Paris court upholds ‘Carlos the Jackal’ life sentence

“I have fought all my life against terrorists. We are not terrorists, we are freedom fighters!”  - Carlos the Jackal

Illich Ramirez Sanchez a.k. Carlos the Jackal
1970s and after his capture in 1997

Ilich Ramirez Sanchez,better known as Carlos the Jackal, lost his appeal today in a French Court for his 2011 conviction for masterminding a string of bombings in France in the 1980s that killed 11 and wounded many more. His life sentence has been reaffirmed.

Back in 2011,  Carlos the Jackal, at the same time that his trial was underway in France , boasted in an interview with the daily El Nacional of committing more than 100 attacks that claimed up to 2,000 lives explaining that:

With the means that I have in jail I began to make a rough account and the dead do not reach 2,000. Less than 10% of innocents suffered for it.

Later in the same interview when questioned about the attacks and asked if mistakes were made Ramírez Sánchez gave a candidly brutal answer:

Reporter - But then you, personally, believe that you were not mistaken in anything?
Ramírez Sánchez- Errors one commits all the time. President Chavez makes mistakes and thats normal, it is not a serious problem. Fidel Castro made ​​terrible mistakes.

Reporter- But people were killed in your attacks.
Ramírez Sánchez - Yes, but Fidel killed more people than me.

This was not his first life sentence. On December 24, 1997 he was also convicted of murder by a French Court and sentenced to life in prison stated at his sentencing: "I am satisfied and I am proud I chose my cause when I was 14 and I have never strayed." According to the New York Times, "His real cause was anti-Americanism, adopted when he was a student in the 1960s looking for a way of defying U.S. domination and capitalist values the way Fidel Castro and Che Guevara had done for Cuba before him."

Ramírez Sánchez, Venezuelan by birth, described by the late Venezuelan "president" Hugo Chavez as a "revolutionary fighter" in November of 2009 is an ideological soul mate of Chavez, the heir apparent to Castroism-Guevarism ideology. According to French intelligence services Carlos the Jackal is responsible for more than 80 murders.


Carlos the Jackal's life story spawned a 2010 film that was five and a half hours long that glorified the acts of terrorism he carried out in the service of Marxism-Leninism.

Regime apologists downplay the significance of the Tricontinental meeting and its relationship to the upsurge of terrorism in the late 1960s and 1970s but there are artifiacts from that time that still remain in circulation: in 1970 the Cuban government published the "Mini Manual for Revolutionaries" in the official Latin American Solidarity Organization (LASO) publication Tricontinental, written by Brazilian urban terrorist Carlos Marighella, which gives precise instructions in terror tactics, kidnappings, etc. and translated into numerous languages which were distributed worldwide by the Cuban regime. 

According to Major David E. Smith USMC in his 1995 paper "The Training of Terrorist Organizations" the Cuban role in the explosion of terrorism in the 1960s and 1970s was systematic:

Although terrorism originated centuries ago, modern international terrorism orchestrated by the Soviet Union arguably began at the Tricontinental Conference conceived by Moscow and conducted in Havana, Cuba during January l966. The purpose of the conference was to devise a "global revolutionary strategy to counter the global strategy of American imperialism."[14] It resulted in the creation of an African, Asian, and Latin American Solidarity Organization based in Havana. ... Castro's terrorism schools were under the supervision of the Dirección General de Inteligencia (DGI). Students were flown into the country from connecting airports, or arrived in Cuban harbors by boat. Upon debarkation in Havana, they were segregated by nationality and moved to their individual training locations. The guerrilla courses lasted from three to six months. Subject material included "tactics, weapons training, bomb making- particularly how to blow up oil pipelines, map reading, cryptography, photography, falsification of documents, and disguise."

The glorification of mass killers such as Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and Carlos the Jackal, downplaying the carnage carried out, while at the same time celebrating it is a recipe for more unnecessary violence and terror.