Crimes against humanity: Unprosecuted murders and human rights
violations
Isabel Vincent. National
Post. July 21, 2001
Over the years, U.S. intelligence officials have done just about everything
-- including kidnapping and explosive cigars -- to get rid of Cuban leader Fidel
Castro. Now, if a group of well-connected Cuban American lawyers have their way,
Mr. Castro may soon find himself calmly handcuffed by foreign security officials
and charged with assassination and torture the next time he travels abroad.
The Cuban American National Foundation, an anti-Castro lobby group, has
spent more than US$700,000 over the past three years to gather evidence from
across Latin America and the United States that would implicate the Cuban leader
in several assassinations. Inspired by the 1998 attempt by a Spanish magistrate
to bring former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to justice in Spain for the
murder of Spanish citizens killed in Chile between 1973 and 1983 and current
efforts in Belgium to try Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for crimes against
humanity, lawyers for the foundation are quietly gathering evidence against Mr.
Castro.
They are mainly investigating unprosecuted murders and other human rights
violations committed in the 1970s and 1980s by leftist guerrilla groups who
received training in Cuba and perhaps acted on orders from Mr. Castro himself.
But legal officials are also seeking to charge Mr. Castro with the murder of
three U.S. citizens, shot down by Cuban fighter jets in 1996.
Although many international law experts have called the exercise a long shot
because the Cuban leader is protected by the international legal principle of
head of state immunity from prosecution, foundation members and lawyers in Miami
say they are unfazed.
"We are dealing here not with a head of state that follows the law and
international rules, but with an international criminal," said Francisco "Pepe"
Hernandez, the foundation's president, in an interview from Miami. Mr. Hernandez
called the Castro indictment the "number one priority" of the
foundation, a powerful lobby group in Washington that has largely dictated the
U.S. government's policy of isolating Cuba for nearly four decades.
"We cannot have dictators willy-nilly doing what they want -- and then
answering, 'I'm head of state,' " said George J. Fowler III, the
foundation's legal counsel.
Those seeking to prosecute Mr. Castro are also buoyed by recent efforts in
Belgium to prosecute Mr. Sharon for the massacre of 800 people at the Sabra and
Shatilla refugee camps while he was Israel's minister of defence in the early
1980s. The recent handover of former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic, who
will become the first former head of state to stand trial for war crimes at an
international tribunal in The Hague, has also bolstered the efforts of the
Cuban-American lawyers. They also point to legal gains made under U.S. civil
law, such as a 1995 federal court decision that upheld a civil suit against
Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic for crimes against humanity.
Moreover, last month, a federal court in Miami convicted five Cuban spies
who tried to infiltrate the U.S. military's Southern Command in the late 1990s.
Two of those spies were also convicted for the murder of three U.S. citizens,
shot down in their planes by Cuban fighter jets in February, 1996. The three
were members of Brothers to the Rescue, an anti-Castro group that regularly flew
over Cuba dropping leaflets, denouncing the Cuban dictator. Intelligence
officials in the United States believe that Mr. Castro gave the order to shoot
down two of the Brothers to the Rescue planes that resulted in the deaths.
"The recent conviction [of the Cuban spies] sets up the foundation to
go up the line in the Cuban command structure," said Rafael Sanchez-Aballi,
a Miami lawyer and human rights advocate. "How can Castro hope to draw on
immunity when he has been involved in the assassination of hundreds of people? I
don't think a government has the right to assassinate."
Mr. Castro himself fears he could be arrested any time he travels abroad. In
1998, when General Pinochet was arrested on a trip to London, Mr. Castro was on
a state visit to Lisbon. When they heard about the General's arrest, his aides
cut the Cuban leader's planned visit to Spain and Portugal short, and
immediately flew him back to Cuba. In a recent speech made in Cuba, Mr. Castro
dismissed the legal efforts against him as a means to harm the Cuban revolution,
but he also vowed to put up a good fight if anyone tried to arrest him.
"If a judge or authority from Spain or any other NATO ally were to ever
attempt to have me arrested, using arbitrary extraterritorial powers and
violating rights that are sacred to me, he should know beforehand that there
will be a fight, no matter where they try to do it," he said in an April 28
speech. "For I do believe in the extraterritoriality of the honour and
dignity of man."
Mr. Hernandez, a Bay of Pigs veteran, said he would support a covert
operation to apprehend Mr. Castro, but with or without the Cuban leader's
arrest, court proceedings against him in the United States, Spain and Latin
America would draw attention to what he called "the criminalization of the
record of the Castro regime, and specifically the figure of Fidel Castro."
In addition to the indictment against Mr. Castro being prepared by lawyers
in the United States, legal officials are also working with prosecutors in
Spain, Argentina and Costa Rica to build cases against Mr. Castro for
assassination and torture.
Lawyers working closely with the Cuban American National Foundation in Miami
have already filed cases against Mr. Castro in a court in Madrid. Cuban exiles
filed suit in a Spanish court against Mr. Castro, his brother Raul Castro, who
is the Cuban defence minister and other Cuban officials for 300 cases of
torture, murder and other crimes. Although the Spanish court threw out their
case, Foundation lawyers are appealing the decision.
In Argentina, Foundation lawyers are trying to persuade local prosecutors to
charge Mr. Castro and other Cuban officials for the 1989 attack on the Argentine
military barracks at La Tablada. Investigators have believed for years that the
All for the Fatherland Movement, the guerrilla group that mounted the attack
which killed 39 people, most of them rebels, was organized by terrorists who
were trained and financed by Cuba.
Enrique Gorriaran Merlo, an Argentine terrorist who had very close ties to
Mr. Castro and headed the All for the Fatherland Movement, was also behind the
1980 assassination of former Nicaraguan leader Anastacio Somoza and a 1984
bombing in Costa Rica. The foundation is helping lawyers in Costa Rica mount a
case against Mr. Castro for his alleged role in the bombing of a press
conference for the Contra leader Eden Pastora that left three journalists, one
of them an American, dead. For years investigators attributed the bombing of the
Contra guerrilla base known as La Penca to CIA operatives. But recent evidence
suggests the bombing was organized and executed by Cuban operatives, allegedly
on Mr. Castro's orders.
"The same person who placed the La Penca bomb was also active in the La
Tablada massacre, and he was working for Cuba," said Jorge Masetti, a
former Cuban intelligence operative now living in France.
Mr. Masetti, who is one of the Foundation's key informants in their cases
against Mr. Castro, noted in a recent interview that Roberto Vital Gaguines, an
Argentine who worked for Cuban and Nicaraguan intelligence under the left-wing
Sandinista regime, was behind both attacks. According to Mr. Masetti, who is
writing a book about his experiences in Cuban intelligence, Mr. Gaguines was one
of the rebels killed in the La Tablada attack.
Mr. Masetti, who was born in Argentina and taken by his parents to live in
Cuba when he was three years old, is also a former militant. While he was
working in Cuba, he said he provided military assistance to Mr. Gorriaran, who
is now in a Buenos Aires jail serving a life sentence for terrorism.
Mr. Masetti is also providing evidence he hopes will convince prosecutors in
Chile to charge Fernando Flores Ibarra, a Chilean and one of Castro's key
allies. Mr. Flores prosecuted cases in Cuba that led to the executions of former
members of Fulgencio Batista's regime. Mr. Batista, a dictator, was overthrown
by Mr. Castro's forces in 1959. Mr. Flores, whose nickname in Spanish translates
as "pool of blood," visits Chile frequently.
"All of these guerrilla groups that carried out assassinations and
massacres did so with Cuban direction and help," said Mr. Masetti. "And
nobody has answered for these crimes."
Mr. Sanchez-Aballi, the Miami lawyer, agrees.
"For years, agents of the Cuban government have been conducting wars in
Latin America," he said, adding that the Colombian guerrilla group known as
the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) also derives its ideology, and
possibly its training and direction, from Cuba.
"It's time somebody was brought to justice," he said.
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