El Salvador says NO to Posada

"WE do not like terrorism and we are not going to give asylum to a foreign terrorist," René Figueroa, Salvadoran minister of government, announced after a cable from the AFP news agency referred to contact between Luis Posada Carriles and "influential government" figures, including President Antonio Saca.

According to the agency, Posada Carriles stated on June 21 in Miami that he had personally contacted Figueroa and General Gustavo Hernández, an advisor to President Saca.

The minister "strongly" denied to the Diario Co Latino that he had had any communication with Posada Carriles.

In its recent past, El Salvador had a very different attitude. In fact, Posada lived in that Central American nation on various occasions and even traveled to the United States with documents issued in that country.

The terrorist and CIA agent was a central figure in the ill-named Iran-Contras scandal, when he participated under the alias of Ramón Medina in the drug trafficking operations directed by CIA officer and dissolute Félix Rodríguez out of the Salvadoran Ilopango airbase.

It was right there that he hatched the 1997 campaign of terror in Havana, using Salvadoran mercenaries, which ended in the death of Italian Fabio Di Celmo.

Later Posada informed The New York Times that his buddy Feliciano Foyo of the Cuban-American National Foundation was the individual who sent tens of thousands of dollars to El Salvador for his anti-Cuba "operations."

On October 5, 1999, the Cuban government presented San Salvador with an extensive report on Posada Carriles, who was then in that country under a false identity and conspiring against Cuba. The Salvadoran authorities did nothing.

On April 26, 2000, Posada arrived at Miami International Airport with a Salvadoran passport in the name of Franco Rodríguez Mena, and it was with that same identity that he was captured in Panama in the following November, when he was planning an attempt on the life of the Cuban president that he had organized in El Salvador.

In an interview with the Prensa Gráfica agency from his cell in Panama in 2003 Posada confessed to "certain interventions" in El Salvador when he was working with the Venezuelan secret services, where he had been located by the CIA.