Ex-Official of Bolivia Flown to U.S. for Trial

Former Interior Minister Luis Arce Gomez was flown to Miami on Monday for trial on charges of trafficking in drugs while he served in the Cabinet of a former Bolivian military president.

He has been accused of leading a cocaine trafficking operation while he was Bolivia’s top law enforcement official. A former army colonel, Arce was also accused here of employing then-fugitive Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie to advise paramilitary forces that tortured and killed opposition political and labor figures.

A federal indictment returned in Miami in 1983 charges that secret police under Arce’s control seized cocaine from traffickers who failed to pay for protection and delivered it to smugglers who did pay.

Two lieutenants of Arce who were charged with him once received $1.5 million for cocaine that was confiscated by Bolivian authorities and stored in bank vaults, according to the indictment. It says that Arce personally ordered the cocaine released.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami said Arce was indicted along with 18 other people and charged with various violations of U.S. drug laws.

While in office here, Arce had a reputation for ruthlessness and for personally torturing political prisoners. He was named interior minister in 1980 and rounded up hundreds of journalists, political and labor leaders, and church officials. Under U.S. pressure, he was removed from office in 1981.

Arce fled to Argentina in 1982, where he was later arrested under the Miami indictment. But the military government there freed him in December, 1983, just before turning over power to the civilian administration of former President Raul Alfonsin.

Arce’s whereabouts were not known until he was captured Sunday at a ranch near Santa Cruz in eastern Bolivia. U.S. Ambassador Robert Gelbard praised the Bolivian government for the arrest.

Arce was stripped of Bolivian citizenship last year for failing to show up for trial in this country on charges of human rights violations and cocaine trafficking.