Word: cuba
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...Cuba insists it has ample evidence to try Posada for the 1997 bombings, which killed Italian businessman Fabio di Celmo as he sat in the lobby of the Copacabana Hotel. "My family and I have been waiting 12 years for the U.S. to officially link Posada to international terrorism," Di Celmo's brother Livio told reporters Thursday via conference call. But the U.S. may have felt emboldened to indict Posada this week for perjury in no small part because the FBI - whose informants have linked Posada to the 1976 airline bombing, and whose agents in 2006 traveled to Havana...
...most likely enhance the hemisphere's early optimistic mood about President Obama when he lands in Trinidad next week. "This will certainly be construed by Latin America as a positive step," says Daniel Erikson, a senior analyst at the Inter-American Dialogue, in Washington, and the author of The Cuba Wars. "The region sees the Posada case as one of the worst examples of a U.S. double standard regarding the rule of law, a subject we often lecture Latin America about...
...Both Cuba and Venezuela, where Posada had citizenship when the the Cubana Airlines flight blew up in 1976, have demanded Posada's extradition. So far, federal judges have declined to send him to either country, where Posada insists he would be tortured. (Cuban President Raúl Castro and Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez have insisted he wouldn't.) But some analysts believe that if the U.S. were to eventually lock Posada away - a grand jury in New Jersey is investigating his involvement in the bombings - it might turn down the volume of the calls for extradition in Havana...
Still, Obama can add the Posada indictment to the list of fence-mending planks he's taking to Trinidad - most of them involving Cuba, which has shaped up to be the central focus of the summit. Most Latin American leaders consider a change in Washington's Cuba policy - including the 47-year-old trade embargo - to be a sine qua non for improving hemispheric relations in general and the strongest indication that the U.S. is willing to deal with Latin America with the same multilateral, dialogue-based approach that Obama pledged at the G-20 summit this month in London...
Though he has said he'll keep the trade embargo intact until he sees more political reform in Cuba, Obama is expected to lift restrictions on Cuban-American travel and remittances to the island before the Americas summit begins. The U.S. Congress, for its part, appears closer than ever to passing legislation to lift the Cuban travel ban for all U.S. citizens - prominent lawmakers like Indiana Republican Senator Richard Lugar now call the embargo a failed policy - and Obama would probably sign such a measure. At the same time, Fidel and Raúl Castro have both in recent days...