U.S. Envoy Says Jailed Bolivian Plots His Killing

The U.S. ambassador to Bolivia said Friday that a jailed former interior minister has ordered his assassination in revenge for the envoy’s role in bringing him to justice.

The former minister, Luis Arce Gomez, is in jail in Miami, awaiting trial on drug-trafficking charges. Neither his attorney nor the prosecutor were immediately available for comment on the ambassador’s allegation.

The ambassador, Robert S. Gelbard, said he believed that the former minister ordered paramilitary forces in Bolivia to kill him “because I was instrumental, with the cooperation of the Bolivian government, in getting Luis Arce Gomez to Miami.”

According to the U.S. Embassy, the information about the assassination order was provided by high-ranking Bolivian anti-drug officials and is being taken very seriously.

The embassy said Arce Gomez called on members of the neo-Nazi paramilitary group Lovers of Death, or Novios de la Muerte, to kill the ambassador. No such attack has been made.

The group was set up by Arce Gomez in 1979 to help plan and carry out the July, 1980, military coup that interrupted democratic rule in the country.

The group was advised by Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, who was expelled from Bolivia in 1983 and is now serving a life sentence for war crimes in Lyon, France.

Arce Gomez became the country’s highest-ranking law enforcement official after the coup. But he provided protection to traffickers, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration says, and was known as the “minister of cocaine.”

Arce Gomez was arrested by Bolivian police and U.S. drug agents on Dec. 10, 1989, and extradited to the United States by order of President Jaime Paz Zamora.