Luis Posada Carriles: A Confessed Terrorist

By Juan Diego Nusa Peqalver, AIN Special Report, 27 August 2004

Global justice is mourning. On Thursday, outgoing Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso pardoned Luis Posada Carriles, one of the cruelest terrorists of the Western Hemisphere.

The internationally repudiated presidential pardon came in the early morning hours and also benefited three other Cuban-born criminals, Guillermo Novo Sampol, Pedro Remon and Gaspar Jimenez.

Of the group, Posada Carriles has by far the longest record of terrorist acts. A favorite of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), his full name is Luis Clemente Faustino Posada Carriles, although his family and friends call him Bambi.

Posada Carriles joined the counterrevolution shortly after the Cuban government began a process of political and economic reforms in January 1959 to benefit the countrys underprivileged.

Although a member of the 2506 Brigade (organized, trained, financed and armed by the US government to try and topple the Cuban revolution) he did not participate in the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Posada Carriles preparation as a terrorist included training in military tactics, espionage, sabotage, explosives handling, demolition and firearms. He was a member of the counterrevolutionary group called Commandos L and by 1963 was in the US Army and receiving training at Fort Benning, Georgia.

His list of evil deeds includes participation in plans to assassinate Cuban officials in Chile and another to try and kill President Fidel Castro when he visited that South American country in 1971.

The murder of two Cuban officials in Argentina in August 1976 is another line item on his resume.

Considerable documentation exists showing how Posada recruited Venezuelans Hernan Ricardo Lozano and Freddy Lugo to sabotage a Cubana Airlines plane.

These mercenaries placed the bombs that exploded in-flight, a few minutes after takeoff from Barbados International Airport on October 6, 1976 and killing all 73 people on board.

In her book, Pusimos la bomba y que? (We put the bomb and so what) Venezulean journalist Alicia Herrera gives a profile of Posada Carriles recounted by his wife at the end of the 1970s, and which describes her husbands lack of scruples.

When he got involved in the Barbados incident, (referring to the blowing up of the Cubana passenger plane) I knew he would be successful because the poor guy had dedicated so much effort, with so much passion...

Later, with help from the Florida based Cuban American National Foundation, Posada Carriles escaped from a maximum security prison in Venezuela on August 18, 1985,

Since then and until he was jailed in Panama in November 2000, El Salvador became his preferred sanctuary.

At the end of 1996 he put the final touches on a series of terrorist actions to be carried out in Cuba, traveling between El Salvador and Guatemala with a Salvadoran passport under the name Francisco Rodriguez Mena and acquired in 1995.

In March, 1998, Cuban authorities detained the Guatemalans, Maria Elena Gonzalez Meza de Fernandez, Nader Kamal Musalam Barakat, also known as Miguel Abraham Herrera Morales, and Jazid Ivan Fernandez Mendoza, linked to bomb explosions in Havana during 1997.

The three Guatemalans, along with the Salvadorans Ernesto Raul Cruz Leon and Otto Rene Rodriguez Llerna, also detained in Cuba, were part of a network of Central American mercenaries hired by Posada Carriles and financed by the Cuban American National Foundation.

On November 15, 1997, the Miami Herald ran an extensive article resulting from an investigative report about the bombs planted in Cuban hotels and the connection of those events with a band of Salvadoran criminals known for bank robberies, house break-ins and car thefts.

The Herald concluded that Luis Posada Carriles was the brains behind those activities, for which he collected 15,000 dollars in Miami.

In July 1998, Posada Carriles told the New York Times that he received 200,000 from the president of the Cuban American National Foundation, Jorge Mas Canosa, to carry out terrorist actions in Cuba.

His anti-Cuban acts came to a temporary halt when he was jailed in Panama on November 17, 2000 after Cuban President Fidel Castro denounced plans to assassinate him with explosives at Panama University.

Assisting Posada Carriles with the foiled plot that could have killed several hundred people were Guillermo Novo Sampol, Pedro Remon and Gaspar Jimenez Escobedo. Now the notorious quartet was just given pardons by Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso, who in doing so, became herself an accomplice of these dangerous terrorists.