La Paz – The governor of Santa Cruz Luis Fernando Camacho, was released this Friday in La Paz after almost three years in preventive detention for an alleged coup d’etat.
The 46 -year -old lawyer and businessman, who must comply with house prison, led in 2019 the protests against the re -election of former president Evo Morales, who motivated his resignation after being indicated to commit fraud.
The opposition leader left the maximum security prison of Chonchocoro, in El Alto, near La Paz, flying a green and white flag of Santa Cruz.
This week justice, in four different failures, reversed the precautionary detention orders against in the same number of cases.
Then he hugged some police officers at the entrance of the prison, located 3,800 meters high.
“There is freedom. I fulfilled my word: neither sold, nor cowardly (…). Long live Santa Cruz and in a few hours we will continue to defend our people,” he said in a video broadcast on his social networks.
On Friday the Supreme Court ordered that it be reviewed if the maximum deadlines for their seclusion had been exceeded. Camacho was arrested, from December 2022 to today, without sentences.
He plans to fly this Friday to Santa Cruz, east of the country.
The politician said he will resume his duties as governor of that town, after being replaced by his ex -collaborator Mario Aguilera during his prison.
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In 2021 he was elected governor of Santa Cruz with 55%. The lawyer and right -wing politician returned to the headlines when he was arrested on December 28. The reaction filled the streets of the province, bastion of the opposition, with violent demonstrations in which 44 vehicles and 20 institutions were burned, including the local headquarters of the Prosecutor’s Office.
Camacho emerged from the policy from the Pro Santa Cruz Civic Committee, an entity that brings together agricultural entrepreneurs, cooperatives, among others. Its different leaders were a headache for Morales in their presidential stage.
In fact, Camacho comes from a family of businessmen and studied for lawyer at the private university of Santa Cruz (UPSA). He obtained a master’s degree in Financial Law and Tax Law at the University of Barcelona in Spain and his father, José Luís Camacho, was president of the same Civic Committee in 1981-1983.
In 2019 he was known as “Macho Camacho”, because he gave Evo Morales a period of 24 hours to resign with a letter he wrote and took to the Government Palace as president of the Santa Cruz Civic Committee.
“With the Bible, the Rosary and the letter of resignation in hand, we entrust ourselves to God for a new and restructured Bolivia in democracy,” he said at the time.
The massive protests forced Morales to receive an opposite diagnosis of the Organization of American States (OAS) on failed elections qualified of fraudulent. Morales who reformed the Constitution to re -elected sought a fourth consecutive mandate in those elections and ended up renouncing the position.
He assumed the presidency interim at the moment, Jeanine Áñez, after conflicting days left 37 deaths and whose criminal bill fell to Camacho.
