The Briefing
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The situation is simple. On August 9, 2005, the Bolivian Government awarded me the status of political refugee under the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. This was formally awarded by CONARE, the National Committee for Refugees, which is coordinated by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and includes representatives of Immigration. Eventually, my local documents had been issued in the past by Immigration, those harassing me in the last year for not having documents. That had been done at the same office I was now visiting.
Later, in July 2009, I was savagely attacked by a Bolivian-Israeli team, see An Attack’s Anatomy: On Israeli Terror in Bolivia. The local police helped to wipe out their tracks in the aftermath. Since then, I refuse to rent rooms from Bolivians—who had sold me out—and stayed in cheap guesthouses. In all my encounters with the local government I always asked to leave the country under the resettlement options enabled by the above-mentioned 1967 Protocol. It was always refused with no explanations. At a certain point, my document expired and I got locked into the guesthouse. I can’t rent a room; I can’t switch establishment. I became a de facto prisoner of the Bolivian government, which kept denying me documents and was declared Political Prisoner of Bolivia. Such document is defined as a basic right, and cannot be denied by any government; Bolivia claims that since I don’t rent a room, it cannot award me the document. This claim contradicts international law; in the USA, several types of documents serve this purpose.
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The situation was ridiculous. In a good example of what the Bolivian culture is, the inspector asked me about what I had just described as if his institution wasn’t the one issuing the documents, as if they didn’t have my file, as if we were meeting for the first time. I complied. Over time I learned the best is to tire them off with their own clumsy rhetoric. When I was finished he asked: “Why don’t you issue new Israeli documents?” I repeated what he already knew: “The Israeli Embassy left Bolivia after the Black October of 2003. Because they left, I arrived. In 2009, President Evo Morales broke the relationship. I can’t do that from here; even if I could I wouldn’t venture to enter an Israeli embassy. I got refuge because of their violencetowards me.” At this point there was nothing else to say. “Wait here,” he said to me and entered the inspectors’ room.
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