The more information emerges about Mike Dwyer and the other four members of group, the more I am convinced that the Bolivian police operation was based on a combination of ineptitude, faulty intelligence and political pressure. It is also clear now that the operation was illegal (a fact denounced by the Bolivian 'College of Lawyers', the equivalent of our Law Society).
Eduardo Rozsa Flores had some extreme views about a wide range of issues, and was a very passionate individual. But he was, primarily, a journalist and writer. In recent years he was involved in film making, and had stated that his reason for returning to Bolivia was to work on a new film.
If he had been plotting to assassinate Morales or other Bolivian politicians, the composition of this group would make little or no sense.
Magyarosi Arpad, also shot dead, was a 28 year old singer and poet. He had participated in fundraising for the Special Olympics in Hungary. His videos can be found on YouTube, e.g.:
YouTube - Magyarosi Árpád - Próbáld meg
One of the detained men, Mario Tadic (like Mike Dwyer and Magyarosi Arpad, he appears as a friend on Flores' Facebook page), was 58 years old. He has told police that he was hired to look after correspondence.
The other detained man, Elod Toasó, had worked in a bank's IT department.
Eduardo Flores himself was almost 50 years old. His days as a fighter in the Balkans were long past.
This group makes far more sense as an amateur film crew, brought together by an ageing idealist with romantic notions.
Mike Dwyer, the youngest member of the group, may well have been taken on board as 'security man', or a kind of 'factotum'.
The key issue, to my mind, is that no member of the group had the skills necessary for a military operation that would involve confronting the entire State security apparatus of Bolivia. The only two with any military experience (Flores and Tadic) were late middle-aged men. Neither the singer nor the computer geek had any known experience of guns or explosives. Mike Dwyer's brief experience as an Airsoft enthusiast (just a step or two above paint-balling) hardly qualified him as a potential assassin.
A key piece of evidence, I believe, are Mike Dwyer's recent holiday photos (I posted a few several pages back, but nobody commented). Eduardo Rozsa Flores even appears in one of them. In these photos, neither Mike Dwyer nor any of the people he is pictured with look remotely like mercenaries plotting to assassinate anyone. It even looks as if Mike Dwyer was travelling with an Irish (or Irish-looking) girlfriend, and she too is pictured with Eduardo Flores. There is nothing secretive about any of this. The photos are even accessible on his Facebook page.
The fact that Eduardo Rozsa Flores has Mike Dwyer, Mario Tadic and Magyarosi Arpad as Facebook friends is another indication that this group was anything but secretive.
The police say that the group was under surveillance, and was constantly moving from place to place. Mike Dwyer's holiday photos even chronicle those moves. Having myself travelled around South America (including Bolivia) on several occasions, I now shudder to think how my own 'constant moves' could have been misinterpreted!!
Many other aspects of the incident (lack of evidence for a shoot-out, hotel Manager's evidence that the group was in residence at the time of the explosion at the cardinal's house, illegality of the police operation, etc.) have been discussed elsewhere.
My own guess is that, following Evo Morales' claim that there were assassination plots, the assault on the Cardinal's residence brought pressure on the Federal authorities in La Paz to produce culprits. Sketchy local police reports of a group of men travelling around the country, and arriving at a hotel in Santa Cruz shortly before the incident at the cardinal's house, may have sparked a panic reaction in La Paz, and the Special Forces unit was dispatched to Santa Cruz. They appear to have acted impetuously, without the necessary judicial authorization, and without any prior investigation. The Special Forces entered the hotel convinced that they were about to confront a group of dangerous mercenaries, and that was that! In fact, the group comprised two almost-elderly former Balkans combatants, a singer, a computer geek and Mike Dwyer! This was no assassination squad! I am convinced that they were hired, haphazardly, by Eduardo Rozsa Flores as part of a film-making project in his native Bolivia. It looks like Bolivia was the wrong place at the wrong time for
all of them! Given the political tensions,
it was not a time for a group of amateur film makers to be travelling around the country without arousing suspicions.
At this stage, many pieces of the puzzle remain missing. But I will be very surprised if further investigations do not point in the above direction.
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Originally Posted by Slacker
I do care that there is a son, brother, freind, ex-work colleague who was killed in one of the most brutal ways imaginable.
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