Luis Clemente Faustino Posada Carriles

CIA agent, naturalized Venezuelan. For decades accused of being an "international terrorist," a fact for which he is proudly confessed, enjoying full freedom in Miami.


In 1954 he moved to the city of Havana, where he established relationships with politicians aligned with dictator Fulgencio Batista, later becoming a secret collaborator of the police. In 1957 he maintains contacts with the FBI. With the triumph of the Cuban Revolution he linked himself to opposition groups that led the clandestine struggle in Cuba. He becomes a specialist in explosives. In 1960 he seeks asylum in the Argentine embassy claiming to be a "political persecuted." On February 25, 1961 he moved with a safe-conduct to Miami. Barely arrived in the United States he becomes a member of Operation 40.

He was a member of the United States Army at the facilities of Fort Benning, Georgia, in the years 1960 to carry out military actions in Cuba through the so-called Operation Mongoose.

He was a career police officer in Venezuela, a country where people arrested by him accuse him of having ordered torture and of having personally murdered several detainees for political reasons.

He was also a member of the so-called Operation 40, orchestrated by the CIA, in order to carry out the failed counter-revolutionary invasion at the Bay of Pigs, in 1961.

The FBI, in May 1965, reported that Posada Carriles was associated in a plot to overthrow the government of Guatemala. A month later, a memorandum declassified by the CIA places him together with Jorge Más Canosa in Veracruz, Mexico, in an attempt to blow up a Soviet ship.

Documents declassified by the United States government report that Posada Carriles worked as a CIA agent between 1960 and 1976. During those years Posada Carriles is sent by the American agency as a "Security advisor" of the secret services of Venezuela, Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile and Argentina. In October 1967, the CIA transfers Posada Carriles to Venezuela, where he joins the Directorate of Intelligence and Prevention Services (DISIP). Under the pseudonym of "Commissioner Basilio" he confronts Venezuelan and Latin American groups with communist and socialist tendencies.

One of the main and most active international terrorists of the "Cuban American National Foundation" (CANF), an extreme right-wing organization created and based in Florida, United States.

Guilty, together with Orlando Bosch Ávila, of the attack that killed the 73 passengers and crew members of the Cubana de Aviación civil aircraft, which exploded in the waters of Barbados on October 6, 1976. For that fact he was arrested and prosecuted in Venezuela, but before concluding the legal process he escaped from prison in 1985.

In an interview with the newspaper The New York Times he admitted having organized the campaign of dynamite attacks carried out in 1997 against tourist centers in Cuba, and acknowledged that the leaders of the CANF had financed his operations.

In this regard he also declared himself responsible, before a Miami television station, for any terrorist act that had been committed, or would be committed, within Cuba.

Involved in attempts to attack Cuban president Fidel Castro in the Dominican Republic in 1998, and in Panama in 2000, from November of that last year he remained imprisoned in the isthmus country until August 2004, when a pardon granted by former Panamanian president Mireya Moscoso put him at liberty.

Since late March 2005 he remained in Miami, where he had entered illegally, according to his lawyer's statements while awaiting the political asylum he had requested from the American government. The latter protected him with silence, while denying knowledge of his presence in the Union.

On May 17 of that same year the Department of Homeland Security issued a statement announcing that it had arrested Posada Carriles and that it was keeping him "in custody to determine his immigration status."

In June the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry presented to the American State Department a file that supported the extradition request of Posada Carriles to its territory, as a fugitive he is from Venezuelan justice since he fled to evade trial for the bombing of the Cuban aircraft.

The United States has not yet responded to the extradition request, which according to experts is appropriate for adhering to the bilateral extradition Treaty (1922), the Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts against the Safety of Civil Aviation (1971) and the International Convention for the Suppression of Terrorist Bombings (1997).

Luis Posada was transferred to the immigration detention center of El Paso, Texas, and after dilatory maneuvers, on June 13 he was presented for the first time before a judge (William L. Abbott, actually a Department of Justice official) to answer for his illegal entry into the country. It would be a hearing with several episodes and adjournments in August and September.

During the proceedings, questioned by the evident collusion between the terrorist, his attorney and the government represented by the Federal Prosecutor's Office, Posada withdrew his request for asylum in the United States and invoked the international convention for protection against torture.

Finally, on September 27, Judge Abbott ruled that Luis Posada Carriles would not be deported to Venezuela, for which he based himself on the assumption that he could suffer torture in the South American nation. In this way the terrorist's stay in the United States was prolonged, in an indirect but official manner, subject to trial only for immigration violations and for lying when filling out the forms about the way he entered the Union.

Several scandals, among other facts for the discovery on American territory of illegal arsenals, in the possession of terrorists closely linked to him, have accompanied the prolonged process led by Posada Carriles and by the authorities who, interested in his silence on shared guilt, have not wanted to try him for the sustained practice that qualifies him as the most dangerous terrorist in the Western Hemisphere.

Almost two years after his exceptionally comfortable imprisonment, the person responsible for the 73 deaths in Caribbean waters in 1976, as well as an indefinite number of crimes associated with Operation Condor in Latin America and other shadowy CIA operations, was released on bail on April 19, 2007, as was said then until the celebration of the hearing set for May 11.

On May 8, however, federal judge Kathleen Cardone, of El Paso, Texas, dismissed the charges for immigration fraud that existed against Posada Carriles, who immediately made statements to the press to celebrate the freedom obtained in this way.

Preceded by a dispute between the Federal Prosecutor's Office and the defense of the terrorist, regarding the prohibition of using evidence about the links between him and the CIA in the trial, Cardone's ruling censures the procedures used by the Bush Administration to assemble a case for immigration crimes, and assures that "Like all defendants before a court, this defendant is protected by certain constitutional rights. This court will not cast them aside nor ignore government misconduct simply because the defendant is a hot potato in political terms."

The White House's detachment from ethics and justice, in close communion with the interests of the anti-Cuban mafia in Florida, has served as the backdrop for this most recent episode of the grossly concealed presidential pardon of Luis Posada Carriles in the United States.

Luis Posada has been married on two occasions, first to Concepción Castañeda Nápoles, with whom he had no children, and later to Nieves de Posada, who would accompany him to Venezuela and with whom he would have two children. Later they separated and they moved to Miami where they reside to this day. Posada has not remarried.