La Paz – Bolivian President Evo Morales on the weekend retracted previous statements he had made blaming Washington for two hotel bomb attacks last month that killed two and wounded 11 in this capital, authorities said Sunday.
“We have no more doubt,” said the Socialist Morales after dining on Saturday with U.S. Ambassador David Greenlee at the presidential residents. The president’s remarks were taped and released on Sunday by his office.
Morales added that “with first-hand information” provided by the U.S. diplomatic delegation, whom he publicly thanked, “there is greater clarity” of the fact that there was no relation between the U.S. government and the deadly blasts.
Meanwhile, Greenlee thanked Morales for the dinner invitation and expressed his satisfaction with the result of the meeting saying that the misunderstanding had been cleared up.
“I don’t want to talk about smoothing out rough edges, but the information has allowed us to put in context what happened and the president has another appreciation of what happened” at this point, said the envoy.
On the night of March 21-22, two bombs exploded within six hours in separate La Paz hotels, causing a national uproar.
The next morning, police arrested U.S. citizen Lestat Claudius de Orleans y Montevideo, 25, and his Uruguayan girlfriend, Alda Ribeiro, 35, as the alleged perpetrators of the attacks. The pair could face 30 years in prison, if convicted.
Several hours after that, and before the police investigation was complete, Morales said publicly in the eastern city of Santa Cruz that Washington had sent terrorists to Bolivia, a stance that he repeated last Tuesday at a press conference for foreign journalists.
The leftist leader, without citing evidence, seemed convinced that the brains behind the attacks were “businessmen (and) oligarchs” who, “using foreign agents” to try to frighten people and create an atmosphere of anxiety, wanted to show him up as a head of state unable keep his own country under control.
Despite the serious accusations leveled by the Bolivian leader, Greenlee said after meeting with him that bilateral relations “are normal, (and are ones) of mutual respect.”
Greenlee said that the United States “respects the sovereignty and dignity of Bolivia and we’re sure that the president respects our dignity,” adding that Washington would continue supporting La Paz in the various areas in which the two nations are cooperating.
Police suggested after the suspects’ arrests that the bombings could have a religious motivation.
“The police will continue their investigations to establish probable links and do not rule out that the motives could be religious,” said police chief Gen. Isaac Pimentel, at a March 22 press conference where the suspects were trotted out.
“The two perpetrators have been fully identified,” Pimentel said, showing photographs in which the Uruguayan woman strikes a model pose naked on top of cases of explosives.
Pimentel said that the two suspects also attacked the Kasani post on the Bolivian-Peruvian border last week, and sent a package of explosives to a Uruguayan judge last year.
Considered to be conclusive evidence was a diary of the accused, written in English, in which police found the date March 25 marked by the terrorists for an attack against the Chilean Consulate in La Paz.
Lestat entered Bolivia last September and Ribeiro arrived in December, both from Argentina where they had been tried for attempting to blow open an ATM with explosives, the police chief said.
The official added that the American, who remained calm before the media, used at least two other identity documents with different names and in one of them appeared as a priest.
According to the official report, the accused employed 120 dynamite cartridges for the first of the two attacks and “more than 100” in the second.
The explosions were set off on the second floor of the hotels, one of which was downtown and the other in northern La Paz.
The first blast killed two people – a Bolivian man and woman – and wounded four others at the Linares Guest House. Several nearby homes were also damaged.
The second blast, in which four people were wounded, came at the Residencial Riosinho near the highway leading to the neighboring city of El Alto.
At the Riosinho, a hotel worker smelled something burning on the second floor, called police and effected an evacuation of the 19 guests, among them several foreigners.
Initially, the U.S. Embassy here had no immediate comment on the report of the arrest of one of its citizens, saying it was investigating.
A judicial official said that the American had said in his first statement to the police that he had tried to kill more than 100 people.
Before the press conference, Ribeiro shouted that she was innocent and that the only one guilty was her husband.
“You have to kill my husband, you have to kill him,” said the woman, although there appears to be no evidence that the pair were married. The woman also appeared calm when shown to reporters.
The woman’s words, plus the fact that the American’s knapsack held several meters of the same kind of fuse used to detonate the dynamite in the attacks, point to Lestat as the perpetrator, the authorities said.
The explosions caused surprise and indignation in Bolivia, a country little accustomed to violence of this kind.
