Former Colombian drug trafficker Carlos Lehder, who has just published his memoirs under the title Life and death of the Medellín cartel, continues to reveal details about the criminal organization’s relationship with Cuba. In a telephone interview with the journalist Vicky Dávila in the magazine’s television program Week, The former criminal reiterates, regarding cocaine trafficking, that “obviously Fidel Castro had to know, he was the director of the orchestra.”
When asked about the veracity of this assertion, he says: “I speculate that Fidel Castro was aware of everything, but I don’t know, because I didn’t see them together talking. I know that Raúl Castro was the commander of that operation, the leader , and I emphasize that they, although they did not know how to traffic cocaine, immediately tried to control the entire business.”
Beyond the book, where he tells of his meeting with the youngest of the Castros, then Minister of Defense, Lehder revealed that, while imprisoned in the United States, where he was extradited in 1987, and cooperating with its authorities, he learned that the Government from that country tried to file federal charges against Raúl Castro for “cocaine trafficking.”
“They never brought federal charges against Raúl Castro although they had mountains of evidence, and a number of boatmen who had been caught with coca brought from Cuba”
The US security and surveillance forces, says the former drug trafficker, “had fully monitored the shipments and boats that arrived with cocaine directly from the port of Mariel and other Cuban ports to the coasts of Florida.” He also claims that “they were accumulating evidence” at the time when President George Bush Sr. lost the election that Bill Clinton won. “There was, of course, a change of prosecutors and whatever, but they never brought federal charges against Raúl Castro even though they had mountains of evidence, and a number of boatmen who had been caught with coca brought from Cuba and who were cooperating with the United States Government. Joined”.
Lehder says that he made two trips to Cuba and did not want to make any more. “I already saw the maneuvers they were doing, very dangerous maneuvers for me,” says, without giving more details, the former criminal, who allows himself a criticism of the Cuban regime: “They had the Cuban people with their boots on their necks.” To consider it a dictatorship, he believes, “is praise”; For him, the Government of the Island is “barbarism”, an “affront to every human being” and an “insult to Latin America and God.”
Without specifically mentioning the famous drug trafficking case that led to the execution of General Arnaldo Ochoa, Tony de la Guardia, Jorge Martínez Valdés and Amado Padrón Trujillo in 1989, Lehder comments to journalist Vicky Dávila about the “debacle” of the deal with the Colombians : “Cubans ended up killing each other over the coca business.”
Faced with the suspicions raised by his testimony, which touches numerous leaders for having accepted bribes from the cartel, Lehder argued: “The verticality of my word gave me my freedom. Pablo Escobar trusted my word for many years, the American Government, with the which I have no outstanding accounts, he trusted my word and gave me my freedom. The Prime Minister of the Bahamas trusted my word and we negotiated with him and I paid him monthly. It was unfortunate, but that was the code of conduct for international drug traffickers, that they have to bribe the authorities to get protection.
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