News came yesterday that one of the worlds worst terrorists died yesterday. He had successfully evaded prosecution in the US and extradition to the US for his crimes because he had been protected by the US government.
Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban-born veteran of the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, died Wednesday aged 90 at his home near Miami.
“The murderer Luis Posada Carriles, who plunged Cuba into mourning, died with impunity,” the official Granma newspaper said.
Posada went on to plot attacks and assassination attempts against Castro’s government, becoming a hero to many Cuban exiles and a terrorist in the eyes of Havana.
…Among the attacks he was accused of masterminding was the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner, which killed 73 people.
He and the late anti-Castro militant Orlando Bosch were jailed in Venezuela for the bombing but never convicted. Posada, who denied involvement in the bombing, escaped the country after being held for eight years.
He was later part of a secret US operation in Central America to arm the Contra rebels fighting the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
Implicated in a spate of bombings targeting Cuban hotels, he was arrested in Panama in 2000 for plotting to assassinate Castro.
Pardoned in 2004 by Panama’s president, he took refuge in Miami, where he fought off Venezuelan and Cuban demands for his extradition.
Castro, who died in 2016, referred to Posada and Bosch, who died in Florida in 2011, as the “most bloodthirsty exponents of imperialist terrorism” against Cuba.
As long as your terrorist acts are for the US government, they will protect you. So much for the law.
Well, at least they did not decorate him. Or did they?
Posada Cariles is dead?
Finally, though I would have loved to see him tried for his crimes.
One of my Cuban friends was the psychologist of the volleyball team that was murdered by him. Ironically, Cuba being poor saved her life, they didn’t have enough money so she could go on that trip.
She once told me the story of how they were told about the attack. How one of the parents died of a heart attack when they heard the news, and how she was the only one to know that one of the young women was pregnant from one of the young men, and how she could not tell this because it would add to the pain of the parents.