Someone’s been tapping phones in Bolivia…and it’s not the local government. Who is it, then? Read on…
The US Embassy in La Paz is using spy systems to control and “tap” the telephone calls of president Evo Morales, the Bolivian government denounced today.
During a press conference, vice-president Álvaro García Linera denied that Bolivia’s executive power possesses the technology to tap phones, like the United States.
“It’s the US who has the telephonic spy systems, including here in Bolivia. The famous Snowden scandal is just the information that your telephones, the citizens’, those of the president (Evo Morales), and the vice-president, are being spied on by the US government,” declared García.
According to García, the United States is the only country that has systems to listen in on phone calls in Bolivia, in Latin America and in the world. “Our government doesn’t have such things, has never bought any and never will.”
The revelations of the president of the Plurinational Constitutional Tribunal (TCP), Rudy Flores, on telephone-tapping, generated a series of declarations from the people’s ombud, Rolando Villena, who expressed his concern, and from the minister of Justice, Sandra Gutiérrez, who called on the president of the TCP to demonstrate the revelations with concrete proof.
On this topic, García Linera called Flores’ claims that the Bolivian government has been tapping phones “false and unfounded”.
“The Government, and as the minister of the Presidency (Juan Ramón Quintana) has said, neither has nor will have telephone-tapping systems,” García said.
Translation mine.
I wouldn’t doubt that the Bolivian government doesn’t have a system of phone taps in place; it’s not rich enough to buy or sustain such a thing. But the gringos are. And as Edward Snowden has shown, they have their tentacles everywhere. Including, surprise surprise, right in the phone lines of the Bolivian government’s highest honchos.
