Seventy-four year old Enma Cruz, a Miami resident, was categorically refused permission to visit her daughter on her deathbed in Cuba: there was no way of obtaining a reply to her request. Her daughter died without the elderly woman having the opportunity to give her a last kiss. For Gaspar Jiménez Escobedo – filed in FBI archives under "international terrorist" for his long-standing criminal past and who is known to have traveled using a false U.S. passport to take part in the thwarted attempt to blow up a lecture theater in Panama – the doors to the United States have been opening bit by bit.

Enma Cruz made her emergency application to travel to Havana when she found out that her eldest daughter Irma Rodales, aged 49, was suffering from cancer. She believed that her case justified rapid processing on the part of the Treasury Department’s Office for Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), part of the Bush administration’s anti-family machinery.

OFAC did not respond to her application. Irma died on July 22 without being able to see her mother. Her story was reported on October 4 in Miami’s El Nuevo Herald, as part of wider coverage of the discontent provoked by the savage restrictions imposed by the George W. Bush government on Cuban-Americans with respect to traveling to their country of origin and transferring remittances to their loved ones.

Gaspar Jiménez Escobedo, for his part, has a criminal history that is far too long to be recounted in a few paragraphs.

Suffice to say that he conspired in the creation of the United Revolutionary Organizations Coordination Committee (CORU) with killer pediatrician Orlando Bosch and led a frenzied program of sabotage and terrorist attacks on Cuba, in close association with the political police of fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet. On July 23, 1976, Jiménez took part in an attack on the Cuban consulate in Mérida, Mexico in which he cowardly killed Cuban fishing technician Artagñan Díaz Díaz. He was arrested, escaped and still has an outstanding prison sentence of 12 years and two months hanging over his head.

In Panama, the notes and file documents handed over to the judicial authorities by the United States in the framework of an agreement for the exchange of police information, confirmed the integral knowledge in the possession of the U.S. authorities not only the terrorist past of this old criminal, but also of his current links with criminal activities.

The report by Panamanian Judge Argentina Barrera Flores, who investigated the assassination attempt in which Jiménez participated with his Miami accomplices, explicitly confirms that "the U.S. embassy, by way of a memo dated February 6, 2001, confirmed that Gaspar Jiménez possesses a false U.S. passport under the name Manuel Díaz."

The official document was signed by General Consul Peter E. Cozzens.

The U.S. memo used the word "possesses", thus confirming the fact that the U.S. authorities already knew that fact at a time when it had not been confirmed that Jiménez was using a false U.S. passport. It remains to be seen why no one intervened.

But the Panamanian archives contain a lot more information. Very reluctantly, but obliged to conform with the signed agreement, the FBI handed over copies of declassified documents from its archives which confirmed that this individual’s terrorist past was already known to the U.S. authorities. The official handover of the files was made by U.S. diplomat John Mata.

For example, a filed report by FBI investigator Raúl Díaz in Miami-Dade discloses that Jiménez belonged to the Los Jóvenes de la Estrella terrorist organization –attached to CORU at that time – which carried out an attack on the Dominican consulate in Miami on October 6, 1975; on the Palacio de Justicia on the 10th of the same month; the Dominican Airline office on October 20, and the Bahamian airline office on November 27.

Following the terrorist’s arrest, with his accomplice Gustavo Castillo, for Díaz’ murder and at the request of the Mexican government, a report by Detective Larry E. Back dated January 23, 1978 warned that the CORU leadership had given the go-ahead to all Cuban exile terrorist groups and individuals to engage in acts of terrorism on the Mexican government and its airlines in retaliation for the arrest of Jiménez and Castillo.

On August 14, 2001, the U.S. embassy in Panama handed over other documents pertaining to the terrorist, at that time incarcerated in El Renacer prison in Panama. One file bearing the code 2-PC-0 indicates that Gaspar Jiménez – alias Manuel Díaz, successively used the names Caspar, Casper, Casper E, Caspar Eugenio and Gaspar-E, with the aim of preventing him from being correctly identified. The same dossier indicated that he was expelled by the U.S. immigration authorities on September 6,1958, "in a private jet, at personal cost" and that he was once again arrested on March 15, 1961 under the charge of "violating immigration laws". He was forced to confront the services again, facing various charges, in 1967 and 1974.

With respect to U.S. passport No. 044172940 in the name of Manuel Díaz used by Jiménez at the time of his arrest, it belonged to a Puerto Rican citizen. During questioning, Jiménez confessed that he had used the false document on two occasions to enter Panama from Costa Rica.

With the same passport in his pocket, Gaspar Jiménez crossed into Panamanian territory from the border post at Paso Canoas and went to the capital, with the intention of destroying the University of Panama lecture hall where thousands of people were expected to gather to listen to a speech by Cuban President Fidel Castro.

Last August, outgoing Panamanian president Mireya Moscoso illegally handed over Jiménez and his three accomplices: Luis Posada Carriles, Pedro Remón and Guillermo Novo, to the Miami mafia.

Whilst Posada remained in Honduras at the home of Cuban-Honduran terrorist Rafael "Ralph" Hernández Nodarse – the millionaire owner of the San Pedro Sula television channel, arms dealer and suspect in the murder of his ex-lover – Remón and Novo accompanied Jiménez on his return "without papers" to the United States.

Or could it be that, informed at the "last minute" of the pardon bestowed by Mireya Moscoso, the Matas and Cossens, or their successors at the U.S. embassy provided him, at six o’clock in the morning, with a safe-conduct to return to his native Florida? That is not known.

What we do know is that for Enma, the elderly woman from Miami, a decent person, who asked for nothing more than the opportunity to see her dying daughter for the last time, Juan Carlos Zárate’s OFAC henchmen effectively decreed a fatal NO. •

Express impunity