There is a black and white photo that shows Bolivia ex-dictator Luis García Meza in full splendor, carrying out the governmental power he conquered in 1980. He is surrounded by most part of his cabinet, made up of military officers. And behind him, there’s a young mustached military man who, with enormous eyes, holds an oblique gaze. The photograph is a commonly exhibited document, at times used to de-legitimize Manfred Reyes Villa because many say that he was the narco-dictator’s military assistant—something that the governor of Cochabamba has never denied.

But his military career as a “patriotic officer,” as Reyes Villa himself likes to say, is not an accident. This photo, not always analyzed with care, shows something else: among those who formed part of ex-dictator’s inner circle is Defense Minister General Armando Reyes Villa—father of Cochabamba’s Governor and one of the principle conspirers of the military coup that handed García Meza power on July 17, 1980.

It is difficult to know if ex-Captain Manfred learned the democratic values that he now, as a politician, claims to defend from his father. Given what occurred on January 11th it is possible that he did. But to be more clear, we might look at a paragraph from Reyes Villa spokesman Erick Fajardo Pozo’s February 6, 2007 statement:

“According to Reyes Villa, the people that are now in the government have been sowing slander for years, splashing his credibility with absurdities and recurrent accusations demonstrating that he had been a de-facto part of past regimes but without ever having the serious intention of supporting such affirmations with any objective proof.”

In a way Fajardo Pozo is right, because the “proof” that the spokesman asks for to incriminate his boss is not always within the government’s reach. It is difficult to prove that Manfred Reyes Villa participated in de-facto regimes, because complete written records were not kept. So we can only point out some memorable points in his military career:

• In the public database containing the names of enrolled students at the infamous School of the Americas (SOA), a counterinsurgency training camp for Latin American oppressors, our dear ex-Captain appears as a cadet who took a course at this military institution (Combat Arms Basic C-2) from February 20 through April 23, 1976.

• Sorry, this writer forgot to mention that cadet Reyes Villa was 21 years old when he returned from his SOA classes in Panama, where the School used to be located. Born on April 19, 1955 the current Governor had the dubious privilege of studying at the SOA as a young man during the Hugo Banzar Suarez dictatorship. Does that have something to do with the fact that his father was part of the Army’s high command at the time? Hard to say…

• Now that we’re back to Manfred’s dad, we also forgot to mention that General Armando Reyes Villa was the Chief of the Armed Forces during the democratic government of Lydia Gueiler and that, from that position, he participated in Garcia Meza’s coup against the then-President. The ex-dictator himself recalls that it was General Reyes Villa who presented Gueiler with a resignation letter that she ought to sign (according to Tomás Molina Céspedes’ book of interviews, Testimonials of a Dictator).

• Agreeing with the ex-dictator’s version, ex-President Gueiler recounts her experience with Reyes Villa as traitor in Alfonso Crespo’s biography: “Reyes Villa always showed me absolute faithfulness and I never imagined that it would end with an act of betrayal.” ( Lydia: A Woman in History. pg. 178).

• Manfred Reyes Villa’s father’s reward for being a traitor to democracy was to named Minister of Defense in Luis García Mesa’s first cabinet. Does this link the ex-Capitan, current Governor to the dictator beyond the fact that his father was his boss? Hard to say. Maybe the photograph mentioned earlier was just an accident. Maybe the young military officer with a moustache had just gone to visit daddy at the palace when he was taken by surprise by a photo catching him de-facto walking behind the president. Hard to say.

But let’s forget Cochabamba’s Governor’s father because he was already found guilty of launching a coup and sentenced to two years in jail in a Supreme Court decision handed down on April 21, 1993. Despite the spokesman’s part in his statement when he says Manfred is “a family man…a man of honor,” maybe he didn’t learn everything from his father, like the use of violence and the capacity for betrayal…maybe he learned that all on his own.

Political Sprinting

In the 90’s, the Governor of Cochabamba began to speed up his political career. Returning from five years of military service in the Bolivian Embassy in the United States where he landed five months after the García Meza’s dictatorship ended, Manfred Reyes Villa entered as an officer in the National Democratic Alliance (ADN in its Spanish initials)—the political party created by ex-dictator Hugo Banzer. On the ADN ticket in 1993, he was elected to City Council of the capital city of the state he now governs.

During that decade, Reyes Villa also founded a real estate business, Marevi, with which he made a fortune little by little in the city of Cochabamba, even while he was Mayor. And whiling we’re talking about houses, the Governor’s beautiful Cochabamba mansion isn’t as nice as his Miami one. Surely he didn’t buy it with the $40 million of debt he left for his municipality when he abandoned his job, already owner of various buildings and houses in Cochabamba and in the United States.

Nevertheless, it was in those years that he solidified his regional leadership, elected Mayor three times by a comfortable majority—like his 1995 win with 69.7% of the votes. At that time he was a candidate of the Free Bolivia Movement (MBL in its Spanish initials), a left-wing party that is today allied with President Evo Morales in the Constituent Assembly.

On his third re-election in 1999, Reyes Villa had his own party—the New Republican Force—with whom he went forward to the 2002 elections, trying his luck at becoming President of Bolivia. An interesting and telling fact about NFR is their color choice, purple and red. Proposed by marketing experts, this combination gave Walt Disney his greatest success (explains the ex-party chief Gonzalo Molina).

Despite this all, we’ve got to acknowledge his efficiency in exercising municipal budgets, his capacity to deliver on publics works and his ready smile that wins him supporters everywhere he goes. But that’s where it ends, because as Mayor of Cochabamba, this man from La Paz also played a major role in many of this country’s more recent notable political events. A few interesting examples:

Then-Mayor Manfred Reyes Villa play a determining role in Cochabamba’s world famous “Water War,” an event that returned voice and dignity to the people from below, as Oscar Olivera explains. The 1999 video footage of him, next to ex-President and ex-Dictator Hugo Banzer, signing the contract that gave U.S. Bechtel corporation privatized water rights is now famous. In this conflict—that, in 2000, would culminate in history’s first popular victory against a transnational corporation—Reyes Villa didn’t hold back from coordinating repressive actions with the central government and he even organized a march to de-legitimize the Coalition in Defense of Water and Life, of which Olivera was the most respected spokesman.

Also famous is Reyes Villa finishing in third place in the 2002 general elections when all the figures, polls and bar bets put him as the big favorite to be the next to govern Bolivia. It would be discovered only later that Reyes Villa was the victim of a dirty war launched by the eventual winner, Gonzalo Sanchéz de Lozada. This, exposed in the documentary “Our Brand is Crisis”.

Nevertheless, Sanchéz de Lozada included Reyes Villa and his party in the governing coalition (putting little brohter Erick Reyes Villa in the cabinet). The August 5, 2003 pact was justified as necessity for ensuring better governability and becomes a factor in determining the NFR party’s and the Cochabamba Governor’s as holding partial responsibility for the massacres executed by the Bolivian military a few weeks later.

From October to the present

From right to left, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, Manfred Reyes Villa and his little brother Erick, a few minutes before signing their pact on August 5, 2003.
© Agencia Boliviana de Información

The popular insurrection that ended Gonzalo Sanchéz de Lozada’s second term on October 17, 2003 is also famous. After more than 60 dead and more than 400 wounded, it was very clear that here in Bolivia, the political parties and traditional ruling class had lost their force and capacity. Despite the grand government coalition he headed, Goni was unable to keep himself in power.

When Manfred Reyes Villa was called to give a statement in the trial against Sanchéz de Lozada for the deaths and injuries, the ex-Captain declared that he held no responsibility for the massacres carried out by the Armed Forces. Since little more than two months had passed since he entered government when everything happened, Reyes Villa tried to exonerate all his party’s ministers (one of those his little brother, as we have said).

In his judicial declaration, Reyes Villa (known as “Bombón”) acknowledged that though he and his gang, sorry, he and his allies were part of the Goni Sanchéz de Lozada government and they held numerous powerful positions, “they did not make any decisions.” This seems accurate because the first massacre occurred on September 20th and Reyes Villa’s Ministers never made the decision to leave the party coalition. In fact NFR members ratified their support for ex-President Goni at the time, refusing to abandon him until the morning of October 17th, a few hours before he fled from the country.

After that, NFR slowly declined as a party and its main leader didn’t do anything to stop the process. The party not only lost governing control in the city in the Cochabamba’s December 2004 municipal elections, but their votes weren’t even significant enough to be of note. In the general elections called for December 18, 2005—when current President Evo Morales won—Manfred Reyes Villa ran for and was elected Governor as candidate of a citizen group named Cochabamba Unified Alliance, linked to ex-President Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga.

In those elections Reyes Villa obtained 47.6% of the votes, four and half points above candidate for Evo Morales’ Movement Towards Socialism party Jorge Alvarado’s 43%. He didn’t get an absolute majority but it was enough for him to be declared the first elected Governor of the state of Cochabamba. Of the 558,498 total votes, Reyes Villa got 246,417.

This backing, in addition to his old rivalry with Evo Morales whom he had always labeled a criminal and narco-trafficker, determined Reyes Villa’s first steps as Governor of Cochabamba. He consistently came out in favor of the Bolivian right-wing’s stances, such as support for all articles of the new constitution (that the Constituent Assembly ought to finish by August 6, 2007), being ratified by a two-thirds vote. Or, the autonomy project driven by the Santa Cruz oligarchy, which he signed onto around the July 2, 2006 referendum on state autonomy.

The right-wing and the Governor of Cochabamba lost in that referendum—“No” to autonomy overwhelmed the ballots. Of the 567, 809 total referendum and Constituent Assembly delegate votes, 331,600, or 63%, were against autonomy and 194,461, almost 37%, agreed with Reyes Villa’s “Yes” stance. But what does that have to do with our story? Everything.

Last December 14th, a happy and emboldened Manfred Reyes Villa, excited by the thousands of supporters he managed to gather in the Plaza de la Banderas, asked his people to support the “independence of Santa Cruz” and announced that he would convoke a new (statewide) referendum on autonomy.

In regard to his first statement, the Cochabamba Governor said it was a “lapsus” (though he didn’t add “brutus”). The second statement was to unleash the rage of the popular sectors—some sympathetic to the Evo government and some not, but those who voted in mass against autonomy last July.

The fight began there and would culminate in blood and death on January 11th. In complicity with the Cochabamba Civic Committee and other sectors, the Governor read the pulse of the social organizations, and encouraged racism and violence, as we will soon show. This man, Manfred Reyes Villa, professional military officer turned supporter of democracy, was a definite protaganist in this tragedy.