The Raid on the Hotel Las Américas was an operation led by the Bolivian police on April 16, 2009, in the city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra.
[1] Costas also highlighted the absence of Santa Cruz prosecutors in the raid;[3] and claimed that one of the objectives of the alleged set-up was to distract attention from the attack on Cardenal Terrazas.
[3] The people in the photograph, members of the Santa Cruz Air Soft sports club, have defended themselves from Rada's accusations, explaining that they are only airsoft players.
[7] However, in that same video, Rózsa claims that he was not planning to overthrow Evo Morales, and that his intention was to organise "self-defence" to face up to "violent groups" of government supporters.
In a leaked diplomatic cable from the US embassy in Bolivia, sent in May 2009, an unnamed whistle-blower assured North American authorities that the government of Evo Morales, under then Chief of Intelligence Jorge Santiesteban, had contacted Rózsa, with the aim of framing separatist groups and the principal regional leaders.
[10] Although, according to the cable, the US embassy in Bolivia had no means of verifying the claim, it was given credibility by the track record and political position of the informant, who had supposedly supplied photographs of the two surviving suspects, who presented with clear signs of having been tortured.
[10] The report concluded that Morales' government had intended to blame the United States for the incident, and underlined that the Bolivian attorney general had declared the existence of emails which linked Rósza with the CIA.
[10]The Bolivian Interior Minister, Sacha Llorenti, qualified this information as "gossip", underlining the fact that in the cable itself it was recognised that the "rumour" could not be verified, and announced that he would summon the US Chargé d'Affaires to La Paz to demand explanation.
[11] The respective families of Hungarian Árpád Magyarosi and Irish Michael Dwyer sought the repatriation of their bodies, and once under their control, requested that new autopsies were carried out.
[12] In the case of Magyarosi, in addition to forensic analysis, the family requested that a Hungarian special forces police official carry out a ballistic examination.
[14] In October 2009, the British ambassador to Bolivia, Nigel Baker, requested that the reports carried out in Europe be taken into account in the Bolivian investigation, claiming that the latter had "too many questionable points" and that at that moment "nothing" had been cleared up.
[17] According to his own government, the principal targets of this decree were Rubén Costas and Branko Marinkovic, opponents of Morales, who had been accused by the President of having supported Rósza financially.
[17] Costas, the Santa Cruz governor, has claimed that the aim of these accusations is:[17] ...to terrorise and to scare off opponents (in the December presidential elections) in order to be able to run uncontested.
[17] According to Vargos, there existed a core group of financial backers supporting the alleged terrorist cell, which was formed of business owners and political activists in the Santa Cruz department.
[19] The main evidence against these people were "chat" conversations obtained from the computer taken during the raid on the Hotel Las Américas, and photographs of the alleged mercenaries counting money.