With the leaders of the labor federation on a hunger strike, Paz directed the police and military to round up the country’s top two hundred union leaders, load them on planes and fly them to remote jails in the Amazon.42 According to Reuters, the detainees included “the leadership of the Bolivian Labor Federation and other senior trade union officials,” and they were taken “to isolated villages in the Amazon basin in northern Bolivia, where their movements [were] restricted.”43 It was a mass kidnapping, complete with a ransom demand: the prisoners would be released only if the unions called
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