Death of alleged plotters not end of story in Bolivia

[AlphaCentauri]

Indeed, the mystery of the case revolves largely around this enigmatic figure, believed to be the group's leader.

He left Bolivia as a teenager, going with his parents into exile in Chile before moving to Hungary, the birthplace of his father, an emigrant of Jewish origin. In Budapest, Rozsa Flores said he came into contact with Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the Venezuelan terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal, while studying linguistics and literature, according to published interviews with Rozsa Flores.

Finding work as a correspondent for a Spanish newspaper covering the breakup of Yugoslavia, Rozsa Flores abandoned journalistic objectivity and took sides. He commanded volunteers fighting for Croatia in the early 1990s, but his battlefield experience was marred by claims that he oversaw the murder of a Briton and a Swiss citizen.

"He lived an overcrowded life, full of events, locations, people, gossip, good and bad legends," said Ibolya Fekete, a Hungarian director who made a 2001 film, "Chico," based on Rozsa Flores' life. "He never fit in anywhere."

Returning to Hungary after the war, Rozsa Flores converted to Islam, a shift from his earlier association with Opus Dei, the conservative Roman Catholic group. And he found a new political obsession, explaining in a television interview last year with a Hungarian journalist that he was moving to Bolivia to organize a militia.

"There is a need for weapons." he said in the interview, which was broadcast for the first time in Hungary last week after his killing, "so it isn't about the boys marching in the streets with flags and bamboo sticks."

Rozsa Flores went further in the interview, saying his goal was not toppling Morales, but achieving autonomy for Santa Cruz, Bolivia's wealthiest department, or province. Envisioning a clash with La Paz over this issue, he nonchalantly described his goal as "declaring independence and creating a new country."

Such thinking fits well into the way Morales' government portrays Santa Cruz: as a region where powerful industrialists and bankers, some of them descendants of Croatian immigrants, want to secede from Bolivia in a rupture inspired by Yugoslavia's disintegration.

But while Morales has described the men killed in Santa Cruz as part of a "tentacle of a structure" intent on killing him and other senior officials named in a list obtained by his government, missteps by officials in describing their handling of the group have led to further questions about the men and what they were doing in Santa Cruz.

Garcia Linera, the vice president, at first said the three were killed in a 30-minute gunfight, but an insurance report filed for the hotel and obtained by the newspaper La Razon apparently found no signs of an exchange of gunfire. Two men taken captive at the hotel, Elod Toazo, a Hungarian, and Mario Tadik, a Bolivian, seem to have surrendered without a fight.

"What happened was the killing of three people who were sleeping, which means murder," said Oscar Ortiz, president of Bolivia's Senate and a top Morales opponent.

Alfredo Rada, a senior minister, made things worse when he went on television with images of men in Santa Cruz clasping weapons, claiming they were linked to those killed. But the men in the photos, lifted from a Facebook page, debunked the claim by explaining that they practiced "airsoft," a game in which participants fire at one another with pellet guns.

The case is fueling conspiracy theories of every stripe, but some secrets were taken to the grave by Rozsa Flores and his two comrades in arms.

In his interview last September in Hungary, he speculated that Morales' intelligence service knew about him, and he also touched on the possibility that he might meet his death in Bolivia. "A tile could fall on my head here and that would be farcical, wouldn't it?" he asked.


http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/world/story/CEEF71283ACE9C76862575AA000EA997?OpenDocument

[EFerrari]

1. Notice that this is a hit piece by Simon Romero

one of the best fiction writers at NYTs. He's actually urging sympathy for the three hitmen that were plotting to kill Morales, and he's trying to shift focus from attempted assassination to "independence" for Santa Cruz. What a POS Romero is.