EFE / La Paz
Relatives of the victims of the so-called Senkata and Sacaba massacres registered during the 2019 crisis protested this Tuesday to denounce that they feel “used” and to demand an audience with the president, Luis Arce, so that he does justice for their dead.
Some 50 people from Sacaba, in Cochabamba, and Senkata, in El Alto, arrived in La Paz on Monday afternoon and spent the night in front of the Casa Grande del Pueblo, headquarters of the Executive, carrying posters and photographs of their relatives. dead.
According to the Ombudsman’s Office, between October 21 and November 24, 2019, more than 30 people died in various police and military operations, amid the tension and constant confrontations for and against Evo Morales, who in that year he resigned from the Presidency together with those who were still in the line of succession, which generated a power vacuum.
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Subsequently, Jeanine Añez assumed the interim Presidency, as second vice president of the Senate, and it is precisely because of this fact and the operations of the forces in 2019 that the former transitory president together with two of her former ministers and several former military and police chiefs are in preventive detention. for the cases called “coup d’état I and II”.
The protesters, who are expected to join more people in the coming hours, have already warned that they will not leave until the president receives them in a hearing that they have requested since Arce took office in November 2020.
The victims’ association alleges that the president has breached his commitment to hold regular meetings to follow up on their cases and that, furthermore, no minister or official has given them any response to their requests for justice.
They also denounce that they have felt used by the ruling party and by organizations related to the ruling Movement for Socialism (MAS), who name them in every act they carry out but that the solidarity and commitment they say they have with them has never materialized.
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“We feel used, not only by the government, but by all the social organizations that do not give us importance,” Óscar Saavedra, one of the victims of the 2019 conflicts, told local media.
The protesters also recalled that a report from the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) last March urged the Bolivian Justice to advance in all the investigations of the events of 2019 in which there were deaths of civilians and human rights violations.
In the “Report on the acts of violence and violation of human rights that occurred between September 1 and December 31, 2019”, the GIEI detailed the events that Bolivia faced before Morales’ resignation from the Presidency and the subsequent Arrival of Añez to power on an interim basis.
The document was prepared by a group of experts sent to Bolivia by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), which for eight months collected testimonies and documents clarifying that “it did not enter into elucidating whether there was electoral fraud or a coup d’état” in the country. .
