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Is Posada on U.S. soil planning new terrorist attacks? BY JEAN-GUY ALLARD
—Special for Granma International— OF all the hypothesis surrounding the flight of Luis Posada Carriles since his “disappearance” on Thursday, August 27, from the
immigration area of the San Pedro Sula Airport in Honduras, we should not rule out his entry into U.S. territory, as suspected by several analysts and which is perfectly conceivable. Moreover, nor should his eventual reappearance in the context of fresh assassination plots come as any surprise. In her book Cuba Confidential, (published just two years ago) Ann-Louise Bardach, the most celebrated journalist in the United States with respect to the Cuban-American mafia, concludes more than 50 pages devoted to Luis
Posada Carriles with a bizarre declaration that describes him as a habitué of Miami’s terrorist circles and explicitly predicts that he would soon be strolling through the streets of Miami. “Officially” an active CIA
agent from 1963 until February 13, 1976, as has been confirmed in declassified documents from the Church Commission, Luis Posada Carriles simultaneously acted as a specialist in demolition and sabotage and an informant until his most fetid relationships with the world of drug trafficking in South Florida
led the agency to suggest he look for his daily bread somewhere else. At the beginning of 1976, Luis Posada Carriles – with the finest references from the CIA – then joined Venezuela’s DIGEPOL in which he rapidly
achieved a leadership position until that political police agency became the DISIP, in order to do away with the guerrilla movement…From there, according to his own statements, he organized and participated in the most savage repression: kidnapping, torturing and murdering with total freedom.
Catapulted from his duties thanks to a change in the presidency, he created a security agency that would become the largest in Venezuela. Along with his friend killer pediatrician Orlando Bosch he masterminded the attack on a
Cubana Aviation aircraft that caused 73 deaths and led to him being placed behind the bars of a penitentiary in that country. His escape from jail, negotiated and paid for by Jorge Más Canosa – his old buddy from
Fort Benning – with the blessing of the CIA, allowed him to reappear in the Salvadoran base of Ilopango, where, alongside Félix Rodríguez Mendigutía, George Bush Sr.’s trustworthy confidante, he organized the exchange of arms for drugs to finance Nicaraguan Contras that constituted a part of the
so-called Irangate scandal. The longtime killer continued organizing assassination attempts against the Cuban president – including that of La Esperanza yacht that failed in Puerto Rico thanks to a surprise
intervention by the Coast Guard – and terrorist attacks such as the 1997 campaign against tourist locations in Cuba, until his arrest in Panama in November 2000. For the Agency, Posada the discredited agent
subsequently reused in dirty tasks in Central America in a semi-clandestine manner, would be an important contact, a blackmail threat, and a convenient loose cannon in search of publicity. BUSH, “THE ONLY HOPE” In her book, Bardach tells how during the last week in November 2000 – that is to say, just a few days after his capture, “a childhood friend of Gaspar Jiménez’” – one of Posada’s terrorist accomplices arrested with him in Panama,
“commented to her “with palpable distress” that “the only hope for the group’s release lay in George W. Bush's election in the recount then taking place in the wake of the presidential elections. She wrote that the former
president and Bush’s father had been very good to these “militants” when he was head of the CIA during the 1970s. The friend said he was confident that Bush would remember all the help given to the Contra operation (that was carried out) by Cuban exiles. It should be remembered that George Bush Sr. was
the one who approved Orlando Bosch’s right to live in Miami denied by the Justice Department, which considered him “the most dangerous terrorist in the hemisphere,” according to an FBI report following his release in Venezuela. It is well known how the vote recount was solved by the sudden intervention of the Vigila Mambisa gang of hooligans, a troop of vigilantes made up of criminals and organized by Batista-loving representative Lincoln Díaz-Balart.
Bush Jr’s arrival in the presidency confirmed to the CIA and the FBI in South Florida – then led by Puerto Rican Special Agent Héctor Pesquera – that the order to provide support to Cuban-American mafia capos and increase impunity in favor of extremist
elements would be maintained more stronger than ever before. “The FBI shuttered all investigations into exile violence, to the despair of its agents. Miami once again kicked back to the laissez-faire atmosphere of
the 1980s, when everyone knew someone else involved in the Contra resupply effort,” stated Bardach. In the summer of 2001, things were looking up for Posada and his accomplices, writes Bardach in the extremely
interesting conclusion of the chapter. “With the backdoor diplomacy of certain members in the Bush administration, Gaspar Jiménez’ friend was hopeful that the four would win release, just as Orlando Bosch had. He
recalled how Miami celebrated with Orlando Bosch Day, and how some hard-liners had roared their approval in Miami’s Orange Bowl in 2000 when Bosch was called to the podium. The team was in place once again.” “IF I
WANT TO GO TO MIAMI, I HAVE DIFFERENT WAYS TO GO” And the U.S. journalist ends with a relevant sentence: “Any day now, he said, Posada and his friends would be walking the streets of Miami.” In the light of day,
that prediction has come to pass in the case of three out of the four prisoners in Panama: Pedro Crispin Remón, the Omega-7 hitman; Gaspar Jiménez and Guillermo Novo from CORU, who arrived from Panama in a private jet just a few hours after their surreptitious release at 5:00 a.m. thanks to the Mafiosa
ex-president of Panama. Without the slightest intervention by those individuals supposedly responsible for applying U.S. law and anti-terrorism regulations. For his part, Posada vanished. Opportunely for some.
In San Pedro Sula, he was met by his life-long buddy, Rafael “Ralph” Hernández Nodarse, an arms dealer and owner of a television station.
After a media circus, all trace of him was “officially” lost. One spokesperson stated that he was headed for the Bahamas but the Bahamian authorities have not commented. But there is no concrete hint of an official
indication on his eventual location. Which leaves us to discuss another possibility: that of his presence in the United States, completely at liberty to reunite with his friends. According to Ann Louise Bardach and
various experts, Posada has made various illegal trips to the United States over the years. On June 18,1998 and for the next three days, he gave Bardach an interview in which he confided receiving funding from the Cuban-American National Foundation, and also revealed that he was then in possession of
four different passports from different countries and bearing false identities. “He admitted that he has an American passport but would not say how he obtained it or disclose the name,” wrote the reporter. “I asked
when he last visited the United States and he answered with a laugh and a question of his own: “Officially or unofficially?” He added coyly that he had occasionally used his fake American passport to visit the States “unofficially”. A friend of Posada’s then confirmed to Bardach that he had purchased the passport from a corrupt passport officer in Miami “and it bore a gringo name from Atlanta, Georgia.” “I have a lot
of passports,” Posada told the journalist during the interview. “If I want to go to Miami, I have different ways to go. No problem.” Everything would indicate that the lifelong terrorist and his sidekicks will carry
on with their digressions. And perhaps benefiting from the tolerance conceded in Florida to those individuals against whom the five Cuban anti-terrorist fighters were battling; five patriots who continue as hostages to the empire’s judicial system.
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