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LatinNews Daily - 19 May 2011
Morales makes a strange appointment
Significance: Farfán lasted just over two months in the job.
His dismissal points to the continued problem of corruption in Bolivia's
security institutions, which was recently laid bare over the drug-smuggling
scandal involving René Sanabria, a top security advisor and former head of Bolivia's
counter-narcotics force, Felcn. The appointment of Santiesteban is
curious, however, given his possible implication in the April 2009 Rózsa
terrorism case.
Key points:
• Farfán, the former head of the national stolen vehicles unit (Diprove) was
fired after a corruption scandal came to light on 5 May involving forged number
plates. Morales also fired the current head of Diprove, Jorge Aguilar, and the
head of the La Paz regional office, Carlos Quiroga. The Diprove has the worst
reputation of any police unit.
• Santiesteban is Morales's seventh police chief since he first came to power
in 2006. Santiesteban's appointment has triggered concerns: he was the head of
intelligence at the time of the so-called Rózsa case -when three foreign
nationals, alleged by the government to be mercenaries hired to assassinate
Morales, were killed by Bolivian special forces in a raid on a Santa Cruz hotel.
• Other question marks over Santiesteban's credentials emerge over the fact
that he was removed from his post as head of intelligence in late December 2009,
for failing to prevent Manfred Reyes Villa, the former prefect of Cochabamba and
chief opposition presidential candidate, from fleeing the country.
• Santiesteban was sworn in pledging transparency and the full implementation
of a new law (no. 101) regulating police discipline. The law was promulgated
last month in a bid to tackle police corruption, which, the US State Department
notes in its most recent human rights report, is "a significant problem,
partially due to low salaries and lack of training, although no reliable
statistics exist[…]to quantify the depth of the problem".End of preview - This article contains approximately 333 words.
