We sure hope this is just a couple of lone wackos and not the beginning of a destabilization campaign against Evo Morales. An AP [2] report indicates suspect Triston Jay Amero of California "has been in and out of psychiatric hospitals since he was seven-years-old"—which is comforting for us, even if it doesn't seem to have done him much good. Still, that doesn't mean he wasn't being paid or manipulated by the CIA (or somebody). From Weekly News Update on the Americas [3], March 26:
A US citizen and an Uruguayan citizen will be charged with homicide for two bomb attacks in La Paz that killed two people between the night of Mar. 21 and the early morning of Mar. 22. US citizen Lestat Claudius de Orleans y Montevideo and Uruguayan citizen Alda Ribeiro Acosta, who apparently owned a dynamite business in the southern Bolivian city of Potosi, reportedly confessed to placing the explosives. The first attack destroyed the low-budget Linares hotel, killing a couple staying there and wounding 11 people; police managed to evacuate the second target, an hospedaje near a bus terminal, before the bomb there exploded. De Orleans and Ribeiro had also apparently planned a bomb attack against the Chilean consulate in La Paz, with the idea of creating a diplomatic conflict between Bolivia and Chile. The attacks at the hotels took place a day before the 127th anniversary marking Bolivia's loss of its coast to Chile in a war. Data from Interpol indicated that De Orleans and Ribeiro were detained in the northern Argentine province of Jujuy for six months in 2005 for trying to blow up a bank automatic teller machine. (Inter Press Service, March 22)
According to a report in the Chilean daily La Nacion, De Orleans is actually Triston Jay Amero, a fan of satanic literature who once sought election to the school board in El Dorado, near Sacramento, California. His criminal history includes credit card fraud--defrauding an internet dating site, specifically--as well as weapons purchase and suspected other explosive attacks. He is believed to be linked to at least two bomb attacks in Colombia, where he apparently went looking to meet women. (LN, March 25)
See our last report on terror scares [4] in Bolivia.
See our last post on Bolivia [5].
