Early last week, the Trump administration’s State Department announced visa restrictions on a group of Latin American officials it accused of corruption and of “undermining democratically-selected governments.” Of the twenty-one people it targeted in Bolivia, Washington chose to name only one: Bolivia’s sitting attorney general, Roger Mariaca.

A little over twenty-four hours later, on September 30, Bolivian police detained Mariaca at Viru Viru International Airport in Santa Cruz while agents raided prosecutors’ offices in Sucre and Santa Cruz. He was taken without a warrant before the legislature had taken any steps to remove him from office, as required by the constitution and, as the government itself later acknowledged, with intelligence supplied by the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), an agency with a particularly sordid history in Bolivia. It looked like an order sent straight from Washington.

“The arrest of Bolivia’s attorney general just after the US rescinded his visa,” journalist Benjamin Swift, based in La Paz, told Jacobin, “is a clear signal of the United States’ growing influence in Bolivia.”