Bolivia: Jeanine Añez sentenced to 10 years in prison for participating in a coup

The acting president Jeanine Añez when she announced - September 17, 2020- that she withdrew her candidacy for the Bolivian presidential election.

PRESIDENCY / AFP

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Ms. Añez, 54, was sentenced Friday, June 10, guilty of "dereliction of duty" and "decisions contrary to the Constitution and the laws" by the first instance court in La Paz.

She succeeded Evo Morales in November 2019 after the latter's resignation against the backdrop of demonstrations linked to alleged electoral fraud.

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Trained lawyer, former television presenter, Jeanine Añez, senator since 2010 and activist of the small right-wing

party , was accused of having acceded to the presidency in an unconstitutional way in November 2019. She had taken

interim president, bible in hand and surrounded by the presidential scarf, thanks to a vacancy of power caused by the

and his constitutional successors.

The Constitutional Court then validated his election.

 At the head of the interim government from November 2019 to November 2020, Jeanine Añez had promised as soon as she took office to quickly call general elections, but the ballot had to be postponed several times, in particular due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Against her promise, she finally announced her candidacy for the 2020 presidential election, arousing criticism from her opponents on the left, but also from her own allies on the right.

She had ended up giving up in the face of unfavorable polls which placed her in fourth position very far behind the candidate on the left and Dauphin of M. Morales, Luis Arce.

Faced with

of the latter in October 2020, she immediately recognized the defeat of her camp. 

In March 2021, the Bolivian prosecutor's office

as part of an investigation into the events of November 2019. Several of his government ministers and senior military officials at the time were also targeted by this arrest warrant.

► À lire aussi

: en Bolivie, début des audiences publiques du procès de l’ex-présidente Jeanine Añez

The former heads of the armed forces, William Kalimán, and of the police, Yuri Calderón, both on the run, received the same ten-year prison sentence on Saturday.

Jeanine Añez had announced that she would appeal a possible conviction.

She must still be tried during a second trial for "sedition, armed uprising and genocide" when she was acting president.

The accusation of genocide follows complaints of families of victims of the repression led by the police at the end of 2019 in fiefs of Mr. Morales, who killed 22 people according to a group of independent experts, reports the 'France Media Agency.

(and with agencies)

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