LA PAZ — Bolivian Attorney General Roger Mariaca was detained on Wednesday night at Viru Viru International Airport in Santa Cruz, just two days after the U.S. State Department accused him of taking bribes to protect drug traffickers from prosecution.
Hooded Bolivian police carried out the arrest, which also swept up Santa Cruz prosecutor Alberto Zeballos.
Interior Minister Marco Antonio Oviedo announced the operation Thursday, describing it as targeting a criminal organization embedded within Bolivia’s judiciary.
U.S. Accusations
The State Department revoked Mariaca’s visa on Monday as part of a broader sanctions action that hit 12 Bolivian officials and made 9 additional nationals ineligible for U.S. visas — nearly 20 officials across Bolivia, Colombia, and Ecuador were affected in total.
U.S. officials said Mariaca received “bribes to facilitate drug trafficking and help violent criminals evade justice,” though no specific cartel was named in connection with his case directly.
Bolivian authorities separately allege the network Mariaca is accused of leading protected Uruguayan drug kingpin Sebastián Marset back in 2023 — the same trafficker who was later arrested in Bolivia and extradited to U.S. custody earlier this year.
Seizures
Raids tied to the operation turned up 3.53 million bolivianos and $10,000 in cash, discovered inside an ambulance that was leaving Mariaca’s Santa Cruz residence Wednesday night.
Mariaca has denied the allegations, calling the U.S. sanctions “interference” and “political pressure” that he claims is in retaliation for investigations he’s personally pursued. The Bolivian prosecutor’s office pushed back as well: communications chief Claudia Pardo characterized the raid on the office’s Sucre headquarters as an “intervention that is being carried out illegally.”
Mariaca had been serving a six-year term as Bolivia’s top prosecutor. His arrest comes as President Rodrigo Paz, who took office in November, has deepened security cooperation with Washington — making this case a visible early test of that partnership, and a striking example of how far the anti-corruption push is reaching into Bolivia’s own justice system.
