Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

TERRORISM-LATIN AMERICA: An Unfinished Story

Patricia Grogg

HAVANA , Jun 3 2005 (IPS) - The links between Latin American dictatorships, U.S. intelligence services and anti-Castro Cuban exile groups emerged as an unfinished story at a forum on terrorism taking place this week in Havana.

“If we all work together, we can gather all of the information more quickly. We can’t wait another century,” Argentine journalist Stella Calloni remarked at the international conference “Against Terrorism, For Truth and Justice,” being held this Thursday through Saturday.

Hundreds of academics, activists, journalists and political and social leaders from over 60 countries gathered in Havana for the forum, organised by the Cuban authorities.

The conference will close with a concert paying tribute to Chilean singer-songwriter Víctor Jara, who was murdered in September 1973 shortly after democratically elected president Salvador Allende was overthrown in a U.S.-backed military coup.

Calloni is the author of the book “Operation Condor: A Criminal Pact”, a study of the coordinated plan among the military governments that ruled Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay in the 1970s and 1980s that was used to track down, capture, and eliminate left-wing opponents.

The operation, sponsored by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), claimed thousands of victims in these South American nations, and there is testimony indicating that its tentacles reached into Central America as well.

“We must not waste this opportunity. We have to set any personal vanities aside. Operation Condor does not belong to any one of us, but rather to the victims,” said Calloni, who proposed the creation of a centre like the one established to investigate the crimes of the Holocaust, “to uncover the truth and expose the guilty.”

Her idea was backed by other participants. “Operation Condor was a transnational corporation of terror. We need to coordinate the information we have to put an end to the impunity,” said Paraguayan researcher Alfredo Boccia.

Calloni maintained that in the 1960s, the CIA created a sort of “all-star team” of terrorists, culled from the anti-Castro Cuban exile community, to eliminate the left-wing opposition in numerous Latin American countries.

“The members of this all-star team were Luis Posada Carriles, brothers Guillermo and Ignacio Novo Sampoll, Virgilio Paz, Félix Rodríguez, Dionisio Suárez and Gaspar Jiménez Escobedo,” she said.

Calloni added that Posada Carriles, Jiménez, Guillermo Novo Sampoll and Pedro Remón “know everything” about the assassination of U.S. president John Kennedy in 1962, in addition to the atrocities committed by dictator Anastasia Somoza in Nicaragua (1967-1979) and the military dictatorships in South America.

The four Cubans were arrested in Panama in 2000 for plotting an assassination attempt against Cuban President Fidel Castro, who was attending an Ibero-American Summit in Panama City.

They were tried and sentenced to jail terms of between seven and ten years, but were released in August 2004 when Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso granted them a pardon just before leaving office. All four left the country immediately.

Jiménez, Novo Sampoll and Remón headed straight to Miami, Florida, which is also the refuge of Orlando Bosch, another Cuban exile implicated alongside Posada Carriles in the explosion of a Cubana Airlines passenger plane over Barbados in 1976, which killed all 73 people on board.

After a period of time in which he was presumably in Central America, Posada Carriles resurfaced in the United States this past March.

After considerable pressure was exerted by the authorities in both Cuba and Venezuela, he was finally taken into custody in May for entering the country illegally. An immigration hearing is scheduled for Jun. 13.

“Miami is a den of international terrorism. The only one missing was Posada Carriles,” commented Venezuelan journalist Alicia Herrera, author of a book entitled “Pusimos la bomba y qué” (which literally translates as “We planted the bomb, what about it?”), in which Venezuelan photographers Freddy Lugo and Hernán Ricardo proudly boast about having perpetrated the attack on the Cuban airliner.

Lugo and Ricardo served 12-year prison sentences in Venezuela for their crime.

Posada Carriles was also charged and imprisoned in Venezuela for masterminding the attack, but managed to escape on Aug. 18, 1985 before a final sentence was passed, with the help of the Cuban American National Foundation, a Miami-based anti-Castro organisation, according to the Cuban government.

Last week, the George W. Bush administration turned down a request from the Venezuelan authorities for Posada Carriles’ extradition, alleging that the application lacked supporting evidence.

Declassified documents released in mid-May by the National Security Archive (NSA), an independent non-governmental research institute located at George Washington University, attest to Posada Carriles’ activities as a CIA asset.

Calloni drew a parallel between Operation Condor and the current situation at the U.S. naval base in Guantanámo Bay in Cuba, where prisoners have been held since late 2001 without charges or trial and are subjected to torture, she said.

The hundreds of detainees at the Guantánamo base, accused of being “enemy combatants”, are denied treatment as prisoners of war, yet they have been neither charged with nor tried for any actual crime, and are additionally deprived of legal counsel and contact with their families.

Human rights organisations and detainees released from the Guantánamo detention centre report systematic abuse of the prisoners there.

The names may change, but the practices and premises remain the same, cloaked under the mantle of counterinsurgency and the national security of the United States, stressed Calloni.

This week’s conference in Havana is part of a campaign being waged in Cuba to demand punishment for the crimes committed by Posada Carriles and his accomplices in the terrorist attack on the Cuban plane and others against civilian targets in Cuba.

Relatives of those who died in the bombing of the airliner founded a committee this Wednesday aimed at encouraging the U.S. public to support their demands for justice and condemnation of international terrorism.