📰 From the news · Impersonating a real college/agent
Fourteen years, a string of senior posts, a registration number belonging to a doctor in Santa Cruz: the Riberalta hospital director with no medical degree
In Bolivia, as anywhere else, a doctor's university degree and professional registration are supposed to be checked each time he or she is appointed to a public post. In Riberalta, a river town in the Amazonian department of Beni, a man held senior medical appointments for more than a decade before anyone did. The case was uncovered not by the hospitals or health funds that employed him but by the local medical college, acting on anonymous tips.
According to a report by the agency ANF carried by eju.tv (14 June 2024), anonymous complaints led the Colegio Médico de Riberalta to investigate. Its president, Lina Hinojosa, said the college gathered documentation showing the man had no medical degree: the Universidad de Aquino Bolivia and the Ministry of Education confirmed that no degree was registered in his name, and the registration number he used belonged to a doctor in Santa Cruz. The college filed a complaint with the Ministerio Público for use of a falsified instrument and unlawful practice of the profession, and he was apprehended after being found displaying a fake general medicine title.
A La Razón report, also carried by eju.tv the same day, said he had held posts since 2011 as director of the Hospital Materno Infantil de Riberalta, coordinator of the local health network and chief physician at the Caja Nacional de Salud and the Caja Petrolera, that the investigation found he had practised for about 14 years, and that police detained him on Friday 14 June 2024. At a press conference Hinojosa said the college had hoped the complaints would prove false, that the institutions had confirmed "this gentleman has no title", and that the college would ask for the inquiry to extend to those who appointed him.
The mechanism was a borrowed number. A registration belonging to a real doctor in another department satisfied every appointing authority for 14 years, because none of them asked the university or the ministry whether a degree existed behind it. It took a professional body acting on anonymous tips to make the two enquiries that ended it.
For students, Bolivia is a popular and inexpensive destination for medicine, and this case shows what a weak verification culture looks like from the inside. If you are choosing a Bolivian faculty or a hospital for rotations, check that the institution and programme appear on the Ministry of Education's lists and ask how the hospital verifies its own staff. If you are a patient, ask for the doctor's registration and confirm it with the Colegio Médico; a number that belongs to someone else is the oldest trick there is.
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This is a news-sourced case summary written by the TrustMBBS team, not a first-person account; see the sources above. They reflect one person's experience and are not a verdict on any institution. Report your own: Report a scam or tell your story.