After the Attorney General announced an investigation into Jeanine Áñez for allegedly traveling to Brazil to meet Jair Bolsonaro, the former President denied that she had met the Brazilian President and questioned the accuracy of this information published by an Argentine newspaper.
“Former President Áñez has urged the defense to strongly state that she never held a face-to-face meeting with Mr Jair Bolsonaro and was less likely to use the President’s plane to carry out actions that threaten the internal security of our state; and not even before and during his tenure as president,” the former president’s attorneys said in a statement.
However, Áñez thanked Bolsonaro for the support he received after his imprisonment in March last year.
The case came after Argentina’s Página 12 newspaper confirmed that Bolsonaro had revealed that he once dated Áñez, but also claimed that the Brazilian President’s video had been removed from YouTube.
Añez expressed her “serious doubts about the veracity of the news distribution” because the Argentine newspaper does not show the alleged video of Bolsonaro and confines itself to saying that it has been deleted from YouTube. He also questioned that the source of the information for Página 12 was an alleged diplomat speaking anonymously.
In 2020, the same Argentine newspaper reported that the presidential plane had made flights to Brazil, according to a recording from an aircraft tracking website. Then the Bolivian Air Force (FAB) denied that these foreign trips had taken place.
Añez’s attorney, Norka Cuéllar, ruled out that Áñez had left the country during her tenure as it would mean she would have left command of the country to Eva Copa, who was President of the Senate. He pointed out that this is easy to verify.
Since the origin of the information about meetings with Bolsonaro was questionable, the defense assumed that these new investigations announced against Añez “would have the sole purpose of generating elements to ensure her conviction in an alleged coup d’etat, and that in more than 10 months into the trial, no evidence was produced.”
