MIAMI — A former minister in the Bolivian government who has been in federal custody since 2021 was sentenced to nearly six years in prison on Wednesday for laundering hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes through a Miami bank in exchange for steering an inflated tear-gas contract to a South Florida company.
Arturo Carlos Murillo Prijic, 59, admitted as part of his plea agreement in Miami federal court that he received at least $532,000 in bribe payments from a Broward-based company so it could land a $5.6 million contract to supply tear gas and other non-lethal equipment to the Bolivian Ministry of Defense in 2019.
But the actual tear gas deal — obtained by the former conservative official to combat socialist protesters in Bolivia — cost only $3.3 million, with the balance of about $2.3 million used for profits and bribes, federal prosecutors said.
