Co-defendants of Posada’s main accomplice in El Salvador released

BY JEAN-GUY ALLARD — Granma International staff writer —

IF the courts continue to be this complacent, Francisco Antonio “El Panzón” Chávez Abarca, the main accomplice of international terrorist Luis Posada Carriles in El Salvador, now being held for being the chief of a car-theft ring, is soon to be released, so that he can once again disappear out of the reach of justice.

Mirian del Carmen Urbina, a worker at the Transport Protection Division of the Salvadoran police, and three criminals linked to the gang of thieves were just released by a court in San Salvador, after a lightning trial in which the judge abstained from considering most of the evidence collected during the police investigation.

A few days ago, Chávez Abarca himself was able to stay out of those proceedings thanks to a last-minute strategy when he announced to the court that he had rejected his lawyer and that his new defense attorney would have to “study” the entire file.

The gang’s chief was then separated from the trial that was about to start, so that another court could try him.

Chávez Abarca is a Salvadoran bandit who Luis Posada Carriles used as his right-hand man during a series of attacks that he masterminded in Havana in 1997. He was never charged in his country for his complicity in this campaign of terror, which he not only contributed to organizing, but also personally traveled to Havana to carry out two of the attacks.

A LIGHTNING TRIAL FOR THE “CAR-THIEF” TERRORIST

The four defendants formally linked to Chávez Abarca and his gang were absolved by the 3rd Sentencing Court.

According to statements by one of the prosecutors in the case, “who declined to give his name” to the newspaper La Prensa Gráfica, the court did not completely consider evidence such as receipts for vehicle sales.

The trial was set to last three days with testimony from 40 witnesses. It did not last even one day.

According to the press report, the gang legalized their thefts with documents from cars out of circulation.

The defendants were charged with having run a warehouse on property in the Escalón neighborhood for luxury vehicles stolen from various Central American countries.

They were all facing charges of aggravated fraud and falsification of documents from stolen vehicles, which were legalized by customs agents and police officials to then be sold as if they were legitimate vehicles.

Chávez Abarca made three trips to Cuba in April and May of 1997.

He was the person who placed the first bomb that went off in the bathrooms of the Aché discotheque in the Hotel Melia Cohiba on April 12, 1997.

Even more seriously, Chávez Abarca was the individual who hired Ernesto Cruz Leon and convinced him to carry out terrorist missions abroad, giving him training on making explosive devices and directing him in the attack that later caused the death of a young tourist, Fabio di Celmo.

Francisco “El Panzon” Chávez Abarca, the son of a notorious weapons-trafficker, dedicated himself to drug trafficking in the 1990s, as well as weapons sales and counterfeit money. Via this business, he had dealings with Posada, gradually becoming his confidence man in the terrorist operation organized and financed by the paramilitary wing of the Cuban American National Foundation.

Everything indicates that the terrorist will now appear before a judge and invoke this most recent court ruling to demand his own release. To date, Salvadoran legal authorities have completely ignored his complicity with Posada Carriles, the international terrorist that the Central American country provided refuge to for years.