Was Michael Dwyer a militant involved in a plot to assassinate Bolivia's president or a bodyguard unaware of the company he was keeping? ask TOM HENNIGANin Santa Cruz, Bolivia
IN THE EARLY hours of April 16th, Michael Dwyer’s young life came to a brutal end, machine-gunned to death in room 457 of the Hotel Las Americas, in Santa Cruz, Bolivia.
It was 4am when around 30 members of an elite police squad swarmed into the hotel, cut the phone line, and demanded that night staff tell them where the Irishman and his four travelling companions were staying.
They were the only guests on the fourth floor, in a row of five rooms. Having located their quarry, police silently made their way upstairs. The next thing the two staff members on duty heard was a huge explosion that shook the building, followed by 10 to 15 minutes of intense gunfire, “a rain of bullets” in the words of the night manager.
Today, as Dwyer’s remains are due to make their final journey to his home in Ballinderry, Co Tipperary, almost every aspect of the raid is sunk in controversy. The only undisputed facts are that by the end of it, the 24-year-old lay dead in his room, as did the occupants of the rooms on either side of his.
The two other men in the group – a Hungarian and a Bolivian of Croatian origin – were arrested at the scene. The only witnesses, apart from the officers involved, are now being held in isolation cells in a maximum security prison in the capital La Paz, more than 900km away.
Dwyer’s body still lay in room 457 when Bolivia’s vice-president gave a press conference in the capital saying police had broken up a cell of “mercenary terrorists” who planned to assassinate Evo Morales, the country’s left-wing president. Since then, the government has claimed the group was linked to right-wing separatists in Santa Cruz who want independence for eastern Bolivia.
The Dwyer family have dismissed the accusations about their son as preposterous. In Santa Cruz, a ramshackle boomtown on Bolivia’s tropical eastern plains that is the motor of the country’s economy, many believe the men were summarily executed, victims of a dangerous escalation in the struggle between Santa Cruz and La Paz over the destiny of South America’s poorest nation.
Family and friends of the former bouncer and security guard understood that Dwyer went to Bolivia last November to take part in a bodyguard training course. But one source described it as a “course that never was”. On realising this, several of Dwyer’s travelling companions reportedly left Bolivia but he decided to stay on. It was around this time that he met a 49-year-old Bolivian of Hungarian descent named Eduardo Rózsa Flores, the man killed in room 458 and named by the authorities as the group’s leader.
Flores came from a well-known family in Santa Cruz. His father was a Hungarian communist émigré and painter. The family fled one of Bolivia’s numerous military dictatorships and went to Chile. When Pinochet staged his coup, they moved to Europe.
A communist in his youth, Flores later fought with the Croatians in the Balkans conflict, and was awarded Croat citizenship. After the war, he worked as a documentary filmmaker and wrote poetry. He later converted to Islam and supported a wide and often contradictory range of causes, many on the right-wing fringe.
One was a group that advocated autonomy for ethnic Hungarians in Romania. Sources say that other members of this group worked in security in Ireland and may well have introduced Dwyer to Flores. By early January, Dwyer, Flores and four other men – two Hungarians, an ethnic Hungarian travelling on a Romanian passport, and a Bolivian with a Croat passport – checked into the four-star Asturias hotel in Santa Cruz, where they stayed until April 3rd. One of these four – the Romanian Arpad Magyarosi – was killed in room 456 in the Hotel Las Americas.
One staff member at the hotel remembers Dwyer clearly. “He was lovely. He did not speak Spanish but he was a good person. We remember him playing around by the pool, singing. He didn’t seem at all like what they say he is now.” The Asturias’s owner, Maria Diez, says the group seemed close and Dwyer was an integral part of it. “The Irishman was very well behaved, always polite,” remembers Diez. “He had his own room but was very friendly with the others. They breakfasted together and in the evenings were around the pool together. We never saw them with anyone else and they never said what they were doing in Bolivia. But they were good guests, never drinking excessively or anything like that.”
Little is known about what the group did during their weeks in the Asturias. Staff said they did not seem to have a regular routine that implied they were working.
THE IRISH TIMES has seen evidence that during this time Dwyer and his companions made at least one excursion into the countryside around Santa Cruz. It has also seen evidence that the group enjoyed a social life in Santa Cruz and had several nights out with locals. They visited the city's bowling alley and Dwyer went with local friends to at least one football game. They had evenings out in the city's bars and an area where young people gather in cars and Santa Cruz's ubiquitous 4x4s for parties. There is also evidence that Dwyer had a girlfriend.
During the group's stay in the Asturias, The Irish Timeshas learned that Flores was in the company of local separatist extremists and that at one such encounter in February, Dwyer was present. But given that Dwyer's Spanish extended little beyond "gracias", it is uncertain that he would have understood whatever conversations Flores had at this time.
It is also unknown how much Dwyer knew about the tense political situation in Santa Cruz, especially in the months leading up to his arrival, when the unrest threatened to spill over into open violence between the country’s east and west.
On April 3rd the group moved to the five-star Hotel Santa Cruz, closer to the central plaza. As at the Asturias, staff here remember always seeing the group together, but in no way drawing attention to themselves or seeming out of the ordinary. “We get a lot of business groups here. I just thought they were foreigners in Santa Cruz to buy land,” says one employee.
The city’s major theatre festival had booked up the Hotel Santa Cruz from April 14th, so the group had to move again. This time they went to the four-star Hotel Las Americas. Less of a holiday resort than the Asturias, and less plush than the Hotel Santa Cruz, it is a functional business hotel on the grittier side of the central plaza. At night on blocks nearby, prostitutes tout for business.
The group checked in and Dwyer did not leave the hotel again, according to staff. After a busy Easter week, business was slow and the group had the fourth floor to themselves. They told the maids not to bother making up their rooms, which staff did not enter after they arrived. The group had their own food with them and ate in their rooms, according to Hernan Rossell, the hotel’s manager. The only time Dwyer was again seen by staff was when he appeared in the lobby looking for a stronger Wi-Fi signal on Wednesday, April 15th, says Rossell. Apart from the other members of the group, it seems the next people to see him were those who killed him.
These are the facts known about Dwyer’s sojourn in Bolivia and they raise more questions than they answer. Was there an armed confrontation between police and the five guests on the fourth floor of the Hotel Las Americas, or were Dwyer and his two colleagues summarily executed as many in Santa Cruz believe? Were there guns in the rooms and is the group linked to an arms cache found in the city shortly after the police raid, as the authorities say? How come three of the five died from multiple gunshot wounds to the chest – with not a single head, leg or arm wound between them – while their two companions were taken prisoner almost unscathed? How was it that the 30 or so officers involved did not suffer a single wound between them in what they say was a half-hour shoot-out? Why, as reported by the hotel’s manager, are all the bullet holes in the walls of the fourth floor inside the bedrooms, with none appearing to be the result of gunfire fired from inside the rooms towards attackers in the corridor?
If the five men were under surveillance for weeks, as the government claims, how did they then supposedly manage to plant a small bomb that partially destroyed the front gate of the house of Santa Cruz’s cardinal the night before the raid on their hotel, as the police claim? And if the group was as armed and dangerous as the government says, why was this attack so inept, blowing just a small hole in the wooden gate at a time when the cardinal was not even at home? And why did Flores, a former war veteran, not practice even the most basic of security precautions if his group had just carried out a terrorist act? They were caught like rats in a trap – found holed up on the fourth floor of a hotel with little possibility of escape should they be discovered, in the centre of the city where they had allegedly just placed a bomb.
THERE ARE ALSO many unanswered questions about what led the group to the Hotel Las Americas. In a video recording with a Hungarian journalist that Flores asked be released in the event of his death, Flores claimed he had returned to the town at the request of the Council of Santa Cruz in order to organise self-defence groups to take on what he called pro-government elements.
But this video was the first time anyone had heard of the Council of Santa Cruz.
What is it and who bankrolled the group’s six-month stay in the city? Having supposedly gone to do a bodyguard training course that fell through, did Dwyer instead accept an unspecified security job from Flores? Did Flores lead him to believe that this was in some way official work linked to the opposition-controlled regional government? Dwyer’s actions in the months leading up to his death do not hint at someone who thought he was involved in clandestine activities. But on his Bebo page, since taken down, he would only vaguely say that he was “travellin, workin, doin a bit a dis and a bit a dat”.
The official investigation now under way will supposedly attempt to answer some of these questions. But it is already being undermined by a government intent to use the events of the last 10 days to attack the opposition.
Its work is being prejudged by officials, led by the vice-president, who have made their own charges against Dwyer and the others without providing evidence.
Two high-ranking Bolivian legal officials have told The Irish Timesthat the investigation breaks all standard legal procedures. "It is ugly. The legal process is already totally contaminated, they are breaking the law with impunity," says one official.
The Irish, Croatian and Hungarian governments have called for an international inquiry. Bolivia’s government has vacillated on whether to agree to this outside scrutiny.
Such an inquiry, even at a remove from the events, might be able to solve many of these riddles. But it is unlikely to be able to answer the two questions at the heart of the brutal death of Michael Dwyer in room 457.
Did he ever fully understand what Flores – a charismatic advocate of obscure causes and whose posthumously-released video hints at something of a martyr complex – was up to in Bolivia? And just what exactly did he think he was doing in Bolivia during his six-month stay?