Cuba: Release of Luis Posada Carriles - full text
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District judge Kathleen Cardone in El Paso, in the US state of Texas, on May 8, 2007, dismissed seven charges of immigration fraud against Luis Posada Carriles, 79, a Cuban-born Venezuelan national and former CIA operative. Judge Cardone dismissed the case because she judged that US immigration officials had breached Posada Carriles’s legal rights during an immigration interview shortly after his arrest. The ruling to release Posada Carriles, a prominent Cuban exile vehemently opposed to Cuban President Fidel Castro Ruz, was fiercely criticised by the governments of Cuba and Venezuela, both of which sought his extradition from the USA.
Immediate Context
The authorities in Venezuela wanted to extradite Posada Carriles from the USA because he had escaped from a Venezuelan prison in 1985 after being convicted of charges related to the bombing in 1976 of a Cuban airliner, in which all 73 people aboard were killed. Posada Carriles was also wanted in Cuba, in connection with a series of bomb attacks in 1997 against hotels, restaurants, and discotheques, in Havana (the capital of Cuba). In July 1998 Posada Carriles admitted to organising the bomb attacks in Havana, during which an Italian tourist was killed and several other people were injured.
Posada Carriles was arrested in the USA on charges of illegal immigration in May 2005, prompting the Cuban and Venezuelan authorities to request his extradition. In June 2005, however, the US government rejected Venezuela’s formal extradition request, prompting Castro to say that the US-led "war on terror" was beset with hypocrisy. A US immigration judge had ruled in September 2005 that Posada Carriles could not be extradited to Venezuela because there was "prima facie" evidence that he could face torture. The Cuban authorities responded by repeating their condemnation of the US government and highlighting the torture by US personnel of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad (the capital of Iraq).
In April 2004 Posada Carriles was sentenced in Panama to eight years in prison after being convicted for plotting to assassinate the Castro during his visit to Panama in November 2000. Cuba severed diplomatic relations with Panama in August 2004 (and did not restore relations until August 2005) after the then-Panamanian President Mireya Elisa Moscoso de Gruber pardoned Posada Carriles for his involvement in the assassination plot.
Reaction and Outlook
Judge Cardone said that the US government had used "fraud, deceit, and trickery" to turn Posada Carriles’s immigration interview into a criminal investigation. Cardone added that the US government's tactics were so "grossly shocking and...outrageous" that they violated "the universal sense of justice", prompting her to "dismiss the indictment".
In a statement, the Cuban government described Posada Carriles as the "Osama bin Laden of the hemisphere" and claimed US President George W Bush was protecting the Cuban-born national in order to avoid the possibility of him divulging details of "US government links with...terrorist activities". Nicolas Maduro, the Venezuelan foreign minister, accused the US government of applying "hypocritical double standards" in its "war on terror".
The Reuters news agency reported on May 10 that a grand jury in the US state of New Jersey had been selected to determine if there was sufficient evidence to bring charges against Posada Carriles in connection with the 1997 terrorist bombings in Havana. The Reuters report also pointed out that Posada Carriles still faced a US deportation order for entering the country illegally, although it was unclear which country the US government deemed an acceptable destination for the former CIA operative.
Historical Context
US relations with Cuba had been sour since Castro assumed power in 1959, leading to the US government ending its diplomatic relations with the island in 1961. Economic sanctions which the US government had first imposed against Cuba in 1960 remained in force in 2007, despite near-universal condemnation of the embargo from the international community. In April 1962 the US government clandestinely supported an attempted military coup against Castro, but the small group of US-based Cuban exiles which led the military operation were defeated during the Bay of Pigs invasion after three days of fighting against Castro’s forces. US relations with Venezuela had been tense since Hugo Chávez Frías became the Venezuelan president in February 1999. Chávez and Castro both led governments characterised by "socialist" political and economic theories, in contradiction to the "free-market" policies pursued--and universally promoted--by the USA.
Posada Carriles was one of the most prominent anti-Castro militants and was widely regarded to have close links with Cuban exile groups which aimed to overthrow the Cuban government. Several anti-Castro Cuban exile groups operated from the USA, most notably the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), founded in the US state of Florida in 1981 by Jorge Mas Canosa and Raul Masvidal. In September 1962 an armed vessel belonging to Alpha-66, a Puerto Rico-based group of anti-Castro exiles, raided the Cuban port of Caibarien, raking the 7,000-tonne UK freighter Newlane and a Cuban ship with tracer bullets. Another group of anti-Castro exiles, Omega-7, in October 1978 detonated a bomb in front of the Cuban mission to the UN in New York, injuring three people, and launched a bomb attack against the offices of a US-based moderate Cuban-exiles newspaper.
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