Bolivia arrests attorney general and 13 other officials after videos of Sebastián Marset allege state protection

Bolivia arrests attorney general and 13 other officials after videos of Sebastián Marset allege state protection

Two newly surfaced videos of Uruguayan drug lord Sebastián Marset alleging high-level state protection triggered a law enforcement purge in Bolivia, ending in the arrest of the country’s attorney general and 13 other top officials.

Even from inside an American prison cell, the Uruguayan drug kingpin Sebastián Marset managed to shatter the highest echelons of Bolivian justice this week.

The sudden release on Wednesday of two video recordings from Marset’s arrest in March sparked a sweeping law enforcement purge, leading to the detention of 14 high-ranking figures — including prosecutors, police commanders, the country’s attorney general, and the former national director of Bolivia’s special counter-narcotics unit.

The operation included raids on prosecutorial offices in Sucre, La Paz, and Santa Cruz after the newly surfaced video footage showed Marset claiming that the attorney general, Roger Mariaca, and other top law enforcement figures had shielded his criminal syndicate.

Bolivia’s Minister of Government, Marco Antonio Oviedo, described the operation as the dismantling of a “criminal organization entrenched in the justice system” that was dedicated to “protecting, encouraging, and supporting narco-terrorism.”

In the recording, captured at Viru Viru International Airport in Santa Cruz shortly before his extradition to the United States to face federal charges of drug trafficking and money laundering, a handcuffed Marset told agents, “I used to talk to Mariaca because he controls the Prosecutor’s Office.”

Within minutes of the video’s distribution on Wednesday night, law enforcement officers apprehended Mariaca and Alberto Zeballos, the departmental prosecutor for Santa Cruz, at the same airport.

Simultaneous raids followed nationwide, ensnaring senior prosecutors, including Martín Daniel Irusta Flores — a former attorney for former President Evo Morales — and Julio César Porras, an anti-drug prosecutor who had been assigned to lead the government’s investigation into Marset.

The purge arrived just 48 hours after the U.S. State Department announced visa restrictions targeting Mariaca and other Bolivian officials over allegations of high-level corruption and illicit drug ties.

In the hours preceding his arrest, Mariaca had publicly vowed to press forward with a separate, politically sensitive investigation into Fernando Cerimedo, a political campaign consultant aligned with right-wing figures in the United States who had advised Bolivia’s newly elected president, Rodrigo Paz. Cerimedo is currently imprisoned in Bolivia in connection with the August attempted murder of his former partner, Nadia Beller.

The sudden collapse of the country’s top prosecutorial office has sent shockwaves through Bolivia’s political and judicial institutions, thrusting the deep intersections of state power and transnational drug networks back into the national spotlight.