Former US ambassador to Bolivia Victor Manuel Rocha, who has been charged with espionage for Cuba for four decades, told a judge on Thursday that he intends to plead guilty.
The 73-year-old ex-diplomat was detained in December for “one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign agent.”
Victor Rocha pleaded not guilty two weeks ago to accusations of conspiring to pose as a foreign government agent, but he informed Judge Beth Bloom at a pre-trial conference on Thursday that he wanted to amend his plea. The court set a date of April 12 for Rocha to formally amend his plea to guilty and be sentenced.
Who is Victor Rocha?
Victor Rocha, a naturalized American citizen originally from Colombia, allegedly began assisting Havana as a covert agent for Cuba’s General Directorate of Intelligence (DGI) in 1981 and continued his espionage efforts until his arrest. In announcing Rocha’s arrest, US Attorney General Merrick Garland stated that he had “repeatedly referred to the United States as ‘the enemy'” and “bragged about the significance of his efforts.”
Rocha began working for the State Department in 1981 and worked his way up to become a career diplomat, serving in Havana, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, the Dominican Republic, and Washington. From 1994 to 1995, Victor Rocha served on President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council, and from 2000 to 2002, he was Ambassador to Bolivia under Clinton and George W. Bush. He also advised the US military command in Cuba.
The criminal complaint against Victor Rocha describes how, beginning in November 2022, he “behaved as a Cuban agent,” praising the communist-ruled island’s late leader Fidel Castro and “using the term ‘we’ to describe himself and Cuba.” He admitted traveling to Havana in 2016 or 2017 to meet with his DGI handlers and asked the undercover agent to send “my warmest regards to the Direccion,” referring to the DGI.
Assassination claim
Rocha also faces a lawsuit filed Thursday in Florida by the widow of Cuban dissident Oswaldo Paya. She claims Rocha was responsible for the death of her late husband, the 2002 laureate of the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for Human Rights, in an automobile accident in Cuba in 2012.
According to one court document, “the Cuban terrorist dictatorship assassinated Mr. Paya with impunity” as a direct result of Roche’s “actions as a covert agent for the Cuban terrorist dictatorship and its intelligence-gathering mission against the United States.”
Another Cuban dissident, Harold Cepero, perished in the same car accident, but two other passengers survived: Spanish politician Angel Carromero and Swedish conservative politician Jens Aron Modig. Cuban officials put the crash on Carromero, the driver, although he believes the car was hit by a Cuban secret service vehicle.