Thomas Becker - The 2019 Senkata and Sacaba Massacres of Bolivia (2023)

Within the framework of the International Human Rights Day, the Embassy of the Plurinational State of Bolivia hosted a conversation meant to remember the massacres carried out by the military forces against the civilian populations of Sacaba and Senkata. In 2019, the constitutional order was broken in Bolivia after a police mutiny and the Armed Forces pressure to the elected president to resign, a situation that led to the illegitimate possession of Jeannine Añez as de facto president. Faced with growing popular protests against the regime, Añez promulgated a decree that exempted the military from criminal responsibility, giving them carte blanche to repress the popular protest. On November 15 and 18, in the face of growing mobilizations against the unconstitutional government of Añez, the military massacred the population of Sacaba and Senkata that was exercising its right to protest in defense of democracy, staining the country with blood and mourning. The Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (CIDH), which carried out an investigation into what happened in the country, concluded that massacres by military and police forces against civilians were recorded in Bolivia, including summary executions, where at least 37 people lost their lives and hundreds received serious injuries, both physical and psychological. At the Embassy we believe that these types of activities are fundamental for the construction of a process of memory, truth and justice, so that we never again allow the violation of human rights by the armed and security forces that are owed to the people and are there to defend it and not repress it.

Thomas Becker is a Senior Clinical Supervisor at the University Network for Human Rights. He has spent most of the past two decades working on human rights issues in Bolivia. He has conducted human rights work around the world, investigating torture and extrajudicial killings of Adivasis in India and Sahrawis in Western Sahara; documenting war crimes in Lebanon and Nagorno-Karabakh; examining land rights in South Africa and Palestine; exposing death squads in Honduras and Colombia. Before joining University Network, Becker taught as a Clinical Instructor at Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation, The Atlantic, Le Monde, El País, Vice Magazine, Al Jazeera, BBC, NPR, and Univision, among others. His book, Coup: A Story of Violence and Resistance in Bolivia, co-authored with Linda Farthing, was a finalist for the Duke University Juan E. Mendez Book Award for Human Rights.

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