Humberto Márquez

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, May 18 2005 (IPS) — Cuban-born Luis Posada Carriles, an admitted terrorist who was taken into custody in Miami and whose extradition has been formally requested by Venezuela, may be sent by the United States to a third country, like Barbados or Trinidad and Tobago.

“Public opinion around the world and especially in the United States can rest assured that if Washington extradites Posada, he will be tried in Venezuela and under no circumstances will he be sent to Cuba,” Venezuelan Vice-President José Vicente Rangel said Wednesday.

U.S. immigration agents seized Posada on Tuesday, and Homeland Security Department officials are studying his immigration status.

However, they have cast into doubt the possibility of extraditing the 77-year-old anti-Castro terror suspect to Venezuela, where he is wanted as a fugitive from justice.

“As a matter of immigration law and policy, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement does not generally remove people to Cuba, nor does ICE generally remove people to countries believed to be acting on Cuba’s behalf,” the Homeland Security Department stated in a communiqué.

It also noted that it had 48 hours (until Thursday afternoon) to determine Posada’s immigration status.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez is a good friend of Cuban President Fidel Castro, which has caused enormous friction between the Venezuelan and U.S. governments.

Lawyer Joaquín Chafardet, who has defended Posada in Caracas, claimed that if his client “puts one foot in Venezuela, the next day he’ll be on a plane to Cuba.”

But according to Venezuelan officials, the extradition request has put the United States in a difficult position, in which it must prove its commitment to fighting terrorism.

Rangel said the case would be “emblematic” in assessing just what the George W. Bush administration’s stance is with regard to terrorism. “It seems that for some there is good terrorism and bad terrorism,” he added.

Posada and another notorious anti-Castro Cuban exile, Orlando Bosch, were charged in Venezuela for planning the October 1976 bombing of a Cubana de Aviación airliner that exploded near Barbados on its way to Havana.

All 73 crew members and passengers, including the teenage members of Cuba’s national junior fencing team, were killed. The incident was the first confirmed mid-air terrorist bombing of a commercial airliner.

Venezuelan photographers Freddy Lugo and Hernán Ricardo were tried and convicted as the material authors of the bombing, and have both served their sentences.

But the lengthy, complicated legal process against Posada was cut short when he escaped from a Venezuelan prison, disguised as a priest, in August 1985.

Recently declassified documents show that Posada, who became a nationalised Venezuelan citizen in 1967 and served in this country’s secret police for several years, was a CIA (U.S. Central Intelligence Agency) asset for several decades.

Posada himself has admitted to taking part in terrorist activities. Seven years ago, he acknowledged in an interview with The New York Times that he organised a wave of tourist installation bombings in Cuba in 1997 that killed an Italian tourist and injured 11 other people.

After hiding out in Central America in the 1990s, he was arrested in Panama in 2000 for plotting to assassinate Castro, who was in that country to take part in an Ibero-American summit.

Although Posada was convicted and sentenced to eight years in prison for the plot to kill Castro, he was pardoned by outgoing Panamanian president Mireya Moscoso just before she left office in September 2004.

Posada’s lawyers announced on Apr. 12 that he was in the United States and had filed a request for asylum.

He was taken into custody by immigration officials after he gave media interviews Tuesday in Miami. It has not been specified where he is being held.

President Chávez said the United States would be hypocritical if it granted Posada asylum, while Venezuelan Foreign Minister Alí Rodríguez said Washington “is under the obligation” to honour an extradition treaty signed by the two countries in 1922.

Venezuela’s ambassador to the United States, Bernardo Alvarez, said he expected full cooperation from the U.S. government.

On Tuesday, Castro led hundreds of thousands in a march in Havana to protest terrorism and demand that Posada be extradited to Venezuela.

The maximum prison sentence in Venezuela is 30 years, but judges regularly grant house arrest to perpetrators over 70.

But according to Carlos Romero, an international relations professor at a number of universities in Caracas, it is unlikely that Washington will hand Posada over to the Venezuelan authorities, – because the Cuban and Venezuelan governments have turned this into a highly politicised affair, thereby backing the United States up against the wall,” he noted.

ôIf he isn’t turned over, Washington will be denounced as having a double standard on terrorism, and if he is turned over, Havana and Caracas can present it as a new victory in their fight against imperialism,” he said.

For his part, Daniel Erikson of Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based centre for policy analysis, believes that the United States has several options. It could hand Posada over to a third country, charge him with some crime and put him on trial itself, or leave him in a kind of legal limbo.

Romero commented that Washington could use the basis for the Venezuelan judicial proceedings – a terrorist attack in Barbadian airspace û to avoid giving in to the demands of Venezuela and Cuba, ôwhich are right when they argue that there is only one kind of terrorism, although it is equally true that this is an old case, that dates far back in time.”

The police and legal investigations at the time revealed that Ricardo and Lugo had boarded the Cubana de Aviación airliner in Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad and Tobago, a stopover on the regularly scheduled flight route of Georgetown-Port of Spain-Bridgetown-Havana.

They got off the plane in Bridgetown, assuming that the bomb would explode on an empty aircraft sitting in the Barbadian capital’s airport, according to Caracas newspaper accounts. Instead, the bomb went off a few minutes after take-off, killing 57 Cuban passengers and crew, along with 11 passengers from Guyana and five from North Korea.

The Venezuelan president at the time, Carlos Andrés Pérez, arranged for the accused to be tried in Caracas, on the grounds that the attack had been planned in Venezuela and involved Venezuelan participants, and that both Cuba and the English-speaking Caribbean island nations could impose the death penalty, unlike Venezuela.

In Venezuela, the case bounced back and forth several times between the military and civilian courts, with contradictory rulings that served to further heighten the tensions between the governments of Venezuela and Cuba, which already occupied opposing sides in the Cold War that dominated the international relations of the era.

ôThe United States has got a hot potato on its hands,” commented Erikson, while Peter Kornbluh, a Latin America specialist at the non-governmental National Security Archive (NSA), told IPS in Washington, ôThis is a real test of (President) George W. Bush’s commitment to fighting terrorism.”

Romero noted that U.S. authorities could challenge the legal grounds for holding the trial in Venezuela, especially since the decision to do so was highly controversial, even three decades ago, and attempt to hand Posada over to Barbados, the country where the crime actually took place.

In the meantime, an editorial published Monday in The New York Times advocated denying asylum to Posada Carriles and handing him over to a third country.