January 17, 2010
Year 45/Number 2

MONTANER MOUNTS CAMPAIGN IN RIGHT-WING PRESS
IN EFFORT TO CLEAN UP HIS TERRORIST PAST
By Jean-Guy Allard

CONFRONTING the eventuality of being named as a terrorist in international court hearings as a fugitive criminal of Cuban justice, and of having been linked to the masterminds behind the assassination of religious figures in El Salvador, CIA agent Carlos Alberto Montaner is mounting a campaign through the right-wing press in an attempt to clean up stories of his terrorist past.

Montaner is circulating a communiqué in which, presenting himself as a victim of slander, he responds to his detractors in a video in which he only manages to demonstrate that he is still as much of a liar and demagogue as he was 20 years ago.

Evidently, having been named as an accomplice of terror with his friends from the Salvadoran ARENA political party - authors of the murder of Monsignor Arnulfo Romero, Jesuit priest Ignacio Ellacuría, a disciple of liberation theology, and five of their colleagues - the "exiled intellectual," a product of U.S intelligence, has finally realized that he could end up before the courts.

He recalled somewhat fearfully how last year, Granma editor Lázaro Barredo, in his position as a parliamentarian, proposed during the constitution of the National Assembly's International Relations Committee to call for the extradition of terrorists located in the United States and other countries who have cases pending with respect to Cuban justice.

Among these criminals, who utilized terror and promoted it against Cuba, Barredo mentioned Montaner.

MONTANER: PSYCHOPATH SUFFERING FROM AMNESIA

Many of the psychopathic jaunts of Montaner - now nearly 70 - have already been exposed. However, his amnesia with respect to the beginnings of his connection with the so-called U.S. "intelligence community" is gaining ground in his paranoia-inflicted brain.

In his interminable meditations, Montaner attributes his arrest in the Cuban capital in 1960 to an alleged protest among students at the University of Havana against a Revolution that had recently triumphed.

The reality is very different.

We should recall that on December 26 of that year, in the early hours of the morning, an extensive Cuban police operation uncovered a network that was intending to plant bombs concealed inside cigarette cases in Havana stores and cinemas,.

Just two days prior to that event, on Saturday, December 24, 1960 just a few hours before Christmas celebrations were to begin, two children and their mother were the victims of a terrorist bomb planted in the busy Flogar department store on Galiano Street, on the corner of San Rafael Street in Havana.

In just a few hours, 17 terrorists were located and arrested, while three bomb factories were discovered concealing a significant amount of weapons, explosives and bomb-making material.

One of the individuals implicated in this terrorist network was the son of a man who had become an extremist, Carlos Alberto Montaner Suris, the inhabitant of Apt. 88a, No. 309, on the corner of 3rd A Avenue, in the then exclusive neighborhood of Miramar in the capital.

At Montaner's home, stated the newspaper Revolución on January 18, 1961, "four detonators, a roll of fuse wire, a receptacle containing three bars of live phosphorous, two rolls of tape, four cartridges of bullets, two pairs of olive green trousers and two militia-style shirts were found inside a canvas bag."

Montaner had already developed ties with the CIA through his links with the Movimiento de Recuperación Revolucionaria (of Manuel Artime and Orlando Bosch).

That same operation captured Armando Valladares - an individual linked to a failed attempt to assassinate Evo Morales last April - who later joined the same CIA gang that today (along with Montaner) devotes itself to singing the praises of the Micheletti

dictatorship.

DON'T YOU HAVE LINKS WITH THE CIA, CARLOS ALBERTO MONTANER?

In July 2007, during the broadcast of a popular Miami radio program, terrorist chief Antonio Veciana - who does acknowledge having worked for the CIA for decades - recounted details of the so-called "cigarette case bombs" found linked to Montaner's group, which came directly from the Central Intelligence

Agency's factories.

He specified that they came in various designs, each one color-coded, indicating the time that they would take to explode.

By sheer chance, Montaner's network also gave support to the mercenaries of the Escambray "contracted" by the CIA itself, the activities of which he is attempting to ignore.

The young terrorist left Cuba for the United States on September 8, 1961. He did not escape like the Count of Monte Cristo, as he likes to insinuate, but with the help of his mother and buddies at the Venezuelan embassy who facilitated his safe passage.

Two elements of his existence in the land of his masters indisputably demonstrate young Montaner's unmentionable links during those years.

Could Montaner's amnesia be so severe that he has forgotten that, shortly after his departure from Cuba, he confirmed in an interview with journalist Angel de Jesús Piñera from Avance magazine, published on April 27, 1962, that he belonged to a group entitled Rescate Estudiantil, defined by experts as the

"student section" of the FRD terrorist organization?

He revealed at that time that "he shared the role of leader of the Action and Sabotage group" with Alfredo Carrión Obeso who, among other discoveries made by officers during the detention of the terrorist group in December 1960, was found to possess "a Star submachine gun and two .38 caliber rifles" in his home.

SPOKESMAN FOR A MILITARY UNIT CREATED BY THE CIA

An article by the UPI agency from July 20, 1963, published by The New York Times, highlights statements made by the terrorist as spokesman for the Cuban Military Units of the U.S. Army. The always loquacious counterrevolutionary stated that "a new exiles' organization was planning extensive attacks against the regime of Fidel Castro."

As all sources on the subject confirm, these "Cuban" units of the U.S. Army were created by the CIA in the early 1960s.

In the abovementioned article, Montaner spontaneously emphasizes that "the majority of these men have been members of the U.S. Army and received special training."

Also by sheer chance…Cuban-Venezuelan terrorist Luis Posada Carriles was another of the mercenaries recruited by the Agency and "especially" trained by the U.S. Army in the use of explosives, kidnapping techniques, torture and the elimination of individuals within the framework of the dirty operations promoted by Washington against Cuba.

A FASCIST PEDIGREE LINKED TO TERROR

A self-proclaimed "defender of human rights in Cuba", from 1970 "democrat" Montaner embarked on a profitable propaganda business in Spain after being repudiated by sectors of Puerto Rican society for his discriminatory manifestations.

The adventures and misadventures of Montaner are so numerous that they could fill a book - which would not be worth publishing - including the story of September 23, 1994, when he accompanied José María Robles, Falangist capo of Spain's Partido Popular, during a visit to Miami to meet with Antonio "Toñin" Llama, director of the Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF).

The owner of La Esperanza yacht, intercepted in 1998 in Puerto Rico, "Toñin" explained in June 2006 during an interview with the Miami Herald how he used CANF funds to buy explosives and other weapons to bomb a popular rally in Havana's Plaza de la Revolución.

Montaner's terrorist pedigree explains without any doubt the cynicism of his manipulation of the circumstances surrounding the death of Jesuit priest Ignacio Ellacuría and his colleagues. He seems to have forgotten that in 1996 he published a particularly disgusting article on preachers of liberation theology.

Entitled "The Pope against theologians", his digressions - now being denounced - note that Liberation Theology, that which includes economic and political change, was a "contorted grimace," as ugly as that of Tomás Borge, of the Tupamaros, and of Tiro Fijo, which latter he called the "bloodthirsty Colombian guerrilla."

Thus he affirmed, for example: "Out of ignorance, in subscribing to that idiotic theory of dependence and insane Marxist instruction, in understanding very little or nothing at all about the phenomenon of underdevelopment, (the Church) had lost itself within a labyrinth of Jesuits and scatterbrained Maryknoll-ites that did not conclude with the emancipation of the poor but in a pointless bloodbath that at times, splashed the theologians themselves, cruelly martyred because of lunatics from another other group, such as occurred in the case of Ignacio Ellacuría and four of his collaborators one horrific morning in El Salvador."

There were not four collaborators but five. And the "lunatics" were the very buddies of the buddies of the author of this macabre outburst.

In the light of so many precedents plus those that he keeps safeguarded in his closet, Montaner needs only to be awarded with an international search warrant. And then to be captured

This article appeared in the PRINT edition of Granma International