The prosecutor Washington sanctioned, and Bolivia arrested

Four days separate the State Department sanction against Roger Mariaca, accused of protecting drug trafficking, from his arrest and permanent removal by the Bolivian Assembly. In between, Rodrigo Paz’s government changed the law, 14 people were arrested and foreign officials appeared inside the legislature.

Four days separate the State Department sanction against Roger Mariaca, accused of protecting drug trafficking, from his arrest and permanent removal by the Bolivian Assembly. In between, Rodrigo Paz’s government changed the law, 14 people were arrested and foreign officials appeared inside the legislature. Mariaca was running an investigation that reached Fernando Cerimedo, a consultant tied to Paz’s campaign and to Donald Trump’s political circles.

On Sept. 28, 2026, Washington revoked the visas of Bolivian officials and named Mariaca as a sanctions target, accusing him of soliciting and accepting bribes to facilitate drug trafficking and help violent criminals escape justice. Mariaca denied it and called the measure political interference. Two days later, officers of the Special Police Intelligence Center arrested him at Viru Viru airport in Santa Cruz. Another 13 officials and employees were detained. The Bolivian government said it had dismantled a structure of institutional protection for drug trafficking linked to the Uruguayan Sebastián Marset and presented its own evidence against the accused. The prosecution service, for its part, called the arrest a “kidnapping” and denounced abuses in the operation. Mariaca had led the institution since 2024 and supervised an investigation against Fernando Cerimedo, an Argentine who had worked for Paz’s campaign. Cerimedo has been in pretrial detention since August 2026, accused of attempted femicide, and is also under investigation for the alleged protection of flights tied to drug trafficking. In the same week Washington sanctioned Mariaca, Cerimedo’s former partner released photographs of him with Donald Trump Jr. and other names tied to the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement. In March 2026, the State Department itself had published a photograph of Cerimedo beside Paz and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio during the Shield of the Americas summit in Florida.

While Mariaca was in custody, the Assembly passed a legal change that allowed his permanent suspension. During the session, lawmakers denounced the presence of people identified as employees of the embassies of Argentina, Peru and the United States. One of those present carried a computer and quick-response (QR) codes that, according to the lawmakers, were being used to offer money to legislators in exchange for votes to remove Mariaca. A later fact-check said the codes were for sharing WhatsApp contacts. The nature of the codes, however, is secondary to the central political fact: representatives of foreign governments were inside the Parliament during a vote meant to remove Bolivia’s attorney general. Mariaca was suspended 113 to 11, with three abstentions and one blank ballot. In the early hours of the next day, José Armando Urioste Viera was chosen as interim attorney general. Washington, which had made Mariaca a target days earlier, publicly celebrated the operation.

The episode comes as the United States openly restates its claim to predominance over the Western Hemisphere. The Donald Trump administration recovered the language of the Monroe Doctrine and began treating the region as a strategic priority, in a policy nicknamed “Donroe.” Bolivia is not isolated in that movement: Washington is expanding its diplomatic, military and economic pressure on Latin American governments while seeking to contain the presence of China, Russia and other actors on the continent. At the same time, the U.S. position in the international system has changed after decades of wars and interventions in the Middle East and Asia. The result is a foreign policy ever more concentrated on the region Washington has historically considered its sphere of influence. In Bolivia, that policy meets a government that is moving closer to the United States, faces an economic and social crisis and is reorganizing state institutions under pressure on its adversaries. Mariaca’s arrest, his rapid removal and the U.S. celebration of the outcome are not merely domestic events: they are a concrete episode in the contest over the political reorganization of the continent.

The sequence helps explain why the Bolivian case matters. Washington sanctions the attorney general; two days later, he is arrested; while he is detained, the government changes the law that allows his removal; the Assembly removes him; foreign representatives are present during the vote; and the U.S. government celebrates the outcome. At the same time, the man Mariaca was investigating had worked for the Bolivian president’s campaign and kept documented connections to Trump’s political circle. None of these facts exists in isolation. They are part of a longer story of intervention and contest over Latin America and of a new U.S. offensive to reassert its primacy in the hemisphere. The Mariaca case is therefore less an anomaly of Bolivian politics than a symptom of a larger transformation: as Washington seeks to regain strategic ground, Latin America returns to the center of its power politics.