Police in Bolivia revealed on Wednesday they had identified among the socialist “protesters” rioting to defend ex-President Evo Morales an Argentine terrorist believed to be in town to “train” local leftists.
Facundo Molares Schoenfeld, 44, was a longtime member of the Communist Party of Argentina before joining the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), one of the wealthiest terrorist organizations in the world. Police believe he was “hired” to come to Bolivia and train local socialists and communists on how to commit acts of terror to intimidate police and government officials into letting the left stay in power.
Police said Schoenfeld received a bullet wound while helping exacerbate riots in the city of Montero on October 30, in which reporters and citizen journalists recorded footage of leftists indiscriminately beating individuals attempting to peacefully protest against Evo Morales’ attempt to govern for a fourth unconstitutional term. The clashes killed two anti-socialist protesters that day.
It took nearly two weeks for Schoenfeld to appear in a hospital in serious condition, and two more days since his arrival on November 11 to identify him.
Schoenfeld is reportedly in a medically induced coma and police positively identified him with the help of his parents. Police found conversations between Schoenfeld and his father on his mobile phone upon entering the hospital which they used to identify him and contact his family. A further investigation of conversations on his father’s mobile phone, which police confiscated when he arrived in Bolivia, reveal that Schoenfeld was systematically acting to violently empower Evo Morales supporters.
In one conversation, he father reportedly replies to his son’s plans, “just leave, let Evo fix his own problems.”
Miguel Ángel Mercado, the head of the Santa Cruz, Bolivia, police department, told reporters Wednesday that authorities believe Schoenfeld was in Montero in the capacity of “instructor.”
“This now becomes a bigger issue,” Mercado continued. “We call upon the community to be very careful. One of the narco-guerrilla’s tactics is to hurt itself to blame public forces,” he added, suggesting Morales supporters shot Schoenfeld to accuse police of unwarranted brutality.
Óscar Gutiérrez, the head of Santa Cruz’s special anti-crime fighting force, told reporters they believe someone yet unidentified “hired” Schoenfeld to offer makeshift military training to Morales supporters to help them repress anti-socialist dissent. Police are investigating not only who requested Schoenfeld’s expertise, but how he entered Bolivia after disappearing in 2017.
“The presence of this person with military training is not a coincidence,” Gutiérrez said. “This person arrived after being hired and that is what we are investigating – where did he enter, how long has he been here, what type of relationships he had.”
“Someone brought this person here to lend paramilitary instruction and prepare violent acts,” he added.
Schoenfeld’s father, Néstor Hugo Molares, is a judge in the Argentine town of Trevelín. His foreign, upper-class white background belies the repeated assertions by Evo Morales and his supporters that the base supporting his Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party is primarily indigenous and native to Bolivia.
Operating under the alias “Commander Camilo,” Schoenfeld reportedly participated in FARC terrorist activities for at least a decade before opposing the 2016 “peace deal” plan in which former Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos legalized the FARC. Latin American news outlets, following Santos’ and the mediating communist regime of Cuba’s lead, refer to FARC terrorists who continued committing acts of terror following the 2016 deal as “dissidents” of the FARC, even though this number now appears to represent nearly every member of the organization.
The FARC peace deal granted terrorists uncontested Colombian House and Senate seats and did nothing to require the terrorists to abandon cocaine trafficking – their most lucrative activity – while rebranding as a political party. Nominally, the FARC was required to offer itemized inventory sheets and reveal its net worth to the government of Colombia, but it handed the government a list of “assets” that included items like mops and juice squeezers, but not coca fields or stolen loot.
As of September, most of the leadership of the FARC has abandoned the plan and declared war on the government of Colombia, urging soldiers to commit treason against their country. The half-century-long war on the FARC has killed at least 260,000 people.
Evo Morales’ flagship political policy as president was to promote the interests of the nation’s coca growers, many of whom generate the FARC’s key cash crop.
Morales was president of Bolivia for 13 years when he resigned on Sunday, following the revelation by the Organization of American States (OAS) of widespread electoral fraud in the October 20 election that he claimed to handily win. It was an election Morales had no constitutional right to participate in, given the term limits in the Bolivian constitution. To override this limitation, Morales first attempted to pass a national referendum ending term limits in 2016, which the people rejected. A year later, he forced the nation’s constitutional court to declare he had a “human right” to be on the ballot.
Morales fled to Mexico on Monday claiming, without offering evidence, that someone had offered a $50,000 bounty for his life. Most of the government’s MAS party leadership also fled the country, creating a power vacuum that left Bolivia without a president for nearly three days.
On Tuesday, the deputy president of the Senate, Jeanine Áñez, took over as the second woman president of the country in history, the highest-ranked person in the chain of command that did not flee the country. A religious conservative, Áñez entered the nation’s presidential palace with a giant Bible in hand and vowed to organize a free and fair presidential election as soon as possible.
In response to the presidency being legally occupied, thousands of MAS supporters marched into La Paz, the seat of the executive branch of government, chanting “here we go, civil war” and burning down at least six police stations in between La Paz and their origin city, El Alto. Many of the speakers leading the march claimed to be indigenous Bolivians outraged over a video circulating on social media showing unidentified individuals burning the Wiphala flag, a legal Bolivian flag that represents the 36 indigenous communities in the country.
Police have not offered an estimate on how many of these individuals are of foreign European backgrounds like Schoenfeld.
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