Fomer Bolivian President Faces Treason Charges (UPDATED)

According to Reuters, the Attorney General of Bolivia has charged Eduardo Rodriguez, Bolivia’s former president, with treason for sending the country’s only surface-to-air missiles to the U.S. to be destroyed. The legal complaint against Rodriguez was filed by Evo Morales, the current Bolivian president, who first made an issue of the secret operation in December as a presidential candidate.

The facts of the secret operation to destroy the missiles remain murky. Rodriguez admits that he ordered the missiles be destroyed, but denies that he authorized transferring them to the U.S. General Marcelo Antezana, the commander of the Bolivian army, told the national press that the U.S. initiated the operation because it feared Morales — a socialist with close ties to Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro — would be elected president, but later retracted that statement. For its part, the U.S. describes the transfer as a straightforward operation initiated by the Bolivian government to rid itself of obsolete missiles. (To its credit, since 2003 the U.S. has helped destroy more than 13,000 shoulder-fired SAM missiles — ideal for terrorists because they are small enough to fit inside a golf bag when disassembled — in countries including Nicaragua, Bosnia, Liberia and Cambodia.)

The Miami Herald has the most complete account of the controversy:

Bolivia purchased the HN-5 missiles from China in 1997 as its only air defense weapon.

The country, South America’s poorest, has no fighter airplanes or other anti-aircraft missiles.

The Chinese missiles received little public attention until October when then-candidate Morales denounced the secret destruction and called for an investigation into how Rodríguez’s government had handled the matter.

Over the next two months, Bolivian journalists reported that U.S. personnel had deactivated the missiles in Bolivia in September, then flown them to the United States on Oct. 2 to be destroyed there.

State Department officials have said the missiles were later returned in pieces to Bolivia to confirm that they had been destroyed. They have declined to provide additional details, including whether the United States first approached Bolivia or paid money to grease the decommissioning of the missiles — a rumor rampant in Bolivia.

Juan Ignacio Siles, who was foreign minister under Rodríguez’s predecessor, President Carlos Mesa, has said that Washington had first approached Bolivia about destroying the missiles in 2004 while Mesa held office. Siles said Mesa rejected the request because it would amount to unilateral disarmament.

Then-President Rodríguez was pulled into the maelstrom in November after he first said that his government ”had not delivered the missiles” to the United States and later said he had not been advised of their destruction.

On Nov. 30, Rodríguez asked Defense Minister Gonzalo Méndez and the commander in chief of the armed forces, Navy Adm. Marco Antonio Justiniano, to investigate what had happened and why.

But on Jan. 15, army commander Gen. Marcelo Antezana muddied the waters further when he wrote a letter to Bolivian newspapers demanding that the government make public the missile destruction agreement with Washington. Antezana claimed the agreement would show he took orders from others on the missiles’ destruction, but he did not identify them.

The top secret report by Méndez and Justiniano, dated Jan. 17, said the investigation had not been able to answer many basic questions, including whether Bolivia purchased the missiles or received them as a donation and whether they had been properly stored.

But the report defended the destruction, saying the missiles ”had effectively wound up in a bad state” and represented a safety hazard, especially after they had failed in two test firings.

Rodríguez fired Méndez and Antezana on the day the report was delivered to him and five days before Morales was sworn in as president. Rodríguez announced that Antezana had not followed ”applicable military norms” with his letter to the newspapers.

The charges against Rodriguez, which carry a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison, must be approved by the Bolivian Supreme Court and the Bolivian Congress for the case to proceed to trial.