La Penca assassination

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Location of the department of Río San Juan in Nicaragua

The La Penca attack on May 30, 1984 was an explosives attack carried out during the Contra War on Edén Pastora Gómez in what is now the Nicaraguan department of Río San Juan . The explosive device exploded during an international press conference at Pastora's headquarters, Finca La Penca. While Pastora was only injured in both legs, three Costa Rican journalists and a member of Pastora's contra organization Alianza Revolucionaria Democrática (ARDE) died; more than a dozen people were injured, some seriously. The background to the crime has not yet been fully clarified. The alleged assassin, the Argentine citizen Vital Roberto Gaguine (born June 23, 1953), who operated under the legend of the Danish journalist Per Anker Hansen, apparently died in January 1989 in an attack on the La Tablada barracks near Buenos Aires . The modus operandi of the attack, up to that point unique in the history of journalism and terrorism , was used again on September 9, 2001 in Afghanistan during the attack on Ahmad Shah Massoud .

Political background

In 1982 Pastora founded the guerrilla organization ARDE in the border area between Nicaragua and Costa Rica to fight against the Sandinista government in Managua . Pastora did not see herself as a contra, but as a representative of an authentic Sandinism. The CIA , which coordinated the contra operations in Honduras and also supported ARDE financially, tried to persuade Pastora to work with the local contra groups, which the guerrilla leader strictly refused to do.

The assassination

At the end of May 1984, Pastora invited representatives of the international press, mostly Costa Ricans, to a conference in the operational area on Nicaraguan territory. The reason for the invitation was that the CIA had given him an ultimatum by the end of May; either ARDE joins the Contras in Honduras or the CIA aid is discontinued. Most of the journalists came from the capital San José and were picked up by motorized pangas ( boats ) in the border area . Pastora's headquarters was Finca La Penca at the confluence of the Río San Carlos into the Río San Juan , a good 50 km as the crow flies east of the Nicaraguan town of El Castillo . As far as is known, La Penca, which no longer exists today, could only be reached by water.

Originally, the event was scheduled to take place on the morning of May 31, 1984, but journalists pushed for an immediate conference. Apparently around 7:00 p.m. a bomb exploded in the middle of the event, around 20 people were injured, some seriously or fatally. The attack caused panic among both journalists and ARDE members, as the next professional medical care for the injured was only possible in hospitals in San José. The injured were transported back to Costa Rican territory with the pangas , treated temporarily in a hospital in Quesada and later transported to San José.

consequences

The following died immediately as a result of the attack:

  1. the American journalist Linda Frazier, 38 years old,
  2. the Costa Rican journalist Jorge Quirós Piedra,
  3. the Costa Rican television cameraman Evelio Sequeira,
  4. the ARDE guerrillas Rosa "Rosita" María Zembrano

Several journalists were seriously injured and sustained permanent damage, including Costa Rican journalists Nelson Murillo, José Rodolfo Ibarra and Roberto Cruz, who died as a result of the attack in 2003. British journalist Susan Morgan was also seriously injured . Little is known about the ARDE victims. Pastora was flown to Venezuela after a short stay in San José and recovered from his injuries after a few weeks. According to a report by the Nicaraguan daily La Prensa on August 30, 2011, three other people, apparently ARDE members, died as a result of the attack, so that the number of victims increased to 7.

Investigations

Both the international journalistic research and the legal investigations on the Costa Rican side were apparently hindered by the fact that the crime scene was difficult to access due to its location in a war zone. It is unclear whether he was professionally examined. The testimony of those present served as an essential basis for the investigations.

From the outset, speculation about the intellectual perpetrators of the attack went in two directions. The Costa Rican press assumed that the attack by the Sandinista secret service DGSE ( Directorio General para la Seguridad del Estado = General Directorate for State Security) had been carried out to eliminate Pastora as the leader of a contra faction. The DGSE was subordinate to the Ministry of the Interior MINT under Tomás Borge and was led by Reinaldo "Lenín" Cerna Juárez (born 1947).

Pastora himself and the left-wing liberal Western press, which sympathized with the Sandinista, suspected an attack by the CIA or the Contra, since Pastora had refused to cooperate with the Contra groups operating in Honduras under Enrique Bermúdez . Pastora still represented this thesis in 1987, according to Der Spiegel :

He believes that the bombing, which killed nine people, including three journalists, at one of his press conferences in La Penca in May 1984 was caused by the CIA. “They wanted to kill me, they didn't want revolutionaries”. ( Der Spiegel from June 22, 1987)

According to Pastora, nationalists like him are even more dangerous than communists for the CIA . The American journalist Martha Honey did particularly intensive research, the results of which were also published in a study published in German ("The attack on La Penca. Secret war against Nicaragua", Zurich 1988). Honey and her co-authors categorically ruled out the involvement of the Sandinista State Security. At this point in time it could be considered certain that

1. the bomb was in a metal case for camera equipment belonging to the alleged Danish journalist "Per Anker Hansen",

2. "Hansen" was smuggled into the press conference by the Swedish journalist Peter Torbiönsson (born 1941), who had contacts with Pastora and therefore had confidence in Pastora.

"Hansen" went into hiding after the attack in Quesada and stayed away. The survivors of the press conference unanimously remembered that the "Dane" behaved conspicuously and was very concerned about his camera equipment. He had left the metal case in the conference room shortly before the explosion and left it immediately. “Hansen” was therefore only injured by a few fragments in the explosion.

The Costa Rican authorities also investigated in the direction of the CIA and suspected the Cuban exile Felipe Vidal and the US citizen John Floyd Hull (born approx. 1921), who ran several farms in Costa Rica , on which runways for small aircraft were created were, complicity. However, this investigation was apparently not supported by the US side. A lawsuit filed by Honey / Avirgan with the help of the Christic Institute in the USA officially failed due to a lack of evidence. Allegedly, Hull was involved in funding the Contras through drug smuggling through his farms.

In 1993, the CIA thesis was questioned by two other American journalists, Juan Tamayo and Doug Vaughan. On August 1, 1993, Tamayo published the article "'84 Bomb Mystery Unravels Sandinistas Tied to Jungle Deaths" in the Miami Herald . Honey had already determined that "Per Anker Hansen" was just the legend of an unknown person who had used the stolen passport of the Dane Hansen. Honey suspected that the assassin was the Libyan right-wing extremist Amac Galil.

Tamayo and Vaughn, on the other hand, assumed that the assassin was identical to the Argentine Vital Roberto Gaguine (born June 23, 1953), who had apparently died in the meantime and who had worked for the Sandinista together with other Argentine leftists since the victory of the Nicaraguan Revolution in 1979 . According to Tamayo, Gaguin was identified by a fingerprint found in Panama in 1990 . Gaguine was killed on January 23 or 24, 1989, along with a good 30 other guerrillas in a raid by a left-wing faction on an Argentine army barracks in La Tablada near Buenos Aires . The real Per Anker Hansen, a student at the time, had reported his passport as lost in Denmark in 1979/80 and never visited the transit countries noted in the passport until 1984.

Although Gaguine's father Samir also identified his son in photos of "Hansen" in 1993, the Costa Rican authorities still had doubts about his identity in 2008, which were only resolved at the end of 2013 through a DNA analysis and fingerprint comparison.

In 2009, Torbiönsson unexpectedly went public with the assertion that the attack was actually committed by the Nicaraguan State Security DGSE and that he had been abused as a “useful idiot” ( Spanish : “tonto útil”). He sympathized with the Sandinista and also educated them. The unknown "Hansen" was smuggled into the conference at the request of the Cuban DGSE employee Andrés Barahona López alias Renán Montero Corrales. At the time, however, he assumed that "Hansen" was a DGSE agent who was only supposed to conduct intelligence-gathering. Torbiönsson said that he has suffered from severe remorse since the attack because he felt responsible for the victims, but had so far remained silent out of sympathy for the Sandinista. He made the documentary Last Chapter. Goodbye Nicaragua (Nicaragua / Sweden / Spain 2010), for whose production he also conducted interviews in Nicaragua, for example with ex-Interior Minister Tomas Borge and Pastora himself. Borge denied all allegations that Barahona López alias Montero died in Havana in 2009 .

After the filming, Pastora said that Torbiönsson and Gaguine were double agents of the CIA and DGSE. Torbiönsson's credibility is countered by the fact that he only found himself willing to go public after 25 years instead of revealing himself immediately after the attack. For him, the assassination was part of the acts of war at the time and thus history. The attack was not aimed at the journalists, but against him, and the assassins never received an order from the DGSE to detonate the bomb at a press conference. In fact, the Swedish journalist had supported Susan Morgan's research in the late 1980s, but never revealed to her that he had worked for the DGSE. Morgan published her own research results in London in 1991: "In Search for the Assassin".

In this context, Pastora went public with the surprising thesis that the founding of ARDE had been agreed with the commander-in-chief of the Sandinista people's army , Humberto Ortega . According to Pastora's account, in the event that the contra war should escalate further, ARDE should act as a "third force" between the Sandinista and the contra, thereby indirectly weakening the contra. He spoke to Ortega in 1990 about the attack and the possible involvement of the DGSE. The latter had explained to him that no one except the two of them had been informed about the character of ARDE and that he was therefore not responsible for an operation by the secret service:

Edén, un secreto es entre dos. Si saben tres no es secreto ... Menos nosotros, porque la Direccion Nacional estaba infiltraba.
( Edén, there is only one secret between two. If three know, it is no longer a secret ... Especially between us, because the National Directory was infiltrated. )
Quoted from Picón Duarte, Pastora acomoda caso La Penca , 2011

As far as is known, Ortega has so far neither confirmed nor denied this statement. At the beginning of December 2013, the Costa Rican attorney general , Jorge Chavarría Guzmán, stopped the ongoing investigation because the documents made available by the Argentine authorities had shown that Garguine actually died in 1989 and that the actual assassin could no longer be charged. The intellectual authors of the attack could not be determined in Costa Rica. However, since the case is now considered a crime against humanity in Costa Rica , the investigation could be restarted at any time if new evidence becomes available. Journalists Murillo and Ibarra called for the case to be independently investigated by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights .

Culture of remembrance

On May 30, 2010, the Costa Rican President Óscar Arias Sánchez declared the date of the attack to be Día del Periodista ("Journalist's Day"), which has been introduced in numerous Latin American countries for decades.

See also

literature

Web links