La Paz, Oct 29 (EFE).- Bolivia’s former president Evo Morales (2006-2019) said Tuesday that his statements about the alleged armed attack he suffered, in which he initially said he had opened fire on his attackers, were distorted because as a member of the Indigenous Aymara people, he does not speak Spanish well.
“They misrepresented that I fired, we never said that. Now I have a problem, the Aymara (and) Quechua people don’t always speak perfect Spanish. That is our weakness,” said Bolivia’s first Indigenous president, whose mother tongue is Aymara, in statements to the radio station Kawsachun Coca, and also accused the Minister of Government, Eduardo del Castillo, of telling “lies” about the events of Sunday.
“He knows he is lying, that is why he took so many hours to lie. Now (he says) I am the one who was carrying the gun, the one who fired. Now the victim is blamed, the victim is the aggressor,” said the leader.
Morales denounced that on Sunday morning the vehicle he was traveling in was shot at least 14 times and that the driver was wounded in the head.
Hours later, in his Sunday radio program on Kawsachun Coca, the former president said that while he was in a pickup truck with a driver and other companions, two vehicles were tailing him.
“At that moment I heard three shots, we ducked (…) we raced quite a bit and the second car was following (…). (When) it reached us (there were) more shots, I shot at the tire of the car, the car could not continue (following us) and (…) we got away. They were still shooting and we were racing,” he said.
Del Castillo said Monday that Morales’ vehicle tried to avoid an anti-drug checkpoint, ran over an agent, and fired at police as it fled.
“Loose lips sink ships,” the minister said, and asked where the former president had gotten a firearm “to start shooting around as if he owned the place.”
“We don’t have any weapons, please, what weapon do we have, we don’t even have a stick,” the former president replied on Tuesday.
The incident occurred amid a 16-day road blockade by Morales’ ers demanding that the government of Luis Arce drop a human trafficking and rape case against Morales, which they say is a form of political persecution aimed at preventing him from running for a fourth presidential term in 2025.
The ruling Movement to Socialism (Movimiento al Socialismo, MAS) political party is currently split into two factions: the “Renovation Bloc,” which s the current president and seeks to renew the party’s leadership, and the “Radicals,” who seek the former president’s re-election even after Bolivia’s Constitutional Court ruled that Morales could not run again because “indefinite re-election is not a human right.” EFE
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