La Penca bombing information

The La Penca bombing was a bomb attack carried out in May 30, 1984 at the remote outpost of La Penca, on the Nicaraguan side of the border with Costa Rica, along the San Juan River. It occurred during a press conference convened and conducted by Edén Pastora, who at the time was the leader of a Contra guerrilla group fighting against the ruling Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. Pastora, the presumed target of the attack, survived the bombing, but seven other people were killed, including three journalists, and several others were severely injured. The bombing was carried out by an operative posing as a news photographer and is considered a serious violation of journalistic neutrality during an armed conflict, like the assassination in 2001 of Afghan leader Ahmad Shah Massoud by Al-Qaeda agents posing as international journalists.

In the years after the event, some journalists and activists, as well as the Costa Rican judiciary, pointed to the United States government's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which was seeking to direct the Contra insurgency against the leftist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, as responsible for the bombing. However, in 1993 the man who had placed the bomb, and who had attended the press conference under a false identity as a Danish photographer named Per Anker Hansen, was revealed to have been an Argentine leftist whose real name was Vital Roberto Gaguine and who had died in 1989 during a guerrilla attack on a military base in Argentina.

In 2009, Swedish journalist and filmmaker Peter Torbiörnsson revealed that he had been asked by Renán Montero, a Cuban military counter-intelligence officer working with the Sandinista Ministry of the Interior, to meet in Costa Rica with the man posing as Hansen and to escort him to the press conference at La Penca. Torbiörnsson then attempted unsuccessfully to press charges in Nicaragua against Renán Montero, Lenín Cerna, and Tomás Borge (the Sandinista Minister of the Interior at the time of the bombing) for murder and crimes against humanity. In 2011 Torbiörnsson released a documentary film, Last Chapter, Goodbye Nicaragua, which includes footage of him personally confronting Borge over his role in the bombing.