Juan Pablo Baro Rebolledo (21 October 1951-) was a Major-General of the Bolivian Army and the commander of its La Unidad special forces unit.
Biography[]
A news article about Baro
Juan Pablo Baro Rebolledo was born in Rio Uruqui, Bolivia in 1951. While Baro befriended the cocalero Rudolfo Yana at a young age, he joined the police force with the intent to destroy the country's foreign and domestic cartels and break Bolivia's reliance on the cocaine industry. He became popular among his subordinates for his tough-on-crime approach, and he was entrusted with commanding the La Unidad military police special forces unit during the Bolivian Drug War. In this capacity, he caved to public pressure and the persistent political threat of the militarized Santa Blanca Cartel and organized a ceasefire between the two organizations. In exchange for the cartel keeping its violence to a minimum, it would be allowed to operate freely in Bolivia. Baro's daughter, upset with her father's decision, changed her name to Erendira Buendia and became a public schoolteacher as a means of atoning for her father's sins.
Baro soon came under the cartel's control, accepting bribes and offering Unidad's protection services to the cartel's illegal operations. His belief that drugs eliminated the weak helped him justify his increasingly corrupt behavior, although it led his subordinate Manuel Moran to defect to the Kataris 26 rebels. In 2019, American Ghost Recon operatives kidnapped Baro's daughter and forced her to set up a meeting between them and her father. Baro, who was at the time failing to persuade the President and his bureaucracy to take action against the cartel, immediately returned to Flor de Oro province to arrange an ambush of the Americans. The surprise attack was thwarted and Baro captured, and, in captivity, he was persuaded by CIA agent Karen Bowman to work with his trustworthy army contacts to begin the process of steering Unidad away from collusion with the cartel.