WHEN the U.S. ambassador approached the new Honduran president just a week after his swearing-in in 2006, everything seemed to indicate that the Bush Administration thought it could impose — without facing any resistance whatsoever — the undesirable presence of Luis Posada Carriles on that country.

On January 24, 2006, three days before that formal access to the office of President Manuel Zelaya, the Miami Herald newspaper, — whose ties to U.S. intelligence have been well-demonstrated — quoted what it called "excerpts" from a statement issued by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) authorities, saying that the ICE was making progress on effecting "Mr. Posada’s" removal from the United States.

The article by this newspaper, part of the McClatchy chain, continued by saying that an immigration judge had halted his deportation to Cuba or Venezuela, but that this did not prevent the ICE from deporting him to a third country, and the IC was in the process of conducting a routine review of Posada’s custody.

Actually, his review was not very routine. The truth is, at that very moment, the White House — subjected to the threat of an international scandal — believed that the best way to get the "hot potato" of this ex-CIA agent, terrorist, torturer and assassin, was to find him refuge somewhere outside of the United States.

On September 27, 2005, William Abbott, an immigration judge in El Paso, Texas, acting on instructions from Bush’s Justice Department, used the absurd testimony of one of Posada’s accomplices, Joaquin Chaffardet — an former official and torturer with the Venezuelan secret police — to declare that the criminal could not be deported to Venezuela.

Abbott said at that time that he was giving the U.S. government "90 days" to find a third country to receive the terrorist, a time period that was later ignored.

What seemed to be a relatively easy process for an individual who had spent years using Central America as a base for the crimes he carried out on instructions of the Miami mafia, was apparently hard work for the distinguished envoys of Bush’s State Department.

However, in the case of Honduras, the ringleaders of imperial power obviously focused on the arrival of a new president to surreptitiously introduce their request.

On August 27, in a statement to journalists after attending an official event, Zelaya revealed the truth about an insolent U.S. request presented "eight days" after he was sworn in as president of Honduras on January 27, 2006.

Efforts to obtain a visa for the terrorist were made, with all typical imperialist arrogance, by the U.S. ambassador in that country, Charles "Charlie" Ford.

"Ambassador Charles Ford came to ask me, through the Foreign Ministry, to give a visa to Posada Carriles," Zelaya stated, referring to then-Foreign Minister Milton Jiménez Puerto.

"It was impossible to give a visa to Luis Posada Carriles when he was a person being questioned for acts of terrorism. They defend that type of terrorism, it seems to me, and it is because of that sort of thing that we have different positions," he emphasized.

Posada Carriles has an extremely long record of crimes committed in Central America under CIA orders, following his breakout from a Venezuelan prison in August 1985, where he had been held for the mid-flight bombing of a Cuban civilian airliner in 1976 that killed the 73 people aboard.

Posada Carriles then became, overnight, the right-hand man in El Salvador of Félix "El Gato" Rodríguez, one of the CIA’s most loyal scumbags, the same one who ordered the murder of Ernesto Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967.

Until October 5, 1986, the terrorist directed the movements of a fleet of small planes from the Ilopango air base in El Salvador in arms and drug-trafficking operations to support the Nicaraguan Contras.

With the explosion of what would be the Iran-gate scandal, Posada took charge of collecting any material that could compromise U.S. intelligence and hid in Zabadú, a Salvadoran tourist resort, until his bosses in Langley ordered him to become a collaborator of the Salvadoran National Police, along with his buddy Hermes Rojas, another former Venezuelan secret police (DISIP) officer. At the time, Rojas was heading up the Venezuelan advisors to the repressive agencies of Salvadoran President José Napoleón Duarte.

Whoever is familiar with what was happening in El Salvador at the time can easily imagine the activities of the man who had been "Comisario Basilio" (Posada) in the Venezuelan secret police, a man whose victims had described him as a psychopathic torturer.

From El Salvador, Posada went in 1989 to Guatemala, where he was given the cover of head of security for the Guatel state-run telephone company. Soon, President Vinicio Cerezo gave him special powers that virtually made him a gangster. A long list of executions, kidnappings, rip-offs and settling of accounts are attributed to him in that period.

From the 1990’s on, as a product of those years working for agencies of repression, Posada was involved in a series of conspiracies in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, where local networks of right-wing extremists linked to his buddies on the paramilitary committee of the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) in Miami requested his services.

His first contacts with Honduras came to light after February 26, 1990, when he was attacked in public in Guatemala by unknown assailants. Two shots hit him as he rode his black Suzuki, one of them hitting him in the jaw and cutting his tongue.

It was after he left the hospital that he took refuge in Honduras, in the home of Rafael Hernández Nodarse, the local head of the CIA’s anti-Cuban terrorist apparatus.

In 1992, when FBI investigators looking into the Ilopango case as part of a congressional inquiry located him in that country, they asked him for a meeting, in nothing less than the Yankee embassy in Tegucigalpa, and without the least intention of arresting him.

Years later, in an interview with The New York Times, Posada admitted that one of the two agents, George Kyszinski, was a personal friend.

Beginning in January, 1994, Luis Posada Carriles openly conspired in actions aimed at destabilizing the legitimate government of President Carlos Roberto Reina.

In the same country where Bush, in 2006, wanted him to be based, Posada was involved in two attempts to assassinate the president, one financed by the CANF, which was to be carried out in the midst of Reina’s inauguration ceremony in the presence of President Fidel Castro of Cuba.

According to the testimony of Doctor Ramón Custodio, president of the Honduran Human Rights Committee, up until 1996 Posada led a gang of Cuban-born criminals associated with Honduran military figures who carried out 41 attacks throughout the country, always with the goal of overthrowing the president.

Posada continued to use Central America for his evil deeds, including a campaign of terrorism against Cuba in 1997, using Central American mercenaries. This was until his arrest in Panama in 2000, when he planned to blow up an amphitheater full of students in which the leader of the Cuban Revolution was going to speak.

Pardoned by Panama’s mafioso president, Mireya Moscoso, in August 2004, Posada then used Honduras as a springboard for illegally entering his masters’ country.

He lied to immigration authorities during a stopover, using an altered U.S. passport in the name of Melvin C. Thompson, and once again took shelter in the home of his buddy Hernández Nodarse. It was later said that the FBI participated in the maneuver.

"Could there be one Honduran person who does not know that here, the (U.S.) Embassy has always interfered through coup d’états, advocated the invasion of other countries throughout Latin America, and wars in other countries?" Zelaya asked during his remarks.

"Were we not victims of the Cold War in the 1980s, when Nicaragua was attacked from here, with the Nicaraguan counterrevolution, and Honduras used as a territory for military actions?" he noted.

Ambassador Charles Ford left his post in Honduras late in July of this year. He returned home peacefully after almost three years heading up the U.S. diplomatic delegation in Tegucigalpa.

Since 2006, seven countries in the Americas have refused to receive the terrorist in their territory: Canada, Mexico, Panama, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Costa Rica.