Bolivia’s attorney general arrested on suspicion of money laundering and drug trafficking

Bolivia’s US-sanctioned attorney general, Roger Mariaca, has been arrested on suspicion of money laundering and drug trafficking, while police found packages of smuggled cash at his home, the government said on Thursday.

Mariaca was arrested on Wednesday evening in the eastern city of Santa Cruz, two days after the United States revoked his visa over his alleged links to drug trafficking.

“A criminal organisation embedded in the justice system has been dismantled,” Interior Minister Marco Antonio Oviedo said at a press conference.

Oviedo said that in the early hours of Thursday, four people were caught trying to take packages of money out of Mariaca’s home in an ambulance.

A video released by the interior ministry showed police removing bundles of money from the ambulance’s panels.

Oviedo said the Attorney General’s Office, “headed by Roger Mariaca, became a criminal organisation dedicated to protecting, encouraging and shielding narcoterrorism.”

According to the Reuters news agency, an official from the prosecutor’s office reported Mariaca’s “kidnapping” during a live broadcast. Local media said Mariaca was detained at Viru Viru International Airport, Reuters reported.

The US State Department said on Monday that Mariaca took “bribes to facilitate drug trafficking and to help violent criminals evade justice.” Mariaca has denied the accusations.

“The institutions should have worked earlier and not now that things are not working. What statement have our institutions given, it is a shame to say it,” he said.

Oviedo said Mariaca’s arrest was carried out with “the cooperation of the US government” as part of the “war on terrorism.”

In total, four prosecutors, six employees of the public prosecutor’s office and the four people found in the ambulance were arrested.

The raids come as Bolivia’s centre-right president, Rodrigo Paz, who took office in November 2025, seeks to strengthen ties with the United States after two decades of socialist rule marked by mutual hostility.

On Monday, the US revoked the visas of 12 Bolivian officials, and nine other Bolivian nationals who do not currently have visas were made ineligible to obtain them.

In March, Paz brought Bolivia into the “Shield of the Americas,” a US-led alliance of right-wing Latin American governments to fight transnational organised crime.