The historic Justice Department indictment over the 1996 shootdown of Brothers to the Rescue planes is closing in on a key piece of the Castro regime in Florida.
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Cuban pilot Luis Raúl González-Pardo Rodríguez faces murder and conspiracy charges, named in the same court document that indicts former ruler Raúl Castro.
González Pardo Rodríguez, who entered the United States trying to go unnoticed as a civilian, also faces immigration fraud charges.
His alibi fell apart when the federal government declassified an undeniable photograph: It shows him wearing an olive-green military flight suit next to a fighter jet, alongside fellow defendant Lorenzo Alberto Pérez Pérez.
After confirming his ties to the Castro-aligned armed forces, investigators laid out his exact role in the deadly 1996 attack that left four pilots dead — three U.S. citizens and one U.S. resident.
Luis Domínguez, a researcher with the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba, reviewed transcripts of military communications submitted to the United Nations and managed to unmask the defendant’s secret alias: “Code 22.”
Despite his lies on immigration forms, González-Pardo Rodríguez kept his loyalty to the regime in private.
Orestes Lorenzo, a former Cuban military pilot who escaped to the U.S. in 1991, told Telemundo 51 how he confronted the defendant in 2017. As he recounted six months ago, when he demanded that the shooters pay for their crimes, González-Pardo justified the massacre by arguing that the pilots “were only following orders.”
Today, at 65 years old and held in a federal prison in Florida, González-Pardo Rodríguez faces an ultimatum from the U.S. justice system. He must decide whether to cooperate with prosecutors and testify against the Castro leadership, or risk a murder trial that could cost him life in prison — or the death penalty.
This story was translated from English with the help of a generative AI tool. An NBC6 editor reviewed the translation.
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