vault backup: 2026-09-21 20:24:41

20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PARAMILITARY/CORU.md

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+---
+category: "Paramilitary"
+tags:
+  - Organization
+  - CORU
+  - CubanExiles
+  - OrlandoBosch
+  - Terrorism
+  - CubanNationalistMovement
+  - DISIP
+alias:
+  - Coordinación de Organizaciones Revolucionarias Unidas
+  - Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations
+summary: "Umbrella of five Cuban exile organizations formed under Orlando Bosch in the Dominican Republic on June 11, 1976, whose members bombed a Cubana airliner that October and lent DINA the men who killed Orlando Letelier."
+start: 1976-06-11
+location: "Miami, Florida"
+created: 2026-09-21
+updated: 2026-09-21
+---
+
+CORU was "integrated by 5 anti-Castro groups which united in the [[Dominican Republic]] on June 11, 1976, under the leadership of Dr. [[Orlando Bosch]]": Bosch's Acción Cubana; the [[Cuban Nationalist Movement]], "a right wing organization which claimed credit for acts of violence in the United States and Canada during the mid-1960s"; the [[Frente de Liberación Nacional Cubano|Cuban National Liberation Front]], formed in October 1973 and credited with about 25 acts; the veterans' association of [[Brigade 2506]]; and the 17th of April Movement. Bosch told an interviewer from prison: "We were conspiring there. Planning bombings and killings. Everything was planned there."[^1][^2]
+
+### 1976
+
+In September Bosch reached [[Caracas]] under Venezuelan protection. On October 6 two employees of [[Luis Posada Carriles]] blew up a [[Cubana Flight 455 bombing|Cubana airliner]] off Barbados. [[Ricardo Morales Navarrete]] of [[DISIP]] named [[Frank Castro]], "a leader of CORU," among those who planned it at the Anauco Hilton, and said Castro had wanted his own front to claim it and then, after the deaths, did not. Members of the Cuban Nationalist Movement had meanwhile gone to Washington with [[Michael Townley]] of [[DINA]] and killed [[Orlando Letelier]] on September 21.[^3]
+
+### After Bosch
+
+With Bosch in a Caracas prison the leadership passed to Frank Castro, "CORU Chief from Miami." Informants reported him reorganizing cells, planning to sabotage a Mexican airliner on the Mérida-Havana route while insisting "that all operations must be outside of the boundaries of the United States," raising money among exile doctors for a jailbreak in the Dominican Republic, and running a "young action oriented cell" of [[Alvin Ross]] and Raciel Rodríguez that bombed the Viasa Airlines office in Miami Beach on December 23, 1977. In January 1977 a CORU member came to Miami on the instructions of Venezuela's [[Orlando García Vásquez]] to arrange "a dramatic mission that would cause maximum publicity," a naval attack on Cuban shipping, and a lesser bombing, to "take away the 'pressure' from Orlando Bosch." In January 1978 [[Guillermo Novo]] was organizing cells in [[Union City, New Jersey]] "for military action in the U.S. and against the country of Venezuela." Bosch wanted "war declared against Venezuela." In July 1978 Bosch, from prison, removed Castro and named Dr. Carlos Dominicis interim head. An informant reported an offer of money from the [[Unification Church]] to a Chicago federation of which CORU was proposed as the military arm.[^1][^4]
+
+The Justice Department wrote in 1989 that CORU "has claimed responsibility for numerous bombings in Miami, New York, Venezuela, Panama, Mexico, Argentina, and elsewhere."[^5]
+
+### Footnotes
+
+[^1]: Federal Bureau of Investigation, Miami, file 2-471, "CORU," August 16, 1978. National Security Archive, Electronic Briefing Book 153, document 13.
+[^2]: Dinges, John, and Saul Landau. *Assassination on Embassy Row*. McGraw-Hill, 1980, p. 250, quoting Bosch to Blake Fleetwood, *New Times,* May 13, 1977.
+[^3]: Federal Bureau of Investigation, Miami, teletype to Director, "Bombing of Cubana Airlines DC-8 Near Barbados, West Indies, October 6, 1976," November 2, 1976, JFK Assassination Records Collection. National Security Archive, Electronic Briefing Book 153, document 10.
+[^4]: Federal Bureau of Investigation, Miami, file 2-471, "Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU)," January 24, 1977. National Security Archive, Electronic Briefing Book 153, document 12.
+[^5]: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Associate Attorney General, *In the Matter of Orlando Bosch-Avila,* decision of Acting Associate Attorney General Joe D. Whitley in exclusion proceedings, January 23, 1989.

20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PARAMILITARY/Cuban Nationalist Movement.md

@@ -27,7 +27,7 @@ Michael Townley testified that in the summer of 1976 DINA assigned him to go to
 
 ### Trials
 
-Novo and Ross were convicted in 1979 of murder, murder of a foreign official, and conspiracy, and Novo's brother [[Ignacio Novo]] of lying to the grand jury. Part of the evidence came from jailhouse informants working with the government. One of them, [[Sherman Kaminsky]], testified that Ross "told me that he was involved in the murder of Orlando Letelier together with generals in DINA, Sepulveda, Michael Townley, and other members of the Cuban Nationalist Movement in this country." In 1980 the Supreme Court held such testimony inadmissible in United States v. Henry, and the [[United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit|court of appeals]] reversed the convictions of Novo and Ross and ordered a new trial. It reversed Ignacio Novo's for the failure to try him separately.[^1]
+Novo and Ross were convicted in 1979 of murder, murder of a foreign official, and conspiracy, and Novo's brother [[Ignacio Novo]] of lying to the grand jury. Part of the evidence came from jailhouse informants working with the government. One of them, [[Sherman Kaminsky]], testified that Ross "told me that he was involved in the murder of Orlando Letelier together with generals in DINA, Sepulveda, Michael Townley, and other members of the Cuban Nationalist Movement in this country." In 1980 the Supreme Court held such testimony inadmissible in [[United States v. Henry]], and the [[United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit|court of appeals]] reversed the convictions of Novo and Ross and ordered a new trial. It reversed Ignacio Novo's for the failure to try him separately.[^1]
 
 At the retrial in May 1981 the defense undertook to prove "that Townley and DINA alone plotted to kill Letelier." Townley, the government's witness, admitted that he had lied to a Chilean military investigator and had given [[El Mercurio]] a false statement that he had nothing to do with the killing. Paz and Suárez were not tried with them.[^4]
 

20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PARAMILITARY/Junta Coordinadora Revolucionaria.md

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+---
+category: "Paramilitary"
+tags:
+  - Organization
+  - JuntaCoordinadoraRevolucionaria
+  - JCR
+  - Tupamaros
+  - MIR
+  - ERP
+  - OperationCondor
+  - SouthAmerica
+alias:
+  - JCR
+  - Junta de Coordinación Revolucionaria
+summary: "Alliance of the Tupamaros, the Chilean MIR, the Bolivian ELN, and the Argentine ERP, formed in 1973 on Che Guevara's model of coordinating juntas, whose members were the first targets of Operation Condor."
+start: 1973
+location: "Buenos Aires, Argentina"
+created: 2026-09-21
+updated: 2026-09-21
+---
+
+The Junta Coordinadora Revolucionaria united four armed organizations of the [[Southern Cone]]: the [[Tupamaros|Movimiento de Liberación Nacional]] of [[Uruguay]], the [[Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria]] of [[Chile]], the [[Ejército de Liberación Nacional (Bolivia)|Ejército de Liberación Nacional]] of [[Bolivia]], and the [[Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo]] of [[Argentina]]. Its first communiqué opened with [[Che Guevara]]'s message to the Tricontinental, which had proposed that "the groups in arms could form something like Juntas of Coordination to make more difficult the repressive task of Yankee imperialism," and declared the four organizations' "decision to unite in a Junta de Coordinación Revolucionaria" to "unify the revolutionary forces against the imperialist enemy."[^1]
+
+Contacts dated from 1968, consolidation from 1972, and the junta was constituted in August 1973. Before the Chilean coup its cadres trained at Cajón del Maipo under Tupamaro instructors; afterward its central office moved to Argentina. The communiqué was published in the junta's magazine *Che Guevara* on November 1, 1974.[^2]
+
+### Condor
+
+Arrests of the junta's couriers in [[Paraguay]] in 1975, interrogated before an audience by [[Pastor Coronel]], drew the first documented American participation in the multinational hunt, a letter from the FBI's [[Robert Scherrer]] to the Chilean police. By Scherrer's account the Paraguayan interrogations sent French agents to a [[Paris]] apartment looking for the ERP's Roberto Santucho and finding [[Carlos the Jackal]] instead. "They should be rounded up," Scherrer said. "But they should be tried, not slaughtered." The junta's pursuit is counted among the reasons for the November 1975 conference in [[Santiago]] that founded [[Operation Condor]].[^2][^3]
+
+### Footnotes
+
+[^1]: "Primer Comunicado de la Junta Coordinadora Revolucionaria," 1974, text as republished by latinamericanstudies.org.
+[^2]: "La Junta de Coordinación Revolucionaria (1972-1979). Una experiencia de internacionalismo armado en el Cono Sur," academic article indexed at Dialnet, as summarized; not read in full.
+[^3]: Dinges, John. *The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents*. New Press, 2004, pp. 90-94.

20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PARAMILITARY/Ordine Nuovo.md

@@ -39,7 +39,7 @@ The judicial path to conviction was tortured over three decades, with acquittals
 
 ### Peteano Bombing and Vinciguerra
 
-The [[Peteano bombing]] of May 31, 1972, in which three Carabinieri were killed by a bomb concealed in a Fiat 500, was carried out by [[Vincenzo Vinciguerra]], a member of both Ordine Nuovo and Avanguardia Nazionale. Vinciguerra fled to Spain after the attack and surrendered to Italian authorities in 1979. In 1984 he made a voluntary confession to Venice investigating magistrate [[Felice Casson]], providing testimony that explicitly linked the attack to the Gladio stay-behind network and to SID intelligence service protection - naming not just his own actions but the organizational framework within which they occurred. His testimony became the foundation for Casson's discovery of the Gladio documents in 1990 and the subsequent forced disclosure by Prime Minister [[Giulio Andreotti]].[^1]
+The [[Peteano bombing]] of May 31, 1972, in which three Carabinieri were killed by a bomb concealed in a Fiat 500, was carried out by [[Vincenzo Vinciguerra]], a member of both Ordine Nuovo and [[Avanguardia Nazionale]]. Vinciguerra fled to Spain after the attack and surrendered to Italian authorities in 1979. In 1984 he made a voluntary confession to Venice investigating magistrate [[Felice Casson]], providing testimony that explicitly linked the attack to the Gladio stay-behind network and to SID intelligence service protection - naming not just his own actions but the organizational framework within which they occurred. His testimony became the foundation for Casson's discovery of the Gladio documents in 1990 and the subsequent forced disclosure by Prime Minister [[Giulio Andreotti]].[^1]
 
 ### SID Relationships