Bolivia Police have arrested their country’s former counternarcotic czar after finding a cocaine lab on one of his properties, although not yet confirmed if he was aware of its existence or not.
Felipe Cáceres was the head of the government department for controlled substances from 2006 to 2019 and in that role was in charge of Bolivia’s fight against illegal drugs.
His arrest is the latest scandal to hit Bolivia’s anti-drugs agencies with one former head of the counternarcotic police currently awaiting trial in the US on charges of drug smuggling and another already in jail for drug trafficking.
Bolivia is the third largest producer of cocaine in the world after Colombia and Peru.
Cáceres was arrested on Tuesday morning in Puerto Villarroel, in the Cochabamba region, where much of the country’s coca crop is grown.
Under Bolivian law, the legal plantation of the crop nationwide should be 22,000 hectares for medicinal use, traditional consumption and use in religious ceremonies but anything above that figure is meant to be destroyed.
Before being appointed as the head of Bolivia’s department for controlled substances, Cáceres was a leader in one of the coca-growers’ unions.
But police said what they found on one of his properties was a laboratory in which coca leaves are turned into cocaine hydrochloride, a drug which is illegal in Bolivia and most other countries worldwide.
Bolivia’s interior minister, Roberto Ríos, said that while the lab, which was big enough to employ 10 people was found on land owned by Cáceres, investigations were still under way to determine if he was the owner of the lab or not.
Ríos added that Cáceres had been detained 500m from the lab at a nearby sand and gravel plant he owns.
When he was anti-drug czar, Cáceres had close links to the president at the time, Evo Morales.
Morales told local media that the arrest of Cáceres was a “set-up” and accused the government of using it as a smokescreen “to detract from its own scandals”, although he did not elaborate on what scandals he meant. A lawyer for Morales’s party added that investigators would have to prove there was a direct link between the cocaine lab and Cáceres although this is not the first time Bolivian counternarcotic officials have come under investigation
source: Gladys Agbedanu