Posada Carriles is also wanted in Cuba for his involvement in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner over Barbados that killed all 73 persons aboard, as well as a deadly string of bombings in Havana in 1997.

The ultrarightists, who were arrested in Panama City in November 2000 with 33 pounds of explosives, were convicted on charges of endangering public safety. Posada Carriles and another Cuban rightist were sentenced to eight years; the others received seven years. Posada Carriles’s Panamanian driver was given four years as an accomplice.

The Cuban government, which for the past three years has sought their extradition to bring them to justice in Cuba, criticized the sentences. “The penalties imposed do not correspond to the gravity of the acts committed,” the Cuban foreign ministry said in a statement.

The five men were arrested by Panamanian security forces after Cuban officials, on the eve of the summit meeting, denounced the presence in that country of counterrevolutionaries who have been involved in numerous attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. The Panamanian government carried out the arrests only after Cuban officials announced they had provided it with the addresses, phone numbers, and other information about the five men.

Cuban officials reported that the ultrarightists had been planning to set off explosives in the middle of a public meeting at the University of Panama where Fidel Castro was invited to speak.

In an April 21 statement, the Cuban foreign ministry called the sentencing the culmination of a period plagued by irregularities, constant escape plans, and attempts to rig the trial in order to absolve the ultrarightists.

The court convicted the defendants on lesser charges and acquitted them of the most serious accusation, possession of explosives and attempted murder, “because no detonators were found in the area where the attack was supposed to be carried out,” the Reuters news agency reported.

Posada Carriles has a long history of carrying out violent activity against the Cuban Revolution with U.S. government complicity. In 1961 he was part of the U.S.-organized mercenary invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, which was quickly crushed by Cuban workers and farmers. Afterward, according to his own account in a 1998 New York Times interview, the CIA recruited Posada Carriles to carry out assassination attempts against Cuban leaders and other violent attacks.

In the 1970s he worked as chief of operations for the Venezuelan secret police. Arrested and convicted in Venezuela for the murderous 1976 Cuban airline bombing, Posada Carriles was allowed to escape from prison in 1985. He then worked closely with Lt. Col. Oliver North and other U.S. officials in supply operations for the U.S.-organized contra war against the Nicaraguan revolution. In the Times interview he bragged about his involvement in a series of 1997 bombings in Havana, including one at a hotel that killed an Italian tourist.

Posada Carriles’s accomplices have a similar record. Gaspar Jiménez previously served time for the attempted kidnapping and murder of Cuban diplomats in Mexico. Guillermo Novo was convicted in the 1976 assassination in Washington, D.C., of former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier, but his conviction was overturned on appeal. Pedro Remón served time for the attempted murder of Cuba’s delegate to the United Nations in 1979.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home