Bolivia Supreme Court orders release of ex-president Jeanine Áñez

# Bolivia Supreme Court orders release of ex-president Jeanine Áñez

Bolivia’s Supreme Court has overturned the 10-year prison sentence of former interim president Jeanine Áñez, ending a conviction that had made her one of the country’s highest-profile political prisoners and reopening a long-running debate over how her 2019 takeover of the presidency should be judged.

Supreme Court President Romer Saucedo said the sentence had been annulled and that Áñez would be released during the day. The court’s reasoning was procedural as much as political: Saucedo said she should have been tried by a special court that handles crimes committed by lawmakers in the course of their duties, rather than by the ordinary criminal justice system. He also said her rights had been violated.

Áñez, a former senator, became interim leader in 2019 after Evo Morales fled the country amid mass protests over alleged election fraud during his bid for a fourth term. Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president, has long argued that he was the victim of a coup, but that claim was dismissed by many in Bolivia and abroad, in part because the army never took power itself. The political context has always shaped the legal one, and the court’s latest move lands squarely in that disputed history.

She was arrested in 2021 after Morales’s socialist party returned to power in 2020. In 2022, she was convicted of illegally assuming the presidency and sentenced to 10 years in prison over an alleged plot to oust Morales. The Supreme Court’s action does not erase the fact that she had been convicted; it voids that sentence on legal grounds and shifts the case into a different judicial frame.

The ruling also underlines how Bolivia’s justice system has been pulled into the country’s post-Morales political conflict. Supporters of Morales say the events of 2019 were an anti-democratic break. Áñez’s defenders say she stepped in during a constitutional crisis and that the courts were used to punish a political rival after the socialist movement returned to power.

Áñez herself did not immediately react on social media, but on the previous day she had posted that she would never regret having served her country when it needed her. That line, repeated widely after the ruling, captured the way she has tried to cast her role: not as a usurper, but as a caretaker in an emergency.

The immediate practical result of the decision is her release. The longer-term result may be even more significant. By annulling the sentence on jurisdictional grounds, the court has effectively signalled that the original case was handled in the wrong forum. That gives her lawyers a stronger legal position and gives Bolivia’s political class yet another reason to revisit the events of 2019.

For now, the Supreme Court has not resolved the broader historical argument over Morales’s ouster. What it has done is remove the prison sentence that had defined Áñez’s case for years and move her out of detention on the same day the court spoke.