EDUARDO ROZSA Flores, the suspected leader of a gang accused of plotting to assassinate Bolivian president Evo Morales, returned to his homeland to co-ordinate armed resistance against government forces if they launched a crackdown on an opposition stronghold.
In an interview recorded before he left Hungary for Bolivia last autumn, Mr Flores said unnamed figures had asked him to come back to his birthplace, Santa Cruz, to help stem what he called a surge of violence from pro-government militias against critics of Mr Morales.
Mr Flores was killed alongside Irishman Michael Dwyer and Hungarian Arpad Magyarosi last Thursday in a special forces raid on their hotel in Santa Cruz, which is the centre of mostly mestizo opposition to a Morales administration that is dominated by indigenous Bolivians. Mr Morales’ critics calls him a communist, while he accuses them of being far-right reactionaries.
“I don’t imagine myself as some kind of Rambo or Superman, but I do have some experience of war,” said Mr Flores in an interview shown for the first time last night on Hungarian television, in reference to his time fighting for Croatia in its 1991-5 war for independence from Yugoslavia.
“If conflict begins, Santa Cruz needs someone to go home and help. They called me to organise the defence of Santa Cruz, because indigenous militias and pro-government elements are causing trouble there,” he said.
Mr Flores expected to fly to Brazil and then be smuggled into Bolivia, where a car would take him to Santa Cruz. There, he said, he would “start work” immediately and acquire guns.
While acknowledging that the Bolivian intelligence services knew who he was, Mr Flores said he would be relatively secure in the opposition stronghold in south-eastern Bolivia.
“The government is less able to send a person, or a group, to get someone in Santa Cruz,” he said, while also insisting that he did not fear death on his mission.
“This is my homeland and my obligation,” said Mr Flores, who was born in Santa Cruz to a Hungarian father and Spanish mother in 1960, lived in Hungary for much of his life but travelled widely, supported a vast array of causes and converted from Catholicism to Islam in recent years.
“Something could hit me on the head and kill me here,” he said before leaving Hungary.“But now I am going to my homeland and if it happens there, then it means it is written and that it happens in the right place.”
While Mr Morales’ officials claim the gang was intent on killing top figures including the president, critics in Santa Cruz call the security operation a bloody pretext for a crackdown on opposition groups.
Hungary’s government said yesterday that it doubted the official Bolivian version of what happened in Santa Cruz, and asked for more information on the incident.