Death of a Cold War Supervillain
Luis Posada Carriles, an anticommunist militant who popped up throughout Latin America over the past half-century, died recently. He won’t be missed.
Luis Posada Carriles attends a rally to oppose Barack Obama’s announcement earlier in the week of a change to the United States Cuba policy at Jose Marti park on December 20, 2014 in Miami, Florida.Joe Raedle / Getty
On May 23, Cuban anticommunist militant Luis Posada Carriles died at the age of ninety. No one on the Latin American left was in mourning.
Posada is best known as one of the masterminds behind the 1976 bombing of Cubana flight 455 that killed seventy-three people, an attack against the socialist state in Cuba. Fidel Castro called him “the cruelest terrorist in the Western hemisphere.” But Posada’s CIA-financed career spanned several decades and multiple countries — including a lesser-known stint in El Salvador that placed him at the heart of one of the greatest scandals in recent US history: Iran Contra.
It’s dizzying and dangerous to dive too far down the Iran-Contra rabbit hole. (Just ask Gary Webb.) A cursory look at Posada’s time in El Salvador, however, offers a hint of the staggering depravity achieved by the US government’s counterrevolutionary activities in Central America and provides an instructive reminder of the demons lurking just below the surface of the empire’s facade.
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