-Morales transition is not distant history. It is part of how U.S. policy has shaped the country’s political landscape—and why another U.S. sanction targeting a senior Bolivian official carries weight.
The allegation is about pressure—and timing
The record supports a direct conclusion: the United States intervened with a visa sanction against Bolivia’s attorney general while his office was pursuing a politically sensitive investigation involving a Trump-connected consultant. Bolivia arrested Mariaca within days. Washington says its action was about corruption; Mariaca called it interference. The timing makes the U.S. role central to the story.
What remains to be established is whether Washington intended to disrupt the Cerimedo investigation or coordinated with Bolivian authorities. That question calls for evidence—communications between officials, the full case files, and the basis for the visa decision. It does not erase the documented sequence or the history that gives it political meaning.
The broader picture is an alleged attack on Nadia Beller, a consultant accused in a separate Brazilian coup plot, an active Bolivian investigation, a U.S. sanction against the prosecutor, and the prosecutor’s subsequent arrest. Those events form a cross-border political crisis. The central question is not whether Washington acted, but what it sought to accomplish—and whose interests its intervention served.
Comments