Mr. García Linera, the vice president, at first said the three were killed in a 30-minute gunfight, but an insurance report filed for the hotel and obtained by La Razón, a newspaper, apparently found no signs of an exchange of gunfire. Two men taken captive at the hotel, Elod Toazo, a Hungarian, and Mario Tadik, a Bolivian, seem to have surrendered without a fight.

“What happened was the killing of three people who were sleeping, which means murder,” said Óscar Ortiz, president of Bolivia’s Senate and a top opponent of Mr. Morales.

Alfredo Rada, a senior minister, made things worse when he went on television with images of men in Santa Cruz clasping weapons, claiming they were linked to those killed. But the men in the photos, lifted from a Facebook page, debunked the claim by explaining that they practiced “airsoft,” a game in which participants fire at one another with pellet guns.

A related quibble: Josh Marshall calls it “one of the Stories You Need the Times For”. Not so! The Wall Street Journal has been doing good work on this story all last week, whereas the Times only ran a brief blurb two weeks ago and is now merely playing catch-up. Coincidentally, it seems as if almost all newspapers outside of the Journal have lost circulation in the last six months.

Flores seems to have been a colorful character. An author, an actor, and a professional revolutionary, he starred in a semi-fictionalized movie of his own life (now added to my Netflix queue). From watching the first few minutes of the film on Google Video, it seems like he grew up with impeccable leftist revolutionary credentials, with an idealist Jewish playwright father who got kicked out of the Bolivian Communist Party for his clandestine work with Che Guevara in the jungles.

What changed him from a fiery revolutionary to a establishmentarian counter-revolutionary, one wonders. Could it be that totalitarian communists are taking the place of fascists in those fevered minds looking to pick up arms and fight for a cause? More to come as I find it.