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Oswald in Mexico City


Who is the man featured above, photos of whom were caught by surveillance cameras and rushed to Dallas from Mexico City on the evening of the Kennedy assassination? Was he the man calling the Soviet Embassy on tapped phone lines using Oswald's name, which the FBI determined did not match the voice of the actual Lee Harvey Oswald? And were these phone calls meant to tie Oswald to purported KGB assassin agent Valeriy Kostikov, about whom a strange letter signed by Oswald would later appear?

Mexico City became a hornet's nest of conspiracy allegations in the wake of JFK's murder, much of it related to Oswald's trip to that city several weeks earlier and his visits to the Cuban and Soviet embassies. The now-declassified CIA reporting of that trip is at odds with the participants' memories and has striking internal contradictions.

Communist conspiracy stories included that of Gilberto Alvarado Ugarte, Elena Garro de Paz, and Pedro Gutierrez Valencia, all of whom told of Oswald being seen with Cubans and in some cases being paid by them. Factoring into some of these stories was Sylvia Duran, the woman who had dealt with Oswald's visa requests and had been arrested, interrogated, and beaten by Mexican authorities in the days after the Kennedy assassination. Other allegations included the idea that Cuban Embassy employee Luisa Calderon had expressed foreknowledge of the assassination over a tapped phone line.

Do these stories add up to a Cuban conspiracy to kill JFK? Or are they all post-assassination "provocations" meant to create that impression? Or are they something yet different, echoes of a pre-assassination framing of Oswald to tie him to Cuba and the Soviet Union?


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