Luis Posada Carriles must be tried for his crimes

While in the name of the fight against terrorism, hundreds of thousands of people have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, and others - arbitrarily detained - are tortured in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, the United States government protects the most notorious terrorist in this hemisphere, attempting to deceive public opinion through interminable pseudolegal manuevers and refusing to try him for his real crimes.

Luis Posada Carriles was accused and brought to trial in Venezuela for the 1976 attack against a commercial aircraft in which 73 persons died. After escaping from Venezuelan prisons in 1982 - leaving his trial unconcluded - he served the CIA as part of what was known as the "Irancontra" operation and also in the implementation of the genocidal Plan Condor. In 1997 he prepared a series of terrorist acts against hotels in Havana - in one of which the young Italian tourist, Fabio Di Celmo, lost his life -, and in the year 2000, the projected attempt against President Fidel Castro´s life at the University of Panama.

In March, 2005, Posada Carriles entered the United States illegally. Only after reiterated public denunciations that revealed the presence of this criminal in U.S. terriitory, the goverment of George W. Bush proceeded to detain and charge him for immigration crimes and false witness, without the slightest reference to terrorism.

Through their handling of Posada Carriles, the U.S. authorities, pressured by groups of Cuban extremists in South Florida, have made evident the double morality of their war against terrorism in the name of which they torture, kidnap and bomb. At the same time, as has been denounced by numerous international forums and United Nations´agencies, five Cuban antiterrorist activists remain unjustly imprisoned in the United States, subjected together with their families to cruel and discriminatory treatment.

All honest people of the world who raise their voices against war and terrorism, have before them irrefutable proof of the lack of ethics upon which the current administration in Washington bases its actions. We, the undersigned, demand that the government of the United States, in compliance with international obligations, charge Luis Posada Carriles for all of his crimes or attend the request for his extradition to Venezuela, which until now has received absolutely no response.