The evidence continues to mount that a bloody trail of terrorist actions, including the assassination of Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C., and the bombing of a Cubana Airlines plane that killed 73 persons, leads back to the little Dominican town of Bonao and a meeting held there in the summer of 1975. That meeting was attended by leaders of various Cuban exile organizations intent on stepping up their terrorist campaign against the Cuban government and anyone else they deemed to represent the “international communist conspiracy.” At the Bonao meeting an umbrella organization called CORU (Coordination of the United Revolutionary Organizations) was founded and has since been linked to over 150 bombings and some 50 assassinations, in addition to the mass murder of the 73 people aboard the Cubana flight. CORU has actually claimed “credit” for many of these actions, including the Cubana bombing (but not for the Letelier slaying), and a recent interview with CORU leader Orlando Bosch, currently jailed in Venezuela on charges of plotting the Cubana bombing, added a startling new dimension to the terrorist campaign in terms of the role of the Dominican government. Bosch told New Times magazine in March 1977: After leaving Costa Rica (in 1974) I went to live in Santo Domingo until August of 1976. I had a number of good friends there and we planned many actions. The Dominican government let me stay in the country and organize actions. I wasn’t going to church every day. We were conspiring there. Planning bombings and killings . . . People were coming and going out. I was plotting with them. Secretly, of course. According to New Times, both the assassination of Letelier and the Cubana bombing were discussed at the Bonao meeting, along with several other actions. Two Cuban exiles residing in the Dominican Republic have been identified as intermediaries between CORU and the Balaguer government. They are Jose Aguilas Kiliman and Santiago Rey, the latter a long-time advisor to Balaguer and the former a member of Batista’s cabinet in Cuba. Another aspect of this story is the role played by transnational corporations located in the Dominican Republic. The town of Bonao is in effect a company town dominated by Falconbridge Nickel, a Canadian-based mining firm controlled by the Keck family of Houston. Falconbridge has a $200 million operation just outside Bonao and nothing important happens there without company knowledge, if not approval. According to several reliable sources, including eye-witness reports, the actual CORU meeting site in Bonao was a club for Falconbridge executives. The meeting was facilitated by a well known CIA operative in the Dominican Republic and presently a Falconbridge official, Sacha Volman. There is much speculation about why a company like Falconbridge would be involved with the likes of CORU. One possibility is that the company was simply doing a favor for the U.S. intelligence establishment, with which it is connected through a powerful company director and Keck business associate, John Connally – a member of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board under several presidents. Falconbridge is also concerned about the tightly controlled international nickel cartel, a group of companies which set world prices and production quotas. If the U.S. trade embargo were lifted, Cuban nickelcould undermine this convenient price control system that is so beneficial to the company. There is also a Chilean connection. Four of Keck’s companies, including Falconbridge, were recently awarded a major mining concession by the military junta in Chile. According to Orlando Bosch and others, the junta has generously supported Cuban exile groups for the last four years, during which numerous terrorist attacks have been made against exiled leaders and organizations of the Chilean resistance movements, with the murder of Letelier one of the more recent and notorious examples. The Falconbridge concessions in Chile would be placed in jeopardy if the military junta were to be toppled by the resistance movement. Previous reports of Cuban exile activity in the Dominican Republic had been linked to the huge Gulf & Western operation with its many Cuban exiles in top management positions. It is not surprising, therefore, that many of the CORU delegates traveled to the G&W facilities at La Romana immediately following the Bonao meeting. The La Romana visit was reportedly a mixture of business and pleasure, during which the visitors enjoyed themselves at the plush $2,000 a week resort, and worked out some of the details of the deadly business discussed at Bonao. From the Dominican Republic Task Force Newsletter, No. 5, November 1977. One year subscription available for $5 from DRTF, Box 641, Cathedral Station, New York, NY 10025.
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