2023-12-05 01:08:55
US prosecutors on Monday accused Víctor Manuel Rocha, the country’s former ambassador to Bolivia, of working as an undercover agent for the Cuban government for four decades, according to the Department of Justice.
“This action exposes one of the most far-reaching and long-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign agent,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland in a statement detailing the accusation against the former diplomat, detained on Friday in Miami (Florida).
According to the complaint, Rocha, a 73-year-old American born in Colombia, “secretly supported the Republic of Cuba and its clandestine intelligence gathering mission against the United States” from around 1981 until now.
Read more: On video | Marta Lucía Zamora was fired with a street of honor and amidst applause from the State Defense Agency
To fulfill his mission, the defendant obtained employment in the US State Department between 1981 and 2002 “in positions that provided him access to non-public information, including classified information, and the ability to influence US foreign policy,” the report indicates. release.
After leaving the State Department, Rocha was an advisor to the US Southern Command, a joint command of the US armed forces whose area of responsibility includes Cuba.
Between 1999 and mid-2002, he was the US ambassador in La Paz, where he caused great controversy by threatening to withdraw US aid to the Bolivian war on drugs if the leftist and former coca grower unionist Evo Morales won the elections.
A “meticulous” activity
Rocha admitted to having worked for Cuba for “40 years” in several meetings in 2022 and 2023 with an undercover FBI agent posing as a representative of Cuba’s General Directorate of Intelligence.
During these meetings, Rocha celebrated her activity as a Cuban intelligence agent, which she described as “meticulous” and “very disciplined,” and she referred again and again to the United States as “the enemy” and to her Cuban contacts as “comrades.”
The Prosecutor’s Office accuses him of conspiring to act as an agent of a foreign government without prior notification to the attorney general, of acting as an agent of a foreign government without prior notification to those responsible for the Public Prosecutor’s Office, and of using a passport obtained through a false declaration.
Read more: Cuban baseball player Iván Prieto defected after Cuba’s defeat in the World Classic in Miami
According to the New York Times, Rocha appeared this Monday before a federal court in Miami where he did not make any statement and broke down crying as his family left the courtroom.
A prosecutor indicated that more charges against him could soon be brought before a grand jury, the American newspaper added.
The State Department praised the work of the security forces in unmasking Rocha and indicated that the investigation continues.
“In the coming days, weeks and months we will work with our intelligence community partners to evaluate the full long-term national security implications of this matter,” department spokesman Matthew Miller said.
In Bolivia, Evo Morales, who was president between 2006 and 2019, reacted to the accusation of the former ambassador on the social network X.
“Let the renovators learn. First, when it suits it, the empire uses them to persecute, massacre and repress the indigenous and popular movement. When it no longer serves it, it processes and defenestrates them. “Manuel Rocha, while he was subservient to the US, enjoyed the impunity and reverence of the neoliberals,” he wrote.
Numerous cases of espionage have tarnished relations between the United States and Cuba, enemies since the island’s communist revolution in 1959, in the midst of the Cold War.
In 2001, Ana Belén Montes, a military intelligence analyst, was arrested for espionage after admitting that she had been collecting information for Cuba for almost a decade.
The CIA, the US secret service, made numerous attempts to assassinate Cuban leaders after the failed landing at the Bay of Pigs in 1961.
Relations between Washington and the communist island, subject to a US embargo since 1962, remain tense.
#accused #diplomat #Colombian #origin #agent #service #Cuba