Authorities in Bolivia announced the arrest Feb. 1 of Felipe Froilán Molina Bustamente AKA "El Killer" [6]—long wanted in the "disappearance" and probable assassination of socialist leader Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz [7] during the period of military rule. Some 80 police agents were involved in the raid of a private house in the upscale Cota Cota suburb of La Paz, where Molina was found hiding behind a false wall. He had been convicted in absentia in 2007 of organizing a semi-official paramilitary death squad that carried out the disappearance of Quiroga and other leftist dissidents, and sentenced to 30 years. Quiroga, leader of Bolivia's Socialist Party One (PS-1 [8]), was abducted July 17, 1980 at the offices of the Bolivian Workers Central (COB [9]), where he was overseeing a meeting of the National Council for Defense of Democracy, a civil society group dedicated to resisting the military regime of Gen. Luis García Meza Tejada [10], who had just seized power in a coup d'etat. There whereabouts of his remains are still unknown, and President Evo Morales expressed hope that Molina will cooperate in recovering them. (ABI [11], Opinión [12], Cochabamba, Los Tiempos [13], Cochabamba, Feb. 1)
The PS-1 remains in opposition, and in 2009 issued a statement [14] accusing the Evo Morales government of being "reformist, anti-worker, neoliberal" and "pseudo-socialist."
