Luis Clemente Faustino Posada Carriles

He was born in Cuba on February 15, 1928. When the Revolution triumphed he joined the counterrevolution and asked for asylum in the Argentine embassy, finally leaving the country on February 25, 1961.

He was a member of the Brigade 2506, but he didn't participate in the Bay of Pigs invasion. Instead, Posada stayed at the CIA camps as their recruit. From 1961 to 1963 he was the head of an infiltration group. He was trained in military techniques, in espionage and sabotage tactics; he passed courses on special missions, on explosives, on demolition and firearms.

When the mercenaries imprisoned in Cuba were returned to the United States he declared that he had become a member of the terrorist organization Commandos L. In 1963, he enrolled in the U.S. army and received training at Fort Benning. In 1964 he signed up as a crew member of the CIA mother vessel Venus. His role involved the purchase and sale of weapons and explosives.

Contents 1 Criminal Activities in Latin America 2 Capture and Escape 3 Actions in the 90's 4 The eagle carries on preying

Criminal Activities in Latin America

Posada was sent to direct the repressive organs in Venezuela, first in the Police General Division (DIGEPOL) and later in the Department of Intelligence and Prevention Services (DISIP). He was connected to the assassination plots against Cuban officials in Chile and the one orchestrated against Cuban President Fidel Castro during his visit to that country in 1971. He had received and delivered to the commando in charge false documentation crediting them as members of the Venezuelan television team. He is also related to the disappearance of the Cuban officials murdered in August 1976 in Argentina.

He carried out several criminal missions in various countries of the area and created a team of terrorists that he sent to the Chilean Secret Police (DINA) during Pinochet's fascist government.

Posada recruited two Venezuelans, Hernan Ricardo Losano and Freddy Lugo, to carry out Barbados Crime|the sabotage against a civil Cuban airliner in Barbados. These two mercenaries placed the bombs on a CUBANA airliner minutes after the flight took off the Barbados airport in October 6 1976 killing all 73 people on board. He and Orlando Bosch Avila were arrested the following day for having sponsored the crime. ,

Capture and Escape

When the Venezuelan police arrested Posada Carriles on October 7, 1976 they found in his office a map of the city of Washington with drawings showing the daily journey Orlando Letelier-the former Chilean foreign minister-used to take to his office before being murdered.

On August 8, 1982 Posada escaped from jail and managed to get into the Chilean embassy in Caracas, but he was sent back to prison. On November 4, 1984 he tried again to escape but he failed. On August 18, 1985 he finally managed to escape from the maximum security prison in San Juan de los Morros.

El Salvador then became the favorite sanctuary of this Cuban terrorist. In September of 1985 he joined another terrorist of Cuban origin, Felix Rodriguez Mendigutia, who had arrived in El Salvador in February of that year following Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North’s instructions to organize the air supply to the “contras” in Nicaragua to support their insurgent actions.

That same year a group of terrorists from Miami visited Posada in his refuge in El Salvador and recommended he move to Honduras. Among them were Juan Perez Franco, then president of the Brigade 2506 and Rolando Mendoza, a former mercenary of the same Brigade who also visited him in December 1988 to organize an attack against the Cuban president when he would visit Venezuela.

Gaspar Jimenez Escobedo and Ramon Font had a meeting with him some days before the shooting down of the U.S. airplane that started off the Iran-Contra scandal.

The then vice minister of Home Affairs of Nicaragua, Luis Carrion Cruz, denounced on October 15, 1986 the participation of Cuban terrorists in the Central America armed conflicts as well as the presence of U.S. mercenary pilots, such as John Peavate, Bill Cooper and John McCraine.

Actions in the 90's

The terrorist Posada Carriles continued organizing terrorist acts against Cuba in close co-ordination with the Mafia of Miami.

On July 15, 1992 the terrorist Gaspar Eugenio Jimenez Escobedo traveled to Honduras to meet Posada Carriles and to ask him to help get a Soviet RPG-7 grenade launcher that they planned to use to shoot down the airplane in which the Cuban President, Fidel Castro, would travel to the Second Ibero-American Summit to be held in Madrid, Spain.

At the end of 1996, Posada Carriles was busy finalizing a series of terrorist actions to be carried out inside Cuba. He operated from El Salvador to Guatemala with his new authentic Salvadoran passport, which he received in 1995 under the name of Francisco Rodriguez Mena.

In 1997 Posada recruited two Guatemalans, Jorge Venancio Ruiz and Marlon Antonio Gonzalez Estrada, to put a bomb in Sol Palmeras Hotel, one of the resorts of the Melia chain in Varadero, Cuba. There were two other explosive devices ready which were found before exploding. One of them had been placed inside a plastic bucket in a minibus from a tourist company and the second was found under a sales counter in the No. 2 terminal of the Jose Marti International Airport in Havana. The terrorists traveled with fake documents.

From March 4 to 20, 1998 three Guatemalan citizens were arrested: Maria Elena Gonzalez Meza de Fernandez, Nader Kamal Musalam Barakat, also known as Miguel Abraham Herrera Morales, and Jazid Ivan Fernandez Mendoza, all linked to bomb explosion in Havana during 1997. These three Guatemalans, together with the Salvadorans Ernesto Raul Cruz Leon and Otto Rene Rodriguez Llerena, also arrested by the Cuban authorities, were all part of a netwok of mercenaries from Central America hired by Luis Posada Carriles and financed by the CANF.

On November 15, 1997, The Miami Herald, published the results of an extensive article on an investigation carried out on the bombs placed in several hotels in Cuba and on their connection to a band of Salvadoran criminals, bank robbers, housebreakers and car thieves.

According to the newspaper Luis Posada Carriles was the "mastermind" of those acts for which he collected 15,000 dollars in Miami.

On July 11, 12 and 13, 1998 Posada Carriles, alias Bambi, revealed to The New York Times that he had received 200,000 dollars from the hands of the president of the Cuban American National Foundation, Jorge Mas Canosa, to be spent on terrorist actions in Cuba. He also admitted that Cruz Leon worked for him. He added as well that there were other mercenaries subordinated to him who were free. Later he denied on Channel 23 TV in Miami of having made such statements.

In another article Posada declared: "The CIA taught us almost everything. They taught us about explosives, murder plots, bombs and sabotage. When Cubans worked for the CIA, they were regarded as patriots."

The eagle carries on preying

In November 2000, during the celebration of the 10th. Ibero-American Summit of Heads of State in Panama, Posada Carriles was arrested with Gaspar Jimenez, Pedro Remon and Guillermo Novo Sampol — well known Cuban-born criminals—for conspiring to assassinate Cuban president Fidel Castro during an international meeting with students in.

After a long trial they were condemned for the attempted attack, with explosives, on the life of Fidel Castro together with thousands of Panamanian students. A few months later they were pardoned by the Panamanian president, Mireya Moscoso, in the last days of her government, in clear contempt for the laws of that country.

It was Santiago Alvarez Fernandez Magrina who sent the two executive airplanes to Tucuman airport in the Panamanian capital, at dawn on August 26 2004, to pick up those implicated in the terrorist attack and to take them to Honduras. There, having entered that country with a false United States passport, track was lost of Posada until he reappeared in February 2005, in.

He had been transported by the shrimp boat Santrina, the property of Santiago Alvarez from somewhere in Central America to the United States, with a short stop in the Isla Mujeres, because of some supposed damage caused by having beached near that port. He entered U.S. territory illegally.

Through his lawyer, Posada requested political asylum in the United States on April 13, 2005. He had illegally entered that country, via the Mexican frontier. On May 3, the Supreme Court of Justice of Venezuela approved an extradition order for Posada. That same day, the Assistant Secretary of the Department of State of the U.S., Roger Noriega, maintained that maybe Posada wasn’t in the United States, and that maybe the charges against him had been invented.

However, documents declassified by the CIA and the FBI disclose their suspicions about his relationship with the explosion on a Cuban airplane in Barbados, just a few days after it happened.

On May 17, 2005, the Miami Herald conducted an interview with Posada in Florida. That same day he was detained. Posada had reiterated his asylum application and he was trying to leave the country illegally. The legal process in El Paso, Texas, just deals with his migratory status and has nothing to do with any of the many other cases of terrorism committed by him. The United States has limited itself to a solitary, mild charge against this gentleman: of having entered the country without papers. Instead of valuing justice, the government has limited itself to giving the criminal a telling off.

On January 24, 2006 his migratory status will be revised. This could entail that he could be set free by the federal government, aided by a law that prohibits the indefinite detention of illegal aliens whose deportation to another country —sought by Venezuela—has not been carried out within a term of 90 days.

The Immigration Judge, William Abbott, ordered the deportation of Posada on September 26, 2005, to any country other than Cuba or Venezuela. The law demands that, once issued with a deportation order against an illegal alien, it should be executed within a term of 90 days, but, at the same time, it also prohibits the indefinite detention of those to who the government has not been able to deport. In this case, the 90 days began one month after the issue of Judge Abbott's judicial order, which was not appealed by the government. That is to say, from October 26 the 2005.