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Luis Posada Carriles Applies for U.S. Citizenship

A highly controversial man by the name of Luis Posada Carriles who is not only a CIA-trained exile, but who has also has been linked to half a dozen violent plots against Cuba during the late 1990s, along with a charge for plotting to assassinate its President Fidel Castro, has filed an application to become a citizen of the United States. This 82-year-old expert in explosives escaped from prison and lived under cover in El Salvador for about fifteen years before moving to Honduras and later Miami. The application he filed a few years ago requesting asylum in this country was based on the services he rendered to the U.S. army at a time when veterans of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba were briefly commissioned in the military. In his N400 form he identified himself as a citizen of Venezuela, where he was naturalized when he served as head of operations for the country’s intelligence agency in the 1970s. But it was not until he was pressed to answer fully and honestly that he acknowledged that he also had Cuban citizenship. Susanna Bolanos, a Department of Homeland Security’s Citizen and Immigration Services, who specializes in cases with “national security concerns” and who was in charge of conducting Posada’s citizenship hearings, voiced her concerns with regards to Mr. Posada’s application. Mrs Bolanos testified at Posada’s trial on charges that he lied under oath at his asylum and naturalization hearings in 2005 and 2006.

Posada currently has eleven outstanding charges that include lying about how he entered the U.S., denying his role in nine bombings of Cuban tourist spots in 1997 that killed one Italian man and wounded a dozen other people, and his denial that he had a Guatemalan passport. As if that weren’t enough, his answer on the N400 form affirming that he has advocated for the overthrow of a government, as well as the Panamanian conviction that led to four years of imprisonment, further fuel the fire that is alight with substantiated allegations of suspicious behavior. Posada was also accused for a 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people though he has denied the allegation and was acquitted of the charge in a trial held in Venezuela. While the investigations pending his application for citizenship continue, Cuban security officials have alleged that he was involved in a relatively unknown 1998 plot to bomb a civilian airliner flying between Cuban and Central America. The head of criminal investigations at the Cuban interior Ministry, Alberto Rabeiro, has claimed that information regarding Posada was given to an FBI team that were conducting an investigation on his role in the tourism bombings.

In light of the circumstances, the numerous criminal allegations against him are more than enough to make a favorable outcome for his citizenship application highly unlikely despite his immigration and defense lawyers’ tenacious attempts to prove them wrong.

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