Posada Carriles: a Hot Potato

By Max Lesnik, March 31, 2005

A CubaNews translation by Maria Montelibre
Edited by Walter Lippmann

The news arrived to the media just a few hours ago, but the rumor has been going around Miami for a few days. Luis Posada Carriles, the most infamous terrorist of Cuban origin is already in the U.S., and he is ready to request political asylum over there. He had remained clandestinely
in Central America, possibly Honduras and El Salvador, after having been pardoned in Panama by the then Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso, who released him from prison. He was serving a sentence for terrorist acts in that country.

The terrorist record of Posada Carriles is so long, that covers almost the 78 years of his adult life. And it cannot be said that he is now "a small old defenseless man," unable to commit more acts of violence and therefore he will remain in the shelter of his home, as if he were a humble Franciscan monk.

Because Posada Carriles - he has said that himself several times - will continue with his criminal life anywhere he may happen to be, as he has done it up to now. Sometimes as a CIA agent, at others, as a repressive officer of the Venezuelan police before the Chavez administration, or as a
leader of a terrorist group funded by right-wing Cuban organizations in Miami - the Cuban American Foundation among them - to carry out terrorist actions against Cuban hotels, as he himself openly and shamelessly proclaimed it in an interview a few years ago with U.S. reporter Ann
Louise Bardach for The New York Times.

But his mot horrendous crime was the inhuman attack in 1976 of a plane from Cubana de Aviaci=F3n. 73 innocent passengers died with the explosion, including a team of adolescent Cuban fencers, from the Cuban Olympic team. They were coming back home after winning first places in an
international competition. Posada Carriles was convicted by Venezuelan tribunals for that barbaric, inhuman action, and was housed in a jail in Caracas. He escaped with the aid of Cuban exiles in Miami, old terrorist friends of his, who not only protected him in Central America, but helped him
to make contact with the CIA. The CIA used him as an operative in the military base of Eliopango, El Salvador, during the then "Reagan War" in that nation against the leftist Salvadoran guerrilla.

The presence of the well-known terrorist Luis Posada Carriles in Miami, and his eventual appearance before U.S. authorities, will put the current administration in a very difficult position before the world. The Bush's administration is deeply involved in what has been called "war on terrorism." Because according to the definition of terrorism by current U.S. laws, terrorism in large scale has been practiced by Cuban Luis Posada Carriles all his
life. Luis Posada Carriles could be called a real terrorist. This is the hot potato in the hands of the U.S. Government. Will he go to the Guantanamo camp, as a murderer of his notoriety deserves to be sent to, or he will freely walk the streets of Miami as other terrorists are doing, as a cynical reward for his exploits, and as a mockery to his victims in the horrendous crime of Barbados?

The credibility of President Bush's anti-terrorist policies is really at stake here. Or is it that in the world there is only one terrorist, Osama Bin Laden? The dice have been thrown. The Miami Cuban extreme right wing have given Bush a good "present." With that kind of "friends," who needs enemies?

Max Lesnik, replying Radio Miami.

See and listen laradiomiami.com in the internet.