Louisiana's governor has denied the clemency request of a man jailed for plotting the murder of Barry Seal, a drug runner and federal informant who worked to bring down Colombian cocaine lords before he was killed in the parking lot of a Baton Rouge halfway house in the 1980s.
Bernardo Antonio Vasquez, serving a life sentence with no parole, was tasked by Pablo Escobar's cartel with tracking Seal’s movements in Baton Rouge before his 1986 slaying. Vasquez asked the state pardon board in September to grant him parole — a request supported by glowing recommendations from prison staff and advocates. The panel voted unanimously to recommend that Gov. John Bel Edwards reduce Vasquez's sentence and grant him parole.
Edwards ultimately decided that Seal's status as a federal witness and the lengths Vasquez went in plotting the killing outweighed those endorsements.
"After carefully reviewing Mr. Vasquez’s file and the facts of the case, which show that he explicitly left his home country of Colombia and came to Baton Rouge with the sole purpose of carrying out a murder for hire to extinguish a cooperating witness in a critically important federal investigation of global proportions, Gov. Edwards has denied his request for clemency," Eric Holl, Edwards' deputy chief of staff, said in a statement provided Thursday.
The decision closes one chapter of a saga some 36 years in the making, in which Vasquez pursued forgiveness from some in Seal’s family, became devoutly religious while behind bars and cultivated a reputation at David Wade Correctional Center as a model prisoner.
Tiffany Flournoy, an advocate who pushed for Vasquez to receive parole, questioned Edwards’ decision, saying Vasquez had lived in New Orleans and Florida for a long period before his involvement in the plan to kill Seal. She said Vasquez had a U.S.-based green card and a social security number under his legal name prior to his arrest.
Hearing of the decision was “heartbreaking,” she said.
“There is nothing more Bernardo Vasquez can do to show the governor he is rehabilitated," she said. “His prison jacket speaks volumes showcasing decades of accolades and no disciplinary infractions.”
He was one of three men who orchestrated the fatal shooting of Adler “Barry” Seal in the parking lot of the Airline Highway halfway house in February, 1986. U.S. authorities eventually traced the slaying to Escobar, a notorious Colombian drug kingpin.
Escobar didn’t live to stand trial in Baton Rouge for the hit as Colombian soldiers killed him in a chaotic rooftop shooting in 1993. Three men he had apparently tasked with killing Seal did, though, ultimately getting life prison sentences in a Louisiana state court. One of those men was Vasquez.
At his hearing before the Louisiana Board of Pardons and Parole in September, Vasquez admitted to his role in the killing and recounted how it was his responsibility to pinpoint Seal's movements in Baton Rouge.
“My whole thing was just, ‘make sure to find Mr. Seal’,” he said.
Seal was a longtime pilot who had assignments with Trans World Airlines and channeled his talents into a lucrative second career running cocaine. He started smuggling drugs in the 1970s and was reported to have worked for Escobar's Medellín cartel starting in the 1980s, flying drugs from Central and South America to locations across the Southern U.S., news reporting on his DEA file says.
The feds indicted him in 1983 after Louisiana State Police and federal agents in Florida and Arkansas uncovered his smuggling. He agreed to cooperate and earned a plea deal in exchange for surveilling traffickers and passing information back to the feds. He was expected to be a key witness in a case against Escobar and others in the kingpin’s circle.
Testimony at the Seal murder trial recounted how Escobar allegedly offered $500,000 to have Seal killed and $1 million to have him kidnapped and returned alive to Colombia.
Some in Seal's family opposed Vasquez's release request, saying it dredged up painful memories of his death and the ensuing storm of media and pop culture attention the case attracted.
But others in the family supported his release; reached by text message Thursday, Aaron Seal, Barry Seal's son, quoted Matthew 6:14-15: "For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins."
Vasquez said through tears during his parole hearing that helping kill Seal had stayed with him for the past 36 years, too, and that he has hoped for years to eventually earn the forgiveness of Seal’s loved ones.
“One of the last things that (my mother) asked me was that I was going to have to make sure that one day, one day, to reach this family, to let them know how sorry I was,” he told the board.
Edwards commuted sentences and allowed parole for 36 people in 2020 — the last year for which figures were immediately available. All were convicted of violent crimes decades earlier and were deemed low risk to public safety.
A Democratic governor who has championed criminal justice reform, he granted more sentence commutations that year than during his entire first term in office, when records show he awarded 34. Edwards took action quietly, granting the awards at a steady pace throughout the year.