Muñiz Varela’s family asks Obama to act
José A. Delgado
WASHINGTON — Just when the Puerto Rican Department of Justice has decided to pressure the federal authorities, Carlos Muñiz Varela’s son has written to President Barack Obama, Justice Secretary Eric Holder, and Puerto Rican Democratic members of Congress to ask that the FBI cooperate with the investigation into his father’s political assassination, which occurred 35 years ago today (Monday, April 28).
“My father was the victim of a conspiracy organized and financed by members of the Cuban far right in Puerto Rico, who were supported by similar groups in the United States,” wrote Carlos Muñiz Pérez in a letter to President Obama, dated April 7, in the name of the Committee of Relatives and Friends of Carlos Muñiz Varela.
Muñiz Pérez, who was barely 5 when his father, 25, was gunned down as he drove his car near his home in Guaynabo, wrote to President Obama in 2011 but received no answer.
He also wrote Holder a second letter, in which he insists that Holder should intercede with the FBI to support the actions taken by Puerto Rico’s Secretary of Justice, César Miranda, who is asking the federal authorities to make available the evidence that can solve the case.
Miranda gave his team until October to get a “total picture” of the Muñiz Varela case. But he expects to learn much more before then about the demands for the FBI’s cooperation.
The Committee of Relatives and Friends, which today held a memorial service in San Juan, said that in 2008 the then-director of the FBI, Luis Fraticelli, told then-Secretary of Justice of Puerto Rico Roberto Sánchez Ramos that the FBI had evidence that would expose the authors of the assassination. The crime occurred at a time when Muñiz Varela, Raúl Alzaga Manresa and Ricardo Fraga were starting to promote travel between San Juan and Havana.
Muñiz Pérez wrote to Holder in April 2010. A copy of that letter was hand-delivered to the U.S. Secretary of Justice last July, in San Juan, through the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), William Ramírez.
In his new letter to Holder, Muñiz Pérez insists that interviews be conducted with three people linked to the Cuban right who live in the United States: José Dionisio Suárez Esquivel, convicted for the assassination of Chile’s former foreign minister Orlando Letelier; Pedro Crispín Remón Rodríguez, and Reynol Rodríguez González.
Through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the Committee of Relatives and Friends obtained FBI documents that refer to the activities of the Coordinating Unit of the United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU) with regard to Muñiz Varela. The names of the suspects had been crossed out, but the FBI described CORU as a group that comprised “five anti-Castro terrorist organizations.”
Muñiz Pérez also sent letters on April 18 to the three Puerto Rican Democrats with full rights in Congress, Nydia Velázquez (New York), José Serrano (New York) and Luis Gutiérrez (Illinois). He had also written to them in April 2010.
“Our main concern is to discover the truth and do justice,” said Muñiz Pérez, whose sister Yamaira was only a few months old when their father was killed. “We have waited for 35 years,” wrote Muñiz Pérez in his letters.
(From the Puerto Rican newspaper El Nuevo Día)
