Bolivian General Luis Arce-Gómez, who served as Minister of the Interior in the 1980-1981 government of General Luis García Meza, has been extradited to Bolivia after serving 20 years in a US prison for drug trafficking.

The story in the UK Guardian:

n his pomp he was known as the “minister for cocaine”, a corrupt and ruthless military despot who collaborated with drug cartels and terrorised Bolivia.

Luis Arce-Gómez, interior minister in the Andean nation’s 1980-81 dictatorship, made an infamous warning to foes to “walk around with their wills under their arms”.

But when the former burly colonel returned home yesterday he was a shrivelled, white-haired figure too feeble to even walk into the prison where he is expected to end his days.
The United States has deported the 71-year-old to face justice in Bolivia after he spent almost 20 years in a Florida prison for drug trafficking.

Arce-Gómez, who once recruited the Nazi Klaus Barbie as an adviser, faces 30 years in La Paz’s Chonchocoro prison for at least eight crimes including genocide and political assassinations.

President Evo Morales thanked the US for deporting a figure whose name once inspired dread among leftists, trade unionists and journalists. “It is a historic day for human rights.”

FBI agents escorted Arce-Gómez on the flight from Miami to La Paz where upon arrival he was given oxygen to adjust to the 3,800-meter altitude, covered in a blanket and wooly hat and ferried past astonished onlookers in a wheelchair to a waiting ambulance and convoy of police vehicles.

It was an ignominious homecoming for a man who once typified the hubris and viciousness of South America’s right wing military regimes.

Arce-Gómez was an ambitious army officer when the 1980 “cocaine coup” financed by drug traffickers brought his ally General Luis García Meza to power.

Appointed interior minister, he wasted no time arresting, torturing and murdering the regime’s real or imagined foes. Records show at least 93 dead, 26 disappeared and 4,000 detained, many of them leftists and union leaders. Barbie, the “butcher of Lyon” who fled to Bolivia after the second world war, gave tips on repression.

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