The Jackal, during his speech before a German judge.
Venezuelan Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, author of a hundred terrorist attacks that shook France in the 1970s and 1980s, received a new conviction this Thursday after his appeal to the last trial he faces in Paris was dismissed. At the age of 72, the best known as Carlos,
El Chacal
, has been sentenced to his third life sentence, in this case for the terrorist attack perpetrated on the afternoon of September 15, 1974, when a grenade exploded in a downtown restaurant. Parisian commercial that killed two people and injured dozens.
The decision of the Paris Criminal Court was taken for granted.
Ramírez is an old acquaintance in the French courts for the sheaf of resources he has introduced to defend himself.
This time he has decided not to appeal to the Supreme Court again, as he has done for the 27 years he has been in prison.
His intention is for the Venezuelan government to demand him and thus be able to serve his sentence in his country, thanks to the ideological ties that Chavismo has had with his cause.
“It is a procedure between states.
Venezuela has to make the demand.
I ask Venezuela to request the transfer, ”said his lawyer and partner Isabelle Coutant-Peyre.
The request would have to be accepted by France, which would open a negotiation to determine whether in Venezuela he could be released, having already served more than 27 years behind bars, according to the lawyer.
More information
Carlos El Chacal, sentenced to life imprisonment for a 1974 attack
The pending accounts of El Chacal
Long before terrorism was that global and diffuse threat that it is now, Ramírez called himself Carlos, a “revolutionary by profession,” and he broke into meetings of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries with armed commandos, killed people in the corridors from the agency's headquarters in Vienna and took 42 people hostage, including 11 oil ministers, took them by plane through various North African countries, until they were released in Algeria.
Almost half a century has passed since his biggest attack, which has kept him in prison in Paris since 1994.
The Jackal forged his record as a terrorist with recurrent car bomb attacks on newspapers in Paris, the storming of the French Embassy in The Hague and the kidnapping of its ambassador, the murder of two French policemen during a movie escape from a student apartment where he lived and the attack on British businessman Joseph Sieff, owner of the Marks & Spencer chain of stores and leader of the Zionist Federation of Great Britain. Thus he became the most wanted criminal, with 52 different names in more than 100 passports, identities for which he learned to speak six languages. The press began to call him The Jackal, a nickname that he despises and that arose, as he himself has said, as a result of the English police finding the novel by Frederic Forsyth,
The Day of the Jackal
, above the fireplace of the house a friend of hers, in one of the many chases to capture him.
For years the intelligence of the whole world had it as a trophy. Ramírez was arrested by the French secret services in Sudan in 1994. In almost 30 years of appearances before the courts, he himself has admitted to having participated in more than 100 attacks that cost the lives of some 2,000 people, 83 of them directly murdered by he. But he has also insisted on regaining his freedom. In an interview with EL PAÍS a decade ago, he claimed not to regret anything of what was done in the "revolutionary struggle" and attributed the deaths "to 10% of innocent casualties" that occur in all operations such as those he carried out. In the same interview published in 2010, he expressed his respect for Osama Bin Laden and described the attacks against the Twin Towers as an "extraordinary blow against imperialism."
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Ramírez grew up in a family in political tension, bourgeois and communist at the same time. He was born in 1949, shortly before the beginning of the military dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez that devastated the left-wing militants. His father, a member of the Communist Party of Venezuela, trained him early on in the "anti-imperialist" struggle. At the age of 14 he was already a member of the party's youth groups. His mother sought to take him to the other side and tried to get him to train in London, but under parental pressure he ended up at a university in Moscow, one of the Soviet Union's recruitment centers for foreign communists. From there he jumped to Beirut where he signed up as a volunteer for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and began his training for armed struggle. At the age of 21 he fought against the Jordanian Army in the so-called Black September.
His revolutionary flag has related him to the more radical Latin American left that calls him Commander Carlos and assures that he is a political prisoner. Hugo Chávez came to defend him several times. At the beginning of his mandate, in 1999, he sent him a letter of support full of references to Simón Bolívar. In 2011, at the beginning of one of his trials, he said that he could not "allow any Venezuelan accused of anything to be run over anywhere in the world." Earlier, you described him as a revolutionary fighter. "I vindicate it, what does it matter to me what they say tomorrow in Europe," said the former president in 2009 during the closing of an international meeting of left-wing parties in Caracas.
Despite the praise, Ramírez's family has denounced that the Venezuelan government has never attempted an official claim that could save him from life sentences. In the first years of the Maduro government, his lawyer made a new rapprochement with Chavismo, with the intention of turning it into a new diplomatic front of Chavista Venezuela, then not as close as now. They have also asked the Venezuelan government to pay for the defense, without success. It remains to be seen if Maduro embarks on a claim for El Chacal, as his lawyer expects, when the Government seeks at all costs to avoid the extradition to the United States of the Colombian businessman Alex Saab, designated by Washington as his alleged front man, and whom they have become the new martyr of the revolution.
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