“There was electoral fraud, not a coup d’état”

The former transitional president left through the main door of the Miraflores Women’s Guidance Center in La Paz, with a Bolivian flag in her hand and accompanied by her children Carolina and José Armando Ribera.

In her first statements once released, Áñez confirmed that In 2019 “in this country there was never a coup d’état, what there was was electoral fraud” which led Bolivians to “demand” that the vote in the general elections of that year “be respected.”

“I will never regret having served my country when my country needed it. That is the commitment that every Bolivian who loves his country has to make and I assumed it even knowing that at some point it was going to have a cost,” said the former governor.

He also assured that his time in prison was “very hard, very painful”, but that he learned to have “the strength of resilience” in the face of a confinement that he considered “unfair.”

The TSJ reported the day before on the annulment of Áñez’s sentence, his “absolution” and the order of his “immediate freedom” for the call ‘coup d’état II’ case, for which she was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2022, accused of illegally placing herself in the line of succession in 2019.

The aforementioned sentence was also ratified in 2023 by the TSJ, although at that time other magistrates were in charge, while those who reviewed the sentence were elected in the judicial elections of 2024.

In reviewing the sentence, at the request of the former president’s defense, the magistrates saw that “There were violations of the current legal system” that “have affected due process” and also “their rights.”

The Supreme Court resolution states that “the succession was not an act of usurpation, but an act of constitutional necessity” and considers that the court that convicted Áñez “failed to assess that the resignations” of those who were before the former president in the line of succession in 2019 “were public, express and with immediate effects”.

“Áñez Chávez did not act with malice, he did not harm a protected legal asset and his actions were protected by a state of constitutional necessity aimed at preserving the institutional continuity of the Bolivian State,” the resolution indicates.

Áñez assumed interim command of the country on November 12, 2019two days after the resignation of the then president, Evo Morales and of all officials in the presidential line of successional.

Morales resigned and left the country, assuring be the victim of a “coup d’état”, amid citizen protests over allegations of electoral fraud in his favor in the 2019 general elections that were later annulled.

Áñez was arrested in March 2021 within the process known as ‘coup d’état I’, initiated by a former representative of the still government Movement towards Socialism (MAS), due to the 2019 crisis.

Last August, the TSJ ordered a review of the terms of preventive detentions in all processes against Áñez and two other regional leaders opposed to the MAS, which led to the release of these politicians.

The courts annulled the ordinary proceedings against Áñez, which were transferred to the Legislature to be addressed in a liability trial, and the review of his sentence was pending, which was reported on Wednesday.