The U.S. ignored Costa Rican proposal to extradite Bosch
By Jean-Guy ALLARD, Special for Granma International

In May of 1976, the U.S. State Department chose to ignore an offer by the Costa Rican Government to extradite Orlando Bosch, a fugitive from U.S. justice, who had been detained in this Central American country for possession of a false Chilean passport. A few months later, Venezuelan authorities arrested Bosch as a principal suspect in the Barbados attack of October 6, 1976 in which 73 people lost their lives in the explosion of a Cubana Aviation plane in mid-flight.

An official telegram from Wilburg Jiménez Castro, acting minister of foreign relations of Costa Rica, addressed to U.S. Representative Eduardo Mora Valverde proves, without the slightest doubt, an exchange of notes between himself and the State Department during this time.

In the document, Jiménez Castro first told the representative that the State Department had informed the Costa Rican Embassy in Washington, via the Department of Central American Affairs, that terrorist groups directed by Orlando Bosch "were going to attempt acts of violence in Costa Rica" on the occasion of an Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance meeting, according to a report received from the FBI.

Meanwhile, on August 1, 1975, there was an attack on the Costa Rican embassy in Washington, the perpetrators of which have not been identified to this day.

Later, the minister revealed to his interlocutor that when Orlando Bosch "was arrested in San Jose in early 1976 with a false Chilean passport, following orders from above, he notified the same U.S. State Department authorities so that the government could consider processing his extradition, given that he was a fugitive from justice in that country."

"No reply was ever received," concluded the message.

The minister’s letter was published in the Costa Rican weekly Libertad on October 28, 1976, under the title "They wouldn’t accept Bosch when he was in Costa Rica and now they’re asking Venezuela for him," a reference to how the U.S. authorities were desperately soliciting Caracas for the extradition of Bosch, accused of sabotaging the Cubana airplane.

"The Costa Rican government offered to hand Bosch over to the State Department and it kept quiet," commented Libertad. "But now they’re asking Venezuela to hand him over, probably fearing that Bosch will talk too much."

While Costa Rica awaited a response regarding Bosch that never came, the CIA, then directed by George Bush Sr., were awaiting the outcome of other operations by the notorious terrorist, who already had the support of Augusto Pinochet’s fascist military junta.

On June 11, 1976, shortly after his expulsion from Costa Rica and working out of the U.S. Falconbridge Company office in the Bonao Mountains, Dominican Republic, Bosch created the United Revolutionary Organizations Coordinating Committee (CORU), made up of five counterrevolutionary groups directed by the CIA and associated with Plan Condor. From that moment on, CORU would carry out dozens of terrorist actions against Cuban entities in Central American countries and Europe.

On July 6 Jiménez Castro denounced a coup plot against Costa Rican President Daniel Oduber. On that day, the minister called on the national and international press to expose this plot that, he said, was being hatched in Guatemala under the direction of Orlando Bosch and to which Latin American ultra-right organizations were committed.

He then explained that Bosch was still using an official Chilean passport, identification card and a falsified Chilean birth certificate. "It has compellingly caught the attention of the Costa Rican authorities that, despite Bosch’s wrongful use of these Chilean documents being public knowledge, the Pinochet government is allowing him to use them and therefore, logically, is supporting his conspiratorial activities," Libertad pointed out in its July 8 edition.

The conspirators, Jiménez Castro affirmed, planned to establish an extreme right regime in Costa Rica "and for this they were counting on the collaboration of the most reactionary groups in Latin America."

In Guatemala, where he had appeared shortly after his expulsion from Costa Rica, Bosch benefited from his links with General Carlos Arana Osorio, former president (1970-1974) and leader of the most fanatic current of the ultra-right.

On July 10t, CORU attacked the British West Indies Airline Office, which represented the interests of Cubana Aviation in Barbados. The next day, there was an attack on Air Panama in Colombia, carried out by CORU.
On July 23, Gaspar Jiménez Escobedo murdered Artagñán Díaz Díaz, who worked at the Cuban Fisheries Institute in Mérida, Yucatán, when they attempted to kidnap him under CORU orders.
On August 9, two Cuban officials accredited in Argentina were kidnapped and murdered by CORU assassins.
At the end of August, C-4 bombs exploded in the Costa Rican offices of Iberia and Nanaco Lines. Both companies were doing business with Cuba. The attacks were immediately attributed to Cuban counterrevolutionaries located in that country and linked to Orlando Bosch.

September 21, in Washington, Orlando Letelier, the former Chilean foreign minister, and his colleague Ronnie Karpen Mofitt, were murdered in an operation directed by CIA agent Michael Townley who was working with the Chilean DINA in coordination with CORU.

In September of 1976, Jay Mallín, from Time magazine, wrote: "the success of Bosch has a very simple explanation, he is an old Chicago-style gangster, if you don’t pay, he’ll put a bomb in your office; it’s that simple... Bosch is an extortionist, not a patriot."
On October 6 a Cubana Aviation plane was destroyed in mid-flight over Barbados. Investigations immediately led to Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles as the principal masterminds behind the crime.

Various declassified CIA and FBI documents demonstrate that the U.S. government knew of the intentions of Bosch and Posada Carriles and withheld evidence from the courts.

The terrorist career of Orlando Bosch began in the mid-1960s when he became involved with counterrevolutionary bands in the Escambray mountains in central Cuba. In 1978, investigations by the U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Commission of the Select Committee on Crime, acknowledged his recruitment by the CIA.
In November 1968, a Miami court declared Orlando Bosch Avila guilty of terrorist attacks on merchant shipping, distributing threatening communiqués to the press and 40 other acts of terrorism executed that year in southern Florida.

He was sentenced to 18 years’ imprisonment, which did not stop him from directing, from his cell, the terrorist operations of his group Poder Cubano (Cuban Power).
On December 15, 1972 he was released on probation and once again began participating in criminal activities as the head of the group Acción Cubana (Cuban Action). In 1974, the CIA advised him to leave the United States to elude the FBI, which suspected him – among other crimes – of the murder of a rival Cuban American, Elías de la Torriente.

After the Barbados trial in February of 1988, Bosch was released by the Venezuela authorities, transferred to Miami with the help of Otto Reich, then U.S. ambassador in Caracas, and later given a presidential pardon by George Bush Sr. on July 20, 1990.

At 79 years of age, Orlando Bosch Avila is leisurely living in Miami and openly continuing to promote terrorism.