Orlando Bosch Ávila, P.ee.I*

29 April 2011

Three undated photos of Bosch, from "Along the Malecon"

Orlando Bosch, who died yesterday at the age of 84, was one of those minor historical figures that popped up throughout late 20th Century Latin American history… leaving behind a trail of corpses.

Trained as a medical doctor (he was the president of the University of Havana’s Medical Student body when Fidel Castro was president of the school’s Law Student organization), Bosch abridged the Hippocratic Oath to read “First, do no harm.” Bosch, who moved to Miami after an internship in Ohio, took no active part in the Cuban Revolution, but briefly returned to his native land in 1960. In 1961, he was involved in attempts to foment an uprising on the Island, which — obviously — failed.

He always claimed that the lack of U.S. support for his own invasion was the rationale behind his non-participation in the botched “Bay of Pigs Invasion”, athough, beginning in 1962, he maintained ties with Cuban terrorist cells and the C.I.A. through his role as coordinator of the “Insurrectional Movement of Revolutionary Recovery.”

Bosch pops up as the intellectual author, or a co-conspirator, in a number of murders, the best known being the bombing of a Cubana Airlines Flight 455 over Barbados on 6 October 1976, killing all 73 persons aboard, at the time the most deadly terrorist attack in the western hemisphere. At the time, Cuba’s population was about 9.5 million people: “9/11” led to 3,000 immediate deaths over two air attacks and the collapse of the Twin Towers, in a country with a population of about 350,000,000. In other words, the Cubana Airline attack was proportionally about as devastating to Cuba, as the “9/11 attacks” were to the United States.

Bosch, at the time, was in Venezuela where he had fled in 1972 while on parole from a prison sentence for his 1968 rifle attack on a Polish freighter in Miami. “Rifle attack” seems rather like a gesture, unless you realize he was using 45 pound 57 mm recoiless rifles, a portable cannon.

In Venezuela, Bosch was employed at a “private security company” owned by fellow Cuban terrorist, Luis Posada Carriles, although the two of them, and Bosch in particular, seem to have maintained ties (or done contract work) for a number of foreign intelligence services, as well as engaging in free-lance mayhem. Bosch is know to have been involved in murders in Argentina, Chile, Mexico, the United States, Central America and Europe and various bombings throughout the hemisphere, (including the Mexican Embassy in Guatemala and possibly the 2007 bombing at the Mexican consulate in New York). And, of course, various bombings in Cuba.

Otto Reich, the … uh… “controversial” (though some prefer the word “sinister”) U.S. diplomat — at the time U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela, Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs during George W. Bush’s presidency, and later a lobbyist for the Honduran coup leaders) arranged for Bosch’s return to the United States in 1987. Despite suspicions of having been the brains behind a series of bombings in Florida throughout the 1970s, Bosch served only six months in prison for a immigration violation.

President (and former C.I.A. Director) George H.W. Bush, over the objections of his Attorney General, gave Bosch a general pardon in July 1990.

Among the many secrets Doctor Bosch took to the grave is one particularly intriguing mystery. If, as many claim, and he hinted, the “dark complected man” in a famous photograph was he, what he was doing sitting on the “grassy knoll” in Dallas on 22 November 1963?