The murder cover-up
Carlos Muñiz Varela (Final installment)
By Eduardo Santana Castellón and Raúl Alzaga Manresa
The investigation on the murder of Carlos Muñiz Varela was a deliberate failure. Evidence was lost or covered up, the crime scene was immediately tampered with, preventing the collection of crucial evidence, and the authorities issued baseless statements saying that the murder was either a crime of passion, a commercial rubout or even an assassination ordered by the Cuban government.
The FBI also participated in the investigation but denied the Puerto Rican police the information and evidence it obtained.
It seemed the crime might remain unpunished. However, a few years later, through several newspaper investigations, FBI documents obtained by way of the Freedom of Information Act, responses to police interrogations, and the evidence presented in corruption trials involving the Puerto Rican police, allowed the publication of the names and motives of the likely culprits of the assassination.
Especially valuable were the public hearings held in 1982, 1991 and 1992 by the Puerto Rican Senate to clarify the murders in Cerro Maravilla, committed one year before Carlos’ murder. In that instance, two young Puerto Rican pro-independence activists were convinced by an undercover policeman into setting fire to communications towers. When the men arrived there, the police captured them unarmed and gunned them down.
The case shook the country and, along with other cases of police corruption, the political crimes committed by secret police “Death Squads” came to light, execution teams that worked inside the Puerto Rican police during the administration of Governor Carlos Romero Barceló.
As a result of those hearings, a high-level cover-up was unveiled (involving the office of the governor of Puerto Rico, the U.S. Justice Department and the FBI) and 50 charges of murder, perjury and obstruction of justice were filed against 14 policemen, prosecutors and public officials. Five prosecutors were suspended or fired. Information about Carlos’ case was also made public during the hearings held by the Judicial Commission of the Puerto Rican Senate in 2002, where the members of the Commission on Truth and Justice testified about the murders of Carlos Muñiz Varela and Santiago Mari Pesquera.
As a result of the inquiries, the people responsible for Carlos’ murder can be categorized into three groups: the conspirators, the executioners and the concealers. In a letter to Barack Obama, written Dec. 15, 2008, Aníbal Acevedo Vilá, then-governor of Puerto Rico, asked the president to intervene in the Muñiz Varela case and asked the FBI to turn over information and evidence in its possession to facilitate the indictment of the people responsible for the crime.
In his letter, Acevedo Vilá names as suspects José Dionisio Suárez (convicted for the assassination in Washington, D.C., of the former Chilean foreign minister Osvaldo Letelier, and later pardoned by President Bush Sr.); Reynol Rodríguez González (who, at the time of the murder, was a member of the weekly La Crónica and military chief of the terrorist group CORU.) Some analysts believe that Reynol might be the hooded Z.
The third man named was Pedro Crispín Remón Rodríguez. Remón was one of the four conspirators who planned to blow up the Great Hall of the University of Panama, full of students and professors, during a conference given by Fidel Castro during the Tenth Ibero-American Summit. Later, all were pardoned by the then-President of Panama, Mireya Moscoso, apparently at the request of the U.S. government, a request expedited by money from Cuban exiles in Miami. Their pardon, imparted a few days before Moscoso finished her term, was declared to be unconstitutional last year by the Supreme Court of Justice of Panama (to read information about them, click here: http://www.cubaminrex.cu/Enfoques/terrorismo_contra%20cuba.htmn).
Governor Acevedo’s letter also refers to three individuals mentioned in the FBI documents and in the interviews: José “Pepe” Manuel Canosa Rodríguez, Waldo Pimentel Amesto, and Julio Labatut Escarra, all of whom died of natural causes between 2005 and 2007. Canosa was the owner of the famous Metropol Restaurant in Puerto Rico. He participated in the failed invasion at Girón Beach and was a member in Cuba of the violent group BRAC (Bureau of Anti-Communist Repression). Pimentel owned the Lumis lighting store in Puerto Rico. Previously, he owned the Quesada lighting store, birthplace of the clandestine group Friends for Democracy. Labatut owned the Florarte flower shop in Puerto Rico.
The FBI documents suggest that the cover-up suspects were various policemen sentenced to prison for various crimes unrelated to Carlos’ murder and a Puerto Rican senator who had been expelled from the Senate.
A clamor for justice, 30 years after the crime
The Muñiz Varela case remains bogged down, despite of all the new information that has come to light. Legal experts agree that the key lies in the information held by the FBI. In the aforementioned letter from Acevedo to Obama, the former governor states:
“Almost 30 years have elapsed since Muñiz Varela’s assassination and three of the known suspects have died. However, some suspects — including José Dionisio Suárez, Pedro Crispín Remón and Reynol Rodríguez González — currently live in the United States.
“Even though the Department of Justice of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico has carried out its investigation with all required care, several pieces of information are missing that are needed to take to suspects to trial […]
“Although FBI director in Puerto Rico, Mr. Luis S. Fraticelli, has informed the Secretary of Justice […] that the FBI has in its possession information and evidence that would allow a resolution of the Carlos Muñiz Varela case and facilitate the indictment of the people responsible for the crime, the FBI has still not provided such information.”
In essence, the governor of Puerto Rico’s letter described the FBI as the fourth suspect in the cover-up. As a result of that letter, in February of this year the FBI director in Puerto Rico publicly agreed to deliver to the legal authorities “all” information in his possession related to the assassination of Carlos Muñiz Varela. To this date, Carlos’ relatives and society at large continue to wait for that delivery.
It is important not to forget
The demons created by the CIA are loose. It is important to point out the political inconsistency of the United States, which on one hand declares “war on terrorism” and on the other promotes terrorism and grants impunity to confessed terrorists like Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles.
What’s particularly lamentable is the case of the five Cuban patriots Gerardo Hernández, René González, Ramón Labañino, Antonio Guerrero and Fernando González, who for several years infiltrated terrorist organizations in Florida and generated information that helped both Cuban and U.S. authorities prevent illegal actions.
They were arrested in 1998 by the FBI, and in an obviously irregular trial manipulated by the Bush administration, their work was ignored and misrepresented. At present, they have spent almost 11 years in U.S. prisons, two of them with life sentences, and the U.S. Supreme Court has refused to evaluate their case.
It is necessary to solve Carlos’ assassination and the explosion of the civilian airliner in Barbados; to dismantle the blockade and the terrorist mafias in Florida; to eliminate the prisons at the Guantánamo Naval Base where inmates have been tortured; and to correct the unjust sentences imposed on the five Cuban agents not only to bring justice and consolation to the relatives of the affected persons, but also to, as in the case of Germany after World War II or Argentina and Spain after their fascist dictatorships, allow the United States to regain its dignity and the trust of its citizens.
This can only be accomplished by acknowledging and confronting the lamentable legacy of fostering terrorism and violating human rights during the Cold War and the administration of George W. Bush. Not forgetting is a part of healing but, more importantly, not forgetting is part of not repeating injustices.
Cuba, Matanzas and the town of Colón, where Carlos was born, do not forget him. An elementary school and an orthopedic rehabilitation center bear his name. This year, on the 30th anniversary of his assassination, the Cuban Institute of Friendship with Peoples honored all Cubans murdered by terrorism. In Colón, a plaque was unveiled at his birthplace, identifying the house as a historical site, and the town erected a monument to all Cubans killed by terrorism. The list is headed by Carlos Muñiz Varela.
The debt to Carlos and his mother
Statements similar to those who brought death to young Carlos, about the need to normalize relations between the United States and Cuba, are now expressed by numerous Cubans, Puerto Ricans and U.S. Americans without running the risk of being murdered. We owe that to Carlos.
In fact, those statements were spoken last April, exactly three decades after his murder, by almost all the Latin American presidents at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad & Tobago, and were reiterated during the Organization of American States General Assembly where Cuba’s exclusion was repealed. Carlos Muñiz Varela gave himself to the most just causes of the two fraternal countries to which he belonged: Puerto Rico, the country who raised him, and Cuba, the country that gave him life.
When the criminals killed Carlos, they killed the messenger but not the message. Carlos’ messages of greater communication and good will among peoples; respect for the self-determination of nations; the encouragement of family reunification, and an end to the U.S. blockade against Cuba are still alive and being broadcast by thousands of more messengers.
On Mother’s Day, 30 years ago, the terrorists presented Doña Idaena with the death of her son. Let us hope that today she will receive from the Obama administration the present of justice she has so anxiously awaited. (10 May 2009, Guadalajara, Mexico, and San Juan, Puerto Rico).
Eduardo Santana Castellón teaches at the University of Guadalajara, Mexico. From 1979 to 1983, he was an active member of the Antonio Maceo Brigade in Puerto Rico. Raúl Álzaga Manresa is co-founder of the magazine Areíto and the Antonio Maceo Brigade. Upon Carlos Muñiz Varela’s death, he became director of the Viajes Varadero Travel Agency in Puerto Rico.
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Carlos Muñiz Varela (Part 1)
A Mother’s Day present — 30 years later
Carlos Muñiz Varela (Part 2)
The first exiles travel and a martyr is born
