El Salvador: The Imprint of Posada Carriles
The parliamentary bloc of the FMLN (Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front) has tried twice to pass a bill to prevent a possible return of terrorist Luis Posada Carriles to El Salvador.

On both occasions, strong opposition from the governing ARENA (Republican Nationalist Alliance) has prevented the bill from being submitted to the Legislative Assembly and becoming a biding document.

The ARENA lawmakers claim that President Antonio Saca has verbally expressed his commitment to denying shelter to Posada Carriles on Salvadorian territory.

However, lawmakers, political leaders, common citizens and San Salvador Mayor Violeta Mejivar herself have expressed concern about the possibility that Posada Carriles may seek protection in El Salvador again.

The truth is that those fears are not groundless, considering the deep imprint Posada Carriles has left in this country over the past 22 years, a period during which he had collaborators, established structures and received official and nonofficial support for his actions.

He himself acknowledged that in statements to the newspaper La Prensa Grafica while he was in prison in Panama, where he said that El Salvador was his second homeland and expressed his wish to live in this country.

After escaping from a Venezuelan prison in 1985, the FMLN detected Posada Carriles in the air base of Ilopango, where he occupied a section of the airport, Jose Luis Merino, aka Commander Ramiro Vasquez, told Prensa Latina.

He added that Posada Carriles traveled to El Salvador to organize a cocaine corridor from South America to the United States, with support from the local Air Force.

Those operations, which were commanded by Oliver North and involved citizens recruited in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, were later known as the Iran-Contras scandal or Irangate.

During that period, Posada Carriles got acquainted with Mario Acosta, who was the Interior minister during the governments of Armando Calderón Sol and Francisco Flores. It was Acosta that rejected Cuba"s humanitarian aid when Hurricane Mitch devastated El Salvador.

Acosta"s wife, Ana Maria Rodriguez Llerena, is the cousin of Otto Rene Rodriguez Llerena, who was recruited by Posada Carriles to carry out terrorist actions in Havana, where he was arrested and tried.

That variety of contacts, and many others, allowed Posada Carriles to create a network to recruit mercenaries in this country, in Honduras and in Guatemala to carry out terrorist actions in Cuba and other countries in the region.

From that network is Raul Cruz Leon, who confessed to carrying out bomb attacks on tourist facilities in Havana, as a result of which young Italian tourist Fabio di Celmo was killed.

In 1997, Posada Carriles recruited Guatemalan citizens Jorge Venancio Ruiz and Marlon Antonio Gonzalez Estrada, who planted a bomb in Varadero"s Sol Palmera Hotel, run by the Spanish chain Melia, and set two other explosive devices that were found before exploding.

In March 1998, Guatemalan citizens Maria Elena Gonzalez, Nader Kamal Musalam Barakat - aka Miguel Abraham Herrera Morales - and Jazid Ivan Fernandez Mendoza, were arrested as they tried to introduce explosive in Cuba.