Luis Arce (left) and Evo Morales (right) during a meeting in 2020. Photo: AP/file photo.
The resolution by Bolivia’s Supreme Electoral Tribunal and the Plurinational Constitutional Court canceling the legal status of the Bolivian National Action Party (PAN-Bol), the political organization that attempted to register former President Evo Morales as a presidential candidate, was drafted on the computer in the office of the Ministry of Justice, headed until a few weeks ago by Cesar Siles.
This was revealed by the metadata of the file sent via WhatsApp by the then Minister of Justice, who is currently facing investigation for judicial corruption, to the Supreme Electoral Tribunal Member, Tahuichi Tahuich Quispe.
The document, “Resolution Suspension of the Pan-Bol Party,” was created on May 5, 2025, according to the independent expert report analyzing the contents of Cesar Siles’s phone. Two days later, on May 7, a nearly identical text was approved and signed by the Supreme Electoral Tribunal. This was the basis for the Plurinational Constitutional Court to definitively cancel the legal status of the PAN-Bol party a month later.
This latest revelation, derived from a review of Siles’s phone and subjected to computer forensics, adds to the one made public in Bolivia on July 1, which revealed a network of judicial manipulation orchestrated from the highest levels of Luis Arce’s government to disqualify Evo Morales politically and electorally.
The documents reveal at least two bank transfers made through a bank in Panama by President Arce’s wife, Brigida Lourdes Durán Romero, to the account of member Tauchi: the first for US $30,000 and the second for US $170,000.
Diario Red has had access to these files, totaling 12 gigabytes of information, which show that former minister Siles and electoral representative Tahuichi maintained a fluid exchange of documents, court rulings, and exchange of cash deposits and airline tickets for trips that were not part of their institutional duties.
The messages were analyzed by a computer expert who confirmed their authenticity. Metadata proves that the chats originated from CĂ©sar Siles’s phone and that their content was not altered.
Trial against Siles
On June 14, CĂ©sar Siles Bazán, 51, resigned from the position he had held for the previous eight months as Bolivia’s minister of justice. He did so amid a political crisis, with protests and blockades by the grassroots movement demanding that Evo Morales be allowed to register as a candidate. Siles had filed a criminal complaint against Morales with the Prosecutor’s Office.
The minister posted his resignation letter to President Luis Arce on his X account. In it, he denounced “rumors and false accusations.” “For my good name, my family, and the people who know how hard it is to start from the bottom and maintain an impeccable track record, and in order to avoid any new pretext from those who insist on perpetuating themselves in power and seek to destabilize the country, affect government management, or prevent the general elections, I submit my resignation to you as the country’s highest authority,” he wrote.
Curiously, he requested that his resignation take effect by Tuesday, June 17, to facilitate an orderly transition to the new head of the Ministry of Justice (“to guarantee an orderly transition”). However, Arce swore in the new minister of justice, Jessica Arancibia, on Monday the 16th. Four days later, on Thursday the 19th, Siles was detained in La Paz while voluntarily appearing before the Prosecutor’s Office to testify in an investigation stemming from the leak of an audio recording in which he offered protection to a judge in order to issue an irregular ruling.
The Prosecutor’s Office accuses him of influence peddling and manipulating a judicial process to force the removal of Judge Fanny Coaquira, elected by popular vote in the December judicial elections. The accusation stems from a separate leaked audio recording between Siles and another judge, also detained, in which Siles offers protection to issue an the ruling. Eight other suspects are implicated in the case, including the judge himself, a Supreme Court member, and a magistrate.
The new revelations also show that the Coaquira case was just one piece of a larger plan: to eliminate all dissenting voices within the judicial and electoral systems.
The operation to ban Morales
Evo Morales’s political organization accused Siles of illegally influencing the Constitutional Court and the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, violating the Constitution and the independence of the branches of government, to prevent the former president’s possible candidacy. The latest leak of WhatsApp messages from former Minister Siles appears to prove the Evo supporters right.
In the first package of leaks reviewed, bank transactions were identified from President Arce’s wife to the electoral member through Tower Bank of Panama, as were plane tickets and two PDF documents titled “Full Court Report” and “Background of Observed Acronyms,” dated May 12, 2025. On the same day, the minister at that time, Siles, sent Tahuchi a document titled “PAN-BOL SUSPENSION RESOLUTION.”
Second revelation
Now, a new set of leaks shows that the PAN-Bol suspension ruling was drafted in Siles’s office. Accessing the file of the aforementioned document in the Microsoft Word text editor, the document “Resolution Suspension PAN-Bol,” shows that it contains 12 pages of text, with only nine pages written. The metadata shows that the document in question was drafted on the computer of the Ministry of Justice Office, as evidenced by the “source” data of the aforementioned file, on the line that states: “Authors Ministry of Justice Office.”
The metadata of a text file is a set of data that describes the file’s characteristics, such as its creation or modification date, size, the program and author that generated it, who modified the file, and much more. Data about the author who created the document cannot be modified from the moment the document was created.
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/JRE/SL
