By Social Links for Victor Nava |
The former US ambassador to Bolivia was sentenced to 15 years in prison on Friday after admitting to a decades-long campaign of spying on the US government for communist Cuba.
Miami-based US District Judge Beth Bloom accepted Victor Manuel Rocha’s guilty plea on two counts, including acting as an agent of a foreign government, before handing down his decade-and-a-half-long sentence and a $500,000 fine, the maximum penalty allowed.
Rocha, 73, was indicted last December, in a case that Attorney General Merrick Garland described as “one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the US government by a foreign agent.”
Rocha was sentenced to the maximum penalty allowed for his charges.
“Today’s plea and sentencing brings to an end more than four decades of betrayal and deceit by the defendant,” Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen said Friday.
“Rocha admitted to acting as an agent of the Cuban government at the same time he held numerous positions of trust in the U.S. government, a staggering betrayal of the American people and an acknowledgement that every oath he took to the United States was a lie,” the Justice Department official added.
