Juan O. Tamayo, jtamayo@herald.com. Published Sunday, January 30, 2000, in the Miami Herald
Bombing expert is under scrutiny
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador -- Nearly three years after his mercenaries unleashed Cuba's worst spate of terrorism in 40 years, Cuban exile Luis Posada is back in the headlines, accused by the Cuban government of plotting fresh bombings and even the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo
Chavez.
Salvadoran government officials interviewed here by The Herald say they have ordered Posada to stop using their nation and citizens for his missions. The U.S. Embassy in San Salvador wants to know his every move. Cuban hit teams may be after him.
But the CIA-trained explosives expert and veteran of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion remains determined to sow terror in Cuba's tourism industry, the largest hard-currency earner for President Fidel Castro's government.
``This crusade is to the end,'' the 70-year-old Posada said when asked about allegations that he hired several Central Americans to set off bombs in Cuba late last year. ``But I don't want to answer that question.''
``There is nothing else for me to do,'' Posada told The Herald in a Jan. 19 interview in a location that he insisted be identified only as ``a city somewhere in Central America.'' He refused to make any other substantive comment, saying he did not want to draw attention to himself.
Posada has been largely out of the public eye since he admitted in mid-1998 that he had masterminded a dozen Havana bombings the previous year that killed one Italian tourist and wounded a dozen other foreigners.
But Castro put him back in the spotlight last month by accusing him of plotting to kill the pro-Castro Chavez, bomb a Cuba-bound airliner somewhere in Central America and ``sabotage economic targets in Cuba itself.''
REACTION TO CLAIM
Posada denied any role in the alleged plots against Chavez and the airliner. ``I think Castro is a little sick in the head. He's manufacturing ghosts,'' the exile insisted.
But he declined to comment directly when asked about the other Castro allegation. Some of his exile friends in Miami also claim that he told them he had sent more non-Salvadoran mercenaries to Havana just three to four months ago.
``Posada claimed he paid some people, Central Americans from somewhere, to go to Havana around October, but they just spent a nice vacation there . . . and did not set off the bombs they carried,'' said one exile who is in regular contact with Posada.
Two young Salvadorans paid by Posada to detonate some of the dozen bombs in 1997 -- Raul Ernesto Cruz Leon and Otto Rodriguez -- were arrested in Cuba and were tried and sentenced to death last year. Their sentences are under review by Cuba's legal system.
Cuba is holding two Guatemalans sent by Posada in early 1998, although none of their devices exploded, and the former husband of one of the Guatemalans, arrested when he flew to Cuba to inquire about her.
SALVADORAN ACTION
Salvadoran government officials said Posada, who has lived in El Salvador since 1985, has been ordered to stop using Salvadoran territory and citizens for his anti-Castro attacks.
``The government wants to disconnect El Salvador from that man and his entanglements,'' said one security official who investigated Posada. ``President [Francisco] Flores has zero tolerance for paramilitary actions, least of all for anything across international borders.''
Salvadoran intelligence agencies have ``cooperated fully'' with a U.S. Embassy request in late 1998 for any information on Posada and ``kept a watch'' on his activities since then, the official added.
But the government declined to expel him from El Salvador, the official added, because the Cuban exile has strong friends in the ruling right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance, known in Spanish as ARENA.
Castro charged last month that Posada's ``major supporters'' in El Salvador were ARENA hardliners -- Interior Minister Mario Acosta, former Public Security Minister Hugo Barrera and former police chief Rodrigo Avila.
ARENA officials confirmed that they have seen Posada and Avila together at social events. Acosta claimed he has never met Posada and retorted that Castro was ``the father of all international terrorists,'' recalling that Cuba armed leftist guerrillas during El Salvador's civil war in the 1980s.
NO CRACKDOWN
Boosting Posada's ability to live in El Salvador is the fact that Cuba never sought his extradition or requested international warrants for his arrest.
Posada, meanwhile, lives semiclandestinely in El Salvador, where he moved after escaping from a Venezuelan prison in 1985. He had been tried and found not guilty in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban jetliner that killed 73 people, but authorities were considering a second trial when he escaped.
Although he carries a Venezuelan passport under a false name, changes addresses often and uses only cellular phones to avoid being located, Posada has no bodyguards and drives himself around San Salvador.
He has recently told friends in Miami that he is in economic straits, sending them some of the Cuban landscapes he paints and copies of his autobiographical book, The Ways of the Warrior, with pleas to sell them among exiles and send him the profits.
Usually talkative and outgoing, he seemed somewhat downcast during the Herald interview and noted that his Salvadoran companion of 14 years, Angela Bosch, died in November at the age of 52 after a long battle with cancer.
``I've seen death many times before, but I never knew I could be so weak,'' he said. ``I have begun to feel that I don't have much [time] left either.''
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