Jose Dionisio Suarez
Cuban Nationalist Movement member who drove Michael Townley to Orlando Letelier's house in 1976 and, by Townley's account, pressed the buttons at Sheridan Circle, a fugitive until 1990 and released from immigration detention in 2001.
José Dionisio Suárez Esquivel, a former officer of the Cuban revolutionary army, was called "El Cepillo" and "Charco de Sangre," pool of blood, "for his work in carrying out executions since the revolutionaries' victory." In December 1974 he went with Guillermo Novo to Chile "to pay homage to Pinochet," entering with Orlando Bosch. At a Union City motel he and Armando Santana searched Michael Townley's luggage at gunpoint and found the passport of Kenneth Enyart.1
A card of the Chilean CNI records that Suárez, "Cuban exile of the MNC," entered Chile on December 4, 1974, on Venezuelan passport 1.289.386, and left on December 19 for Colombia "posing as an American tourist"; Guillermo Novo had entered the day before "together with Orlando Bosch Ávila" on an American passport.2
September 1976
Suárez was at the meeting of September 10, 1976, where Townley asked the Cuban Nationalist Movement for help. He "drove to Washington in his late-model American car" on September 18, lent Townley more than a hundred dollars, and because he had a new job to start in New Jersey on Monday pressed the others to move quickly. He supplied a blasting cap. "During the ride to Letelier's house, I was informed by Paz and Suarez that they expected me to place the device on the car as they wished to have a DINA agent, namely myself, directly tied to the placing of the device," Townley stated. Suárez drove him to National Airport for the first flight to Newark. Townley told investigators he believed Suárez set off the bomb "by pressing two buttons on a telephone beeping device as he trailed Letelier at Sheridan Circle."13
Fugitive
Indicted on August 1, 1978, with Novo, Alvin Ross, Manuel Contreras, Pedro Espinoza, Armando Fernández Larios, and Virgilio Paz, he had earlier "spent 11½ months in a D.C. jail rather than testify before a grand jury." FBI agents found him on April 11, 1990, in a modest house in St. Petersburg, Florida, an unemployed painter known as Jose Suárez, with his wife and a fifteen-month-old son. "Jose is basically a scapegoat," his wife said. "In exchange for a promise not to prosecute his wife," he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to murder a foreign official and was sentenced to eight years. Released on probation in 1997, he was held by the immigration service at Bradenton because Cuba would not take him, until the Supreme Court's ruling of June 2001 against indefinite detention. Freed on August 14, 2001, he said: "I want to clarify a lot of things. There have been many lies."345
Sources
- Dinges, John, and Saul Landau. Assassination on Embassy Row. McGraw-Hill, 1980, pp. 16-21, 148-151, 240. ↩
- Fiscalía Militar Ad-Hoc, Santiago, causa 192-78, as reproduced in Proceso contra Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda y Pedro Espinoza Bravo, tomo 2, scan at https://www.latinamericanstudies.org/MNC/Causa-Contreras-Espinoza-1991-2.pdf. Quotations translated from the Spanish, CNI fichas on José Dionisio Suárez Esquivel, Guillermo Novo Sampol, and Virgilio Pablo Paz Romero, undated, 1978. ↩
- McAllister, Bill. "Suspect Arrested in Letelier Slaying," Washington Post, April 12, 1990. ↩
- United States v. Sampol, 636 F.2d 621 (D.C. Cir. 1980).; "USA v. Guillermo Novo Sampol et al., 78-CR-367," case synopsis, latinamericanstudies.org, not verified against the docket. ↩
- "Conspirator in '76 Letelier Assassination Released," Reuters, Washington Post, August 16, 2001, p. A13. ↩
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