TERRORIST Luis Posada Carriles’ route through Mexico last March and his arrival in the United States aboard the Santrina boat have made it possible to uncover a widespread network of Cuban-Americans known as "Los Marielitos" with connections to the Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF), involved in money laundering, human contraband and drug trafficking in the Yucatan peninsula.

An in-depth investigation by Por Esto newspaper has revealed many elements that confirm the dangerous situation – for Mexico, and also for the entire region, including Cuba and the United States – which has been created in the state of Quintana Roo, above all in the Cancun tourist resort area.

In order to learn some details of the investigation, Rebelión spoke with Renán Castro, general coordinator of Por Esto, who has been researching drug trafficking in his country for nearly 20 years. He stated: "We are facing a serious danger, and if the Mexican authorities don’t follow up on what the Cuban government has revealed, clear up and make public everything that happened in the Posada Carriles case, this will be unstoppable."

Por Esto undertook a thorough inquiry beginning in November of 2004, in the wake of a series of 12 executions of Federal Police (PF) agents involved in combating drug trafficking. After revelations in the daily’s pages, another 30 PF members were detained, as well as high-ranking officials at the Attorney General’s office.

At that time, a fight had broken out between the Gulf Cartel, run by Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, held at La Palma prison, and the Sinaloa Cartel, run by Ismael Elmayo Sambada.

The newspaper’s management already possessed a voluminous file with data provided by an informant when the Santrina ran aground on March 15 in El Farito, Isla Mujeres.

Renán explains that the National Immigration Institute knew that the Santrina, with its Cuban-American crew, was there to rescue terrorist Posada Carriles (the author of the mid-flight explosion of a Cuban passenger plane over Barbados that killed 73 people), who had entered Mexico via its border with Belize, and was in hiding in Cancun.

The files register a list of names of individuals to whom the detained federal agents were providing protection, including individuals associated with drug trafficking, undocumented Cuban immigrants and other illicit actions.

"We are continuing our investigations," Renán adds, "and we learned about his arrival in Cancun from shady business interests, total strange for an area that is very well monitored by the federal authorities, given the geographical situation of the Yucatan peninsula, which serves as a springboard for shipping drugs into the United States."

After checking around, the journalist managed to contact an undocumented Cuban immigrant, a woman, who was kidnapped for more than two weeks in a clandestine warehouse, where others like her are kept them before taking them, a few at a time, to the highway towards the cities of Matamoros and Nuevo León, later to cross them into the United States as "wetbacks" (illegally).

What is currently happening, he added, is a situation that is putting national and regional security at serious risk, not just because of drug trafficking, but because of the existence of a criminal cell that includes individuals from the Cuban-American National Foundation, who have established themselves in Mexico with the clear goal of trying to destabilize the Cuban government and make themselves into millionaires by trafficking in people and bringing drugs into the United States.

The Miami CANF sponsors a network that traffics in undocumented Cuban immigrants, led by Juan Carlos Riveroll, alias El Profe. They are the same ones who transferred Posada Carriles from the Mexican border with Belize to Cancun.

Riveroll maintains relationships with a group of drug traffickers (which is confirmed in official documents) and with Los Marielitos, the latter via the aforementioned Cuban-American businessmen who have established themselves there, laundering millions of dollars.

That is done through legal front businesses like restaurants, stores and bars that operate for two or three months and are immediately shut down (so as not to leave any evidence) by the tax administration authorities. Federal authorities estimate that investments in Cancun with dirty money run at about 40%.

In May, 365 illegal Cuban immigrants arrived in Mexico, and the total cost of getting them into the United States is between $5,000 and $50,000, depending on the importance of the individual and the economic level of his or her relatives. Some people do not have family in Miami, and in order to pay for the trip to the North, those Mafiosi prostitute women in Cancun and other Mexican cities, and use the men to bring drugs into the United States.

The quantity of narcotics that is moved daily via these drug runners is constantly growing. Recently, a small Colombian airplane that was transporting 1 ton and 2 kg of pure cocaine crashed near the López Bridge along Mexico’s border with Belize. This is a matter of million-dollar drug trafficking, Renán noted.

The operations are similar to those in Central America during the Iran-Contra scandal, where trafficking in cocaine and marijuana controlled by Cuban counterrevolutionary elements with the participation of high-ranking US officials financed the war against the Nicaraguan government and provided weapons to the Contra army.

They are the same organizations and individuals from that era, and need money for their anti-Cuba activities, which they obtain from drug trafficking. These are historic links, all through the years, and not a coincidence, and that is why Posada Carriles’ presence in Quintana Roo was not a chance event; he used the same maritime route that drug traffickers use to bring tons of Colombian cocaine into the United States, Renán emphasized.