The big-boned, but skinny old man in the worn gown, lay long on the fat pillow and thin plastic blue liner of an anonymous Miami hospital bed, the name tag sliding down his wrist, the shock of thick white hair and hard green eyes small set in the sallow, splotchy face framed by wild bushy brows. Tubes extended from his nostrils and other lines jutted under the sheets.
He smiled benignly, showing discoloured teeth in the most recent public photograph, but the square right jaw is noticeably lopsided, permanently jarred an inch higher from a blast of bullets in a botched 1990 assassination attempt in Guatemala, twisting torpid, torn tongue and skewing slurred speech.
Nearly 89, the ailing exile in the February 2016 image, the seemingly indestructible Luis Posada Carriles clings to precious life, his loving family of a devoted wife and two children, faithful friends, ardent admirers and his strict Roman Catholic God. When reporter, Camilo Loret de Mola went to see him, hoping to complete an unfinished interview and extract new revelations for his Diario de Cuba blog and programme, he left disappointed. The frustrated Posada could barely speak except for an occasional sputter of desperate gibberish in scattered fragments of memory. He was being treated for a bout of severe pneumonia brought on by “too much time lying.”
“I give up. I sit, it makes no sense to try to rescue confessions,” a frustrated Loret de Mola posted in a translated version of his visit online.
Posada suffered thrombosis a year ago, about two months after a serious accident in South Florida with his car slamming into a light pole and flipping, and his consequent hospitalization for injuries including three broken ribs and a collarbone.
One of the two ruthless militant masterminds recruited and ably trained by the United States (US) Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the sixties, he was behind the 1976 Barbados bombing of the Cubana Airliner which killed 73 including 11 Guyanese. Posada has outlived his old friend and fellow hardline rogue terrorist partner, Orlando Bosch Avila.
Bosch died five years ago, at 84 – felled by a series of debilitating strokes – in the safe stronghold of a suburban Los Angeles medical institution in the heart of the powerful Cuban community. He headed the umbrella Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU) group comprising several dangerous gangs of fervent insurgents.
A man who loved inventing cheeky but deceptive aliases for his many operations, Posada, ironically known as Bambi and Solo, was for a while simply called Comisario Basilio – the notorious and deeply feared chief of operations for Venezuela’s Intelligence Service (DISIP) that launched a disturbingly, dirty war against Cuban-backed communist fighters and sympathisers in the South American nation. Scores were kidnapped, tormented, executed, others tossed into the sea. Many prisoners simply disappeared without a trace, during the seven years reign of terror.
Elsewhere on the continent, the clandestine Operation Condor took full lethal flight in several sister states, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil to eradicate communist influence and ideas, and to suppress active or potential opposition movements. More than 60 000 victims would die ranging from “dissidents and leftists, union and peasant leaders, priests and nuns, students and teachers, intellectuals and suspected guerillas,” Long Island University’s Political Science Professor J.Patrice McSherry estimated in Latin American Perspectives.
Venezuelans Marlene Esquivel and her sister Brenda were lucky to survive Posada’s dungeons of death as young women, but their lives are permanently scarred by their horrific encounters with the devil, and they recalled him all too frighteningly well. In a television interview with journalist David O’Shea, who tracked down the pair of former prisoners for the Australian news network SBS in 2007, following the dismissal of all United States (US) immigration charges against Posada, a weeping Esquivel recounted how Comisario Basilio even calmly tortured her screaming three-week old baby in 1972, following their arrests. Bearing a black and white memorial framed photo of herself and the then chubby cheeked infant she stated clearly:
“He burned her several times with a cigarette. And Basilio himself covered the baby’s nose. I couldn’t (protect her) … I kept moving her (like this from side to side) to stop him from (doing it) I was trying to, but, yes, they tortured her a lot. They’d put a revolver here, and cock the trigger like this, and then they’d make a loud noise like a gunshot. That’s how it was,” an emotional Esquivel quavered in Spanish. Eight months pregnant at the time, Brenda recalled that the sadistic Basilio, coldly gave the order to kill her unborn child.
“They said to Basilio: ‘The lady is pregnant, she is due in days, what do we do with her?’ He said: ‘Kill the seed before it’s born. Destroy it before it’s born!’ ” They kicked and punched her stomach until she miscarried, Brenda remembers, shaking her head.
In the late 1960s, Posada had moved as a key ‘adviser’ from Miami to Caracas, supposedly with the CIA’s recommendation and as a paid asset, conceding in his memoirs, “Ways of the Warrior” that “I fought relentlessly the enemies of Venezuelan democracy…the Police, whose main strength was in the informers, stopped, raided and interrogated using the toughest methods of persuasion” admitting “I persecuted them hard, very hard,” and “many, many people turned (or were) killed (murdered).”
American investigative journalist and author, Ann Louise Bardach conducted a famous 1998 interview with Posada over three days, in his hideout from Aruba, for the New York Times (NYT), and in 2006 she used some of the recorded material in a follow-up article for the Atlantic Magazine:
“He saw to it that all Cuban offices and businesses in Venezuela were under continuous surveillance and also poked into the private business of some of Venezuela’s politicians—including Carlos Andrés Pérez, who didn’t appreciate having Posada listen to secret wiretaps of his conversations with his mistress. When Pérez was elected president in 1974, he promptly fired his operations chief.”
But in the mid-seventies Venezuela was booming, so with his invaluable contacts, Posada Carriles easily switched to running a handy private detective and security agency out of east Caracas, that formed an important Latin American front in the clandestine war against President Fidel Castro and Communist Cuba.
Some declassified but nicely “sanitized” documents obtained through the tireless efforts of the American non-governmental agency, the National Security Archive (NSA), under the Freedom of Information Act (FIA), show that in September 1976 at a US$1100 a plate fundraising dinner held in honour of the visiting Bosch, supported by President Perez, the Cuban exile chief bragged, “Now that our organization has come out of the (September 21 1976 Washington car bomb assassination of Chilean diplomat Orlando) Letelier job looking good, we are going to try something else.” Days later, an informant advised the US that Posada announced final plans for a spectacular act and ensuing international publicity, “We are going to hit a Cuban airline” and “Orlando (Bosch) has the details.”
Among Posada’s employees were the two Venezuelans who planted the explosives aboard Cubana Flight 455 on October 6, Hernan Ricardo Lozano, a photographer/odd-jobs worker and friend Freddy Lugo. The paid pair confessed to Trinidad and Tobago (TT) authorities, implicated Bosch and Posada as the ringleaders, and were in due course sent back to their homeland to be tried in the wake of a five country pow-wow in Port of Spain, where it was eventually agreed, to the evident relief of Barbados, that Venezuela would assume full jurisdiction for the crime.
Lozano bluntly blurted out to Trinidad’s Deputy Police Commissioner Dennis Ramdwar, during questioning, “If you use your police brain, it would be clear to you who bombed the plane,” according to one of the valuable NSA documents, detailing the deposition of TT’s Senior Police Superintendent, Gordon Waterman.
“DC Ramdwar told him he believed he knew who committed the crime. Lozano hesitated for a while and said to Mr. Ramdwar, ‘I am going tell you in confidence that Lugo and myself bombed the plane.’ He then requested a sheet of paper and a pencil and sketched a chart explaining how C4 plastic bombs can be detonated giving a time limit for the detonation. I recall him pointing to a pencil on Mr. Ramdwar’s desk and saying that the detonator used in the bomb was a pencil type…” Waterman swore.
At about 8:45 p.m on October 20, Police rushed in to find Lozano bleeding from a wound on left forearm, when he cut himself with a shaving razor in a suicide attempt because “he did not wish to go back to Venezuela.”
Lozano and Lugo were judged guilty and served at least 20 years before their release. Bosch was arrested in Caracas and held for years while awaiting trial but he was acquitted since the court found “insufficient evidence” to prove the accused responsible. Defending himself, Bosch would later brush off the crime, “All of Castro’s planes are warplanes.”
None of the many meticulous affidavits and critical supporting documentation submitted by the TT and Barbadian police officials during their investigations of the crash were ever allowed by the Venezuelan courts, on the strange grounds that these were flawed and all in English.
Found not guilty by a military court, the ruling was overturned and Posada held for trial in a civilian court. He was detained without conviction before slipping away again – permanently from Venezuelan jails in 1985 – disguised as a tall, confident Bible-carrying priest, while heavily bribed guards looked the other way. Bambi then flew on a private plane to El Salvador where he joined Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North’s Contra covert operations.
In written answers to questions from the respected correspondent and Cuba expert, Bardach, while he awaited his US fate in an El Paso, Texas jail in 2005, Posada who “sleeps like a baby” acknowledged “many mistakes.” Affirming that he is unafraid and definitely harbours no regrets, the Comisario claimed he would live his life the same way again, insisting that the greatest sadness is “not being able to return to my homeland” but “If God accompanies me, I will return soon.”
ID hears the loud strains of Simon and Garfunkel’s hit, “If I could” or “El Condor Pasa” named for a Peruvian folk song, and thinks of it being played symbolically each time the Miami news media received a chilling phone call in 1975, prior to a flurry of explosions warning the US not to pursue détente with Cuba.
