Argentine President Alberto Fernández said on Wednesday (29) that he rejected the request made by President Jair Bolsonaro to intercede with the Bolivian government to allow former Bolivian interim president Jeanine Áñez to take refuge in Brazil.
“He came to ask me to intercede with Bolivia so that Áñez could go to Brazil as an asylum seeker and I told him that unfortunately I couldn’t do any of that,” Fernández said in an interview with broadcaster C5N.
The Argentine president also declared that “Bolivia has set an example to the world by prosecuting a coup with ordinary courts and without changing the natural judges”.
Last Monday, Bolsonaro commented that he was working to offer asylum to Áñez, who was sentenced to prison for failing to comply with duties and resolutions contrary to the Constitution when he took power in 2019.
Bolsonaro revealed that he discussed this possibility with other South American leaders, among whom he cited Alberto Fernández, with whom he said he discussed the situation of Áñez at the last Summit of the Americas.
“We will do our best to make him come to Brazil,” declared Bolsonaro, who considered that Añez was unfairly arrested for “alleged anti-democratic acts” after “beating the sympathetic group” to former president Evo Morales.
Áñez interim assumed command of the country as second vice president of the Senate on November 12, 2019, two days after Evo Morales resigned from power, as did all officials in the presidential line of succession.
The resignation took place amid the political and social crisis that erupted after the October elections of that year and allegations of alleged fraud in favor of Morales, who denied this possibility.
Añez stayed in power for a year and a half and was succeeded by the current president, Luis Arce, who won the 2020 elections as a candidate for the Movement for Socialism (MAS), the same party as Morales.
The former interim president was arrested in March 2021 and, on the 10th, sentenced to ten years in prison by a court in La Paz, which issued the same sentence against the former commander of the Armed Forces, Williams Kaliman, and the former police commander Yuri Calderón, whose whereabouts are unknown.
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