At midnight a year ago today, Michael Dwyer left his girlfriend’s flat. Hours later he was shot dead
IT IS a terrible “what if?” for anyone to have to live with.
On April 15th last year Rafaela Cotrim Moreira spent the evening with her Irish boyfriend at her apartment. At midnight he said he would head back to the hotel where he was staying.
“Normally if it was late he would spend the night but this time he didn’t. He was tired and he said he had to get up early the next morning. And so he went home,” remembers this young Brazilian woman, her voice suddenly catching with emotion.
Michael Dwyer went back to his hotel in the centre of the Bolivian city of Santa Cruz. Around 1am a year ago today he sent Cotrim a text message: “To say he loved me.” It was the last she heard from him.
Around three hours later an elite police unit stormed the hotel. What happened next is mired in controversy. The police say there was a shoot-out. Witnesses have cast severe doubt on this claim. But by the time the raid was over Dwyer and two colleagues lay dead, two others were taken prisoner.
“Now I can’t help thinking what would have happened if I had asked him to stay. Would he be alive? I don’t know,” says Cotrim quietly, tears in her eyes.
Had she asked him to stay and Dwyer were alive today, Cotrim has no doubt he would be able to explain what he was doing in Bolivia and disprove its government’s claim that he was a member of a group of mercenary terrorists there to assassinate the country’s president Evo Morales, a claim she finds impossible to reconcile with the man she knew.
Cotrim says she is speaking out now on the first anniversary of Dwyer’s death because she feels his character has been destroyed by the Bolivian authorities and much of the Bolivian media.
“There is nothing I can do to bring him back,” she says. “But I think of his family and what they have had to go through. He spoke of them all the time. So for their sake I want to tell you what he was really like. He was not just anyone. I wanted to be with him. I saw in him someone I sought in my life.”
An attractive, softly-spoken but serious woman, Cotrim (26) was studying medicine at a local Santa Cruz university when, in the weeks before Christmas 2008, she first met Dwyer. They started to see each other and quickly both were smitten.
“He was different to every other man I knew. He was very attentive and respectful, always happy. You never saw him sad or giving out. I presented him to many people and everyone liked him. There was nothing not to like,” she says.
Dwyer told his new girlfriend he was employed as a bodyguard. She wondered why a European would work in Bolivia, South America’s poorest and most backward country. He told her that the economic situation in Ireland was bad and that many of his friends were losing their jobs.
At least in Santa Cruz he had work and while he earned little the cost of living was low.
Dwyer was, she says, totally unaware of the tense political situation in Bolivia which pitched the mestizo lowlanders around Santa Cruz against the indigenous population in the Andean highlands to the west. He spoke only the most rudimentary Spanish and was always having to ask her to translate conversations with her friends into English.
She bridles at suggestions in the media that he was a racist or held fascist political views.
“When we would meet my indigenous Bolivian friends he never showed any hint of prejudice,” she says.
She also says claims he had an SS symbol tattooed on his arm are nonsense – she helped him chose what she insists was clearly a tribal tattoo.
Cotrim is adamant that had she for a second suspected that Dwyer was involved in anything suspicious she would have had nothing to do with him.
She was in Santa Cruz because she could not afford medical school in Brazil. Even in cheaper Bolivia, her mother had to struggle to put her through college. “I had a responsibility to her – I was not there to mess around. I was not in Bolivia by choice and it was not easy for me being there,” she says.
“I had one goal which was to qualify and I would do nothing to put this at risk. But I never felt any danger or risk with Mike.”
That is why she was so confused to see photographs of Dwyer posing with weapons come to light after his death.
“This is the big problem,” she says. “But I do not know in what context these photos were taken. I do not think the photos alone prove what they are trying to claim about Mike and until today the only thing against him is the photos. But to say someone is a terrorist or planned to kill the president you need more proof.”
Cotrim only once met the man Dwyer told her he was working with and who authorities say was the group’s leader. She says Eduardo Rozsa Flores was friendly as they hung out in a bowling alley but remembers that despite Dwyer’s presence he spoke with the other members of their group in Hungarian.
Ten days after Dwyer’s death, frightened and under siege from the Bolivian press, Cotrim quit Bolivia. A year on, she has finally managed to enrol in medical school in Brazil and restart her life. But the events of one year ago and its terrible “what ifs” still haunt her: “What happened didn’t have to happen,” she says.
THE INVESTIGATION: PROSECUTOR CLAIMS MASONIC LODGE PLOTTED TO KILL MORALES
IN THE latest twist to his sprawling investigation the Bolivian prosecutor in charge of the case last week claimed Eduardo Rozsa Flores was working for a web of powerful right-wing separatist groups in Santa Cruz controlled through a Masonic lodge called The Knights of the East, which plotted to kill President Evo Morales and have Santa Cruz secede from Bolivia.
Rozsa Flores would die in the bedroom beside Dwyer’s. In the days following his death a video emerged in which he said he had been invited to return to the land of his birth to help form a militia to defend Santa Cruz from the aggression of the indigenous-dominated central government. Twelve months later it is still impossible to say just what Dwyer knew about Rozsa Flores’ plans.
The opposition in Santa Cruz says the investigation has turned into a farcical witch-hunt against them with the goal of weakening the main source of opposition to Morales. The Dwyer family and the Irish government are calling for an international investigation, a request the Bolivian government has so far ignored.