In 1981, FBI agent Robert Scherrer wrote that his colleague Carter Cornick was working in Miami, “since that is where the bomb experts live, along with drug traffickers and former Latin American dictators; “The legendary mobster and former Cuban senator, Rolando ‘El Tigre’ Masferrer, was executed there in 1975… Orlando Bosch still continues to raise funds in Miami.”[i] Both agents had been assigned to the case of the car bomb that killed Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt and, like other federal agents, knew Miami as “the capital of terrorism in the United States.” The record of executions and bombs in cars, public and private buildings did not leave an inch for doubt.
This consensus among FBI detectives had an explanation in the story, I thought, I wrote down, I crossed out, I wrote again. The wave of terrorist attacks in Florida, New Jersey and New York was the natural result of a historical development that had begun with the mafia organizations that dominated the Cuban economy even before the government of Fulgencio Batista. Later, it was a collateral effect of the CIA’s plans after the coup d’état in Guatemala in 1954 and, above all, after the Cuban Revolution of 1959.
In 1961, south of the University of Miami campus, the CIA installed its largest operations station in the world, which it named JMWAVE, with a budget of 50 million dollars (equivalent to 500 million, half a century later), which translated into a miraculous bonanza for small businesses in the area, while demonstrating the virtues of capitalism, the free market and freedom free from the tyranny of governments. 300 American employees and 6,000 Cuban exiles began working there, recruited as collaborators. All of them, according to the records, entered the CIA payrolls sooner or later. The project was closed in 1968 due to persistent failures, among them the most important, which consisted of the assassination of Fidel Castro and the most persistent sabotage and bombing of the island, which, far from diminishing the power of the new regime, ended up destroying strengthen it.[ii]
Among the direct collaborators were figures who would later have great power in politics and business, such as the gastronomic and media businessman Jorge Mas Canosa. In the 1961 invasion of Cuba, Mas Canosa led the group Niño Díaz. He was also an announcer for Radio Swan and Radio Américas, the pirate AM that the CIA installed on the CIA-owned island, opposite Honduras, to prepare for the invasion of Cuba with its psychological warfare manual. The radio was a copy of Radio Liberación, the short wave invented in 1954 to destabilize the democracy of Guatemala, chaired by Jacobo Árbenz, and which at that time was an absolute success. At that time, a young doctor named Ernesto Guevara was in Guatemala, who will take his experience to Cuba and will be part of the resistance to the CIA plan to turn Cuba “into another Guatemala.”
In April 1965, this CIA station in Miami hired Luis Posada Carriles. In June 1967, Posada was sent to Caracas to pursue a career in the Venezuelan secret police (where he stood out for his violent interrogation techniques) and pave the way for a dozen other Cubans from Miami, who would not work as second-rate agents. Not even as sergeants, but in high positions in the Disip as soon as they arrived at the Maiquetía airport. One of them will be the Cuban Ricardo Morales Navarrete, who joined the Miami CIA station that same year.
Known as El Mono, Morales had been a secret G-2 agent in Cuba until 1960 and a member of “Commandos L” from Miami in 1963. He was recruited a year later by the CIA “for paramilitary activities” in Florida. El Mono will become a central figure of the Cuban exile. He will be a CIA agent in the massacres in Congo and Angola (at $350 per month); one of the heads of the Venezuelan secret police in the 70s; protected FBI informant (at $700 per month) against his own comrades and despite having admitted to a murder in Florida in 1972.[iii]
Finally, he dedicated himself to drug trafficking, until his execution in a Miami bar in 1982.
Due to the famous failure of the Bay of Pigs, the future businessman and powerful financier of several paramilitary operations from Miami, Jorge Mas Canosa, was awarded a rank of second lieutenant, as soon as he enlisted in the United States Army to stop being a paramilitary. At Fort Benning, he was in charge of training Cubans in propaganda and clandestine operations.[iv]
Fort Benning, Georgia, was named in honor of Henry Lewis Benning, general of the pro-slavery forces of the Confederacy, exactly a century earlier, and then home to the School of the Americas – the School of Assassins, as translated by Robert Richter. There, Mas Canosa met and became unconditional friends with Félix Rodríguez, Luis Posada Carriles and Oliver North. He found Oliver North again in the White House during the Ronald Reagan years. Despite insisting that he was not the Jorge Mas Canosa that Lieutenant North had mentioned during the Iran-Contra scandal, subsequent investigations will reveal that the donations to North to finance the Contras were from the only known Mas Canosa in Miami—and user of the same telephone numbers investigated. Colonel Oliver North will make a career of training the Contras in Honduras and Nicaragua. He will be convicted of lying to the US Congress about the Iran-Contra case and, shortly after, released by the White House. He will also be recognized for other unpunished massacres, such as in Afghanistan, decades later.
With some imprecision, Rodríguez took credit for the execution of prisoner Ernesto Che Guevara in the Standard Oil Company’s Bolivia and of Nazis sent by the CIA, such as war criminal Klaus Barbie.
Posada Carriles failed in all his attempts to kill Fidel Castro, but Mas Canosa will help him several times to stay in different countries and escape from uncomfortable situations, such as the Caracas prison, after being convicted of blowing up the Cubana plane, with 73 passengers.
The smartest of all seems to have been Mas Canosa. By the late 1960s he was running million-dollar businesses in Miami and, in his spare time, he financed paramilitary groups such as L Commands. If Orlando Bosch had failed in his attempt to become the Che Guevara of capitalism (the reference was explicit in a letter he sent from Chile), Mas Canosa had failed in his obsession to reproduce the success of Granma, when in 1956 a few rebels The survivors landed in Cuba and, in three years, managed to overthrow the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, a dictatorship even better armed than Castro’s and with the unconditional support of the United States government and the powerful mafia of the casinos and brothels of Havana. . His attempts to land in Cuba on sophisticated yachts to overthrow Fidel Castro failed again and again. For some reason, nothing was working, not even remotely. For some reason, not even God trusted us, even though we trusted God so much. Nothing will ever work, a frustration that increased the level of endogamous violence.
Starting in the 1970s, as was the case with other exiles and the CIA itself on a larger scale, Mas Canosa became involved with different drug traffickers, such as Rafael de Arce and Antonio Canaves.[v]
“These people visited Jorge once or twice a week,” his brother, Ricardo Mas Canosa, declared under oath and before a judge, “until they got into trouble with the law, due to their business with drug traffickers. I remember them very well, because they appeared in the offices in their luxurious Cadillacs, smoking huge cigars. As soon as they entered Jorge’s office, they closed the door and left me outside.[vi]
A series of declassified FBI documents (with the approval of the CIA, which at that time no longer considered these collaborators important) record multiple illegal activities of Mas Canosa and Posada Carriles, from international drug trafficking to the creation of paramilitary training camps in Florida; the continued trafficking of weapons from Venezuela; the planting of bombs in Mexico and Central America, and (according to another secret CIA report of July 26, 1965) the attempted overthrow of another president of Guatemala, this time Colonel Alfredo Peralta Azurdia, at the request of another resident from Miami Beach, the millionaire businessman Roberto Alejos Arzú.[vii]
According to a document classified eleven years later, dated November 26, 1976, Posada Carriles, “demolition expert”, also worked with Alejos Arzú in his coup d’état plan in Guatemala.[viii]
The plan, loaded with weapons and cylinders against Peralta Azurdia, another dictator who protected banana corporations and with some bedroom friends, was frustrated by Washington in Mexico. Years later, the colonel and dictator Peralta Azurdia, in whose government the Death Squads reigned, as well as his personal enemies, also retired in Miami.
Posada Carriles’ role in Venezuela was very similar to that of Dan Mitrione in other countries on the continent, such as Uruguay. In June 1967, the CIA ended its working relationship with Posada Carriles, citing tax problems and independent activities not reported to Central. In August I was already working for Digepol, in Caracas.[ix]
While he was head of Venezuela’s secret police, he was known as Commissioner Basilio. Not only was he dedicated to supervising the torture and disappearance of Venezuelan dissidents subjected to special interrogation techniques, but he also facilitated drug trafficking from Colombia to Miami, as recorded in FBI memoranda from March 1973. A month later , the CIA confirmed Posada Carriles’ connection with drug trafficking, being reported in the company of “powerful drug bosses.” Federal investigators preferred not to formalize accusations, to keep him as a source of information. In May 1973, he was found “guilty only of having the wrong friends.” Not just friends. By March 1976, the DEA was still pursuing his wife, Nieves Elina González, suspected of participating in drug trafficking from Colombia to Miami through Venezuela.
Three months later, Posada Carriles requested a special visa from the CIA to spend his vacation in the United States.[x]
Of the book 1976. The capital of terrorism (2024)
Notes:
[i] Branch, Taylor & Eugen Propper. Labyrinth. Penguin, 1983, p. 177.
[ii] Alan McPherson. Ghosts of Sheridan Circle. How a
Washington Assassination Brought Pinochet‘s Terror State to Justice. University of North Carolina Press, 2018, p. 77.
[iii] “The President John F. Kennedy Assassination
Records Collection”. The National Security Archive. Geroge Washington University. Archives.gov,
www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/2018/180-10143-10345.pdf
[iv] Bardach, Ann Louise. Cuba Confidential:
Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana. United Kingdom, Knopf Doubleday Publishing
Group, 2007, p. 136.
[v] Idem, 138.
[vi] Idem, 138.
[vii] “The President John F. Kennedy Assassination
Records Collection”. The National Security Archive. Geroge Washington University. Archives.gov.
www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/104-10178-10061.pdf
[viii] The National Security Archive. Geroge Washington University. Archives.gov,
nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB157/19761209.pdf
[ix] The National Security Archive. Geroge Washington University.
nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB157/19761209.pdf
[x] “The President John F. Kennedy Assassination
Records Collection”. The National Security Archive. Geroge Washington University. Archives.gov,
www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/2023/180-10145-10345.pdf
Rebelión has published this article with the permission of the author through a Creative Commons licenserespecting your freedom to publish it in other sources.
