Bolivian police official jailed on extortion charges
Print Edition
A HIGH-RANKING Bolivian National Police official was jailed in Florida on charges of attempting to extort thousands of dollars from the former owner of a Bolivian airline. The charge carries a potential five-year prison sentence.
An FBI complaint said Mario Fabricio Ormachea Aliaga offered last month to get Bolivian charges dropped for the businessman, Humberto Roca, in exchange for US$30,000. Roca formerly owned Bolivia’s AeroSur airline.
Roca fled to the US to avoid Bolivian charges alleging he provided tickets to what authorities there called anti-government foreign mercenaries.
The FBI affidavit said that Roca calls the charges politically motivated and is seeking asylum in the US.
AeroSur halted flights in June amid debts of about US$100 million, including back taxes to the Bolivian government and US$30 million to some 1,200 airline workers. Roca has claimed political persecution, arguing the government of Bolivian President Evo Morales drove AeroSur out of business in favor of the state-owned Boliviana de Aviacion airline.
On the advice of a lawyer, Roca had contacted the FBI after learning that Ormachea Aliaga was traveling to Miami to meet with him.
Agents monitored and recorded their meetings, during which Ormachea Aliaga — the No. 2 official in the national police’s anticorruption unit — allegedly told Roca that in exchange for US$30,000 “he would drop the charges against (Roca) and charge someone else instead,” according to the FBI affidavit.
But if he refused to pay, Ormachea Aliaga told Roca, he’d get him arrested in the US and extradited to Bolivia to face charges of subversion, FBI agent Jason May wrote in the affidavit.
After Roca gave him an initial US$5,000 provided by the FBI, Ormachea Aliaga was arrested during a traffic stop and charged with traveling in foreign commerce to commit extortion.
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