Bolivia's ex-president targeted in US lawsuit over deaths

Eight-year-old Marlene Nancy Rojas Ramos was at home in Warista, Bolivia, when she peeked out a second-story window at the anti-government protests erupting in the streets and a bullet tore through her chest.

She fell onto a bed where her mother, Etelvina Ramos Mamani, was lying with a newborn baby, and died in her mother's arms.

Four-and-a-half years later, Ramos and her husband are among 10 Bolivians suing the country's former president and defense minister over the government response to the protests, which killed 67 civilians and injured 400 more.

This week, a federal judge in Maryland consolidated two lawsuits filed last fall, one in Maryland against former Bolivian President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, and the other in Miami against former defense minister Jose Carlos Sanchez Berzain.

U.S. District Judge Adalberto Jordan in Miami, who will hear the combined case, gave the State and Justice departments until June 1 to submit their views on the case, noting in his order that it has "foreign policy repercussions."

The plaintiffs claim the two men have escaped accountability in Bolivia by relocating to the U.S. and must be forced to pay damages for the deaths.

"We hope the judiciary in the United States will give a fair trial for the victims and defendants. We are asking for justice," said Juan Patricio Quispe Mamani, whose brother was killed during the fall 2003 protests.

Sanchez de Lozada, who lives in exile in Chevy Chase, Md., and Berzain, a resident of Key Biscayne, say the case should be thrown out. They contend they were doing their constitutional duty to quell a violent uprising and that the events and people involved are purely Bolivian.

"The actions I took at a time of national crisis in 2003 were necessary to protect lives and property and restore law and order," Sanchez de Lozada said in written statement to The Associated Press. "Regrettably, lives were lost among both the government forces and armed protesters."

Bolivia's ambassador to the U.S., Gustavo Guzman, scoffed at the claim that that the two former leaders acted properly during the protests.

"No Bolivian law states that part of the function of state men is murder," Guzman said in an e-mail.

The so-called "Black October" protests swelled into riots following years of resentment and poverty endured by Bolivia's indigenous Aymara people. The situation reached a crisis when peasants tried to block roads, set fire to a tourist hotel and mounted a violent blockade of the capital, La Paz.

Evo Morales, at the time a first-term congressman, turned the events into a movement that eventually won him the presidency. Morales, an Aymaran Indian, is a close ally of Venezuela's leftist President Hugo Chavez, while the Sanchez de Lozada government had the backing of the Bush administration.

Berzain, the former defense minister, called the Miami lawsuit "political persecution" by Morales. But attorneys for the plaintiffs said the two former leaders put themselves under jurisdiction of U.S. law by moving to this country after leaving power.

"They have made this their home. How can they be surprised that they would be subject to U.S. law?" said Judith Chomsky, a cooperating attorney with the nonprofit Center for Constitutional Rights in New York. "This is in a sense the only place where these people might get justice."

Similar cases brought in U.S. courts have met with some success. Last month a federal judge in Miami ordered that a former Peruvian army major pay $37 million to families of victims killed by his troops 1985.

In 2002, a federal jury in West Palm Beach held two retired Salvadoran generals living in Florida responsible for atrocities committed during El Salvador's civil war two decades earlier. The men were ordered to pay $54.6 million to three torture victims.

Howard Gutman, a Washington attorney for Sanchez de Lozada and Berzain, said the lawsuit should be dismissed because U.S. courts have no jurisdiction over actions taken by foreign leaders under their own country's laws. The protests ultimately resulted in the government's ouster on Oct. 17, 2003.

"The Lozada government was toppled illegally," Gutman said. "In essence, the violent demonstrations were a way for the wrongful actors in Bolivia to get back at their former political rivals."

The exiled Bolivian officials have received support from four former legal advisers to the State Department, including William H. Taft IV, who held the post from 2001-2005. They filed a brief in Miami arguing that it's not for U.S. courts to decide whether foreign governments act appropriately in their own countries.

"Formulating and implementing U.S. foreign policy is and should remain the responsibility of the president of the United States, not our federal courts," their brief says. "We hope the State Department joins us in urging the court to dismiss these claims."