From FPRI:
THE MIDDLE EASTERN-LATIN AMERICAN
TERRORIST CONNECTION
by Vanessa Neumann
In a global triangulation that would excite any conspiracy
buff, the globalization of terrorism now links Colombian
FARC with Hezbollah, Iran with Russia, elected governments
with violent insurgencies, uranium with AK-103s, and cocaine
with oil. At the center of it all, is Latin
America-especially the countries under the influence of
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
The most publicized (and publicly contested) connection
between Hugo Chavez and the Colombian narcoterrorist
organization Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)
was revealed after the March 2008 Colombian raid on the FARC
camp in Dev¡a, inside Ecuador, where a laptop was discovered
that apparently belonged to Luis Edgar Dev¡a Silva (aka,
"Ra£l Reyes"), head of FARC's International Committee
(COMINTER). The Colombian government under then-President
_lvaro Uribe announced that Interpol had certified the
authenticity of the contents of the computer disks, whose
files traced over US$ 200 million funneled to the FARC
through the Venezuelan state-owned, and completely Chavez-
dominated, Petr¢leos de Venezuela (PDVSA). On May 10th,
2011, the International Institute of Strategic Studies
(IISS) will publish one of its strategic dossiers based on a
study of the computer disks entitled The FARC Files:
Venezuela, Ecuador and the Secret Archives of 'Ra£l Reyes'
that purports to elucidate the organization's development
and internationalization.
According to some already leaked documents, Venezuelan
General Hugo Carvajal and other members of the armed forces
were in direct contact with and lending financial support to
the late FARC leader Antonio Mar¡n, aka "Tirofijo" ("Sure
Shot") and "Manuel Marulanda." Of the fact that the FARC
enjoys at least ideological support from the governments of
Ecuador and Venezuela, there can be no doubt: Venezuelan
President Hugo Chavez and Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa
have both argued that the FARC should not be considered a
terrorist organization.
While support of the insurgents next door is certainly
nothing new, Venezuelan military and terror alliances are
spanning the globe and expanding at a worrying rate for all,
especially US interests in the region.
As I wrote in The Weekly Standard last October[1],
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Russian President
Dimitry Medvedev jointly announced that they had reached an
agreement for Russia to build two 1200-megawatt nuclear
reactors in Venezuela. Also part of the deal was the latest
installment of $6.6 billion of conventional weapons
purchases since 2005: ninety-two T-72 and T-90 tanks that
will replace the aging French MX-30s, ten Ilyushin Il-76MD-
90 planes, two Il-78MK refueling aircraft, as well as five
S-300 missile systems. Iran had also sought the S-300 but
Medvedev banned the sale for fear of violating U.N. Security
Council Resolution 1929, concerning sanctions on Iran. The
S-300 missiles and their attendant Smerch multiple rocket
launchers are considered far more powerful than the Tor M-1
missile systems that both Venezuela and Iran have previously
purchased in the past five years. Caracas has also confirmed
plans to purchase up to 10 Mi-28NE attack helicopters on top
of the 10 Mi-35M helicopters purchased in the past half-
decade. That is an awful lot of weaponry for a country that
has not fought a war since its independence from Spain in
1821.
While Chavez has said that he is arming his citizen
militias, known as Bolivarian Circles, rumor has it that the
weapons may also be going to agents and fighters from the
Colombian FARC, the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah
and Cuban security and intelligence services, whose numbers,
according to many think tanks and U.S. security sources,
have swelled in Venezuela. Interpol has confirmed evidence
that Venezuela has funneled well over $300 million to the
FARC and has built an ammunition plant to supply AK-103s,
the FARC weapon of choice.
That is only one piece of the puzzle; the other is Iran,
where Venezuelan money has also been flowing.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Iranian President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad publicly call each other "brothers" and
last year signed 11 memoranda of understanding for, among
other initiatives, joint oil and gas exploration, as well as
the construction of tanker ships and petrochemical plants.
Chavez's assistance to the Islamic Republic in circumventing
U.N. sanctions has got the attention of the new Republican
leadership of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Ileana
Ros-Lehtinen and Connie Mack (both R-FL) have said they
intend to launch a money-laundering investigation into the
Venezuelan state oil company Petr¢leos de Venezuela, S.A.
(PDVSA). In July 2010, the EU ordered the seizure of all the
assets of the Venezuelan International Development Bank, an
affiliate of the Export Development Bank of Iran (EDBI), one
of 34 Iranian entities implicated in the development of
nuclear or ballistic technology and sanctioned by the
Treasury Department. In the meantime, Tehran and Caracas
have announced that PDVSA will be investing $780 million in
the South Pars gas field in southern Iran.
Uranium, sought by both Iran and Russia, is a key aspect of
the two countries' strategic relationship: Iran is
reportedly helping Venezuela find and refine its estimated
50,000 tons of uranium reserves.
So, on one side Venezuela is funding and arming the FARC; on
the other it is purchasing nuclear reactors and weapons from
the Russians; on yet another, it is sending money to Iran
and helping it find and enrich uranium. And then there is
Hezbollah, Iran's Lebanon-based asset.
Reports that Venezuela has provided Hezbollah operatives
with Venezuelan national identity cards are so rife, they
were raised in the July 27, 2010, Senate hearing for the
recently nominated U.S. ambassador to Venezuela, Larry
Palmer. When Palmer answered that he believed the reports,
Chavez refused to accept him as ambassador in Venezuela.
Meanwhile, Iran Air, the self-proclaimed "airline of the
Islamic Republic of Iran," operates a Tehran-Caracas flight
commonly referred to as "Aeroterror" by intelligence
officials for allegedly facilitating the access of terrorist
suspects to South America. The Venezuelan government
shields passenger lists from Interpol on that flight.
Iran, meanwhile, has developed significant relationships
elsewhere in Latin America - most prominently with Chavez's
allies and fellow Bolivarian Revolutionaries: Bolivian
President Evo Morales, Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa
and Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega.
In December 2008 the EDBI offered to deposit $120 million in
the Ecuadorean Central Bank to fund bilateral trade, and
Iran and Ecuador have signed a $30 million deal to conduct
joint mining projects in Ecuador through the Chemical-
Geotechnical-Metallurgical Research Center in Ecuador. Even
as that deal carefully avoids mentioning uranium, the IAEA's
March 2009 plans to help Ecuador explore its vast uranium
reserves were largely intended to highlight and preclude
Iranian involvement. In February 2010 the Paris-based
Financial Action Task Force, a multilateral organization
that combats money laundering and terrorist financing,
placed Ecuador on a list of countries that failed to comply
with its regulations.
Middle Eastern terrorism, however, is not new to Latin
America and has been on the US Army's radar for many
years.[2]
Latin America's Tri-Border Area (TBA), bounded by Puerto
Iguazu, Argentina; Ciudad del Este, Paraguay; and Foz do
Iguacu, Brazil, has long been an ideal breeding ground for
terrorist groups. The TBA, South America's busiest
contraband and smuggling center, is home to a large, active
Arab and Muslim community consisting of a Shi'a majority, a
Sunni minority, and a small population of Christians who
emigrated from Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and the Palestinian
territories about 50 years ago. Most of these Arab
immigrants are involved in commerce in Ciudad del Este but
live in Foz do Iguacu on the Brazilian side of the Iguacu
River.
In 2005, six million Muslims were estimated to inhabit Latin
American cities. However, ungoverned areas, primarily in the
Amazon regions of Suriname, Guyana, Venezuela, Colombia,
Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil, present easily
exploitable terrain over which to move people and material.
The Free Trade Zones of Iquique, Chile; Maicao, Colombia;
and Col¢n, Panama, can generate undetected financial and
logistical support for terrorist groups. Colombia, Bolivia,
and Peru offer cocaine as a lucrative source of income. In
addition, Cuba and Venezuela have cooperative agreements
with Syria, Libya, and Iran.
Argentine officials believe Hezbollah is still active in the
TBA. They attribute the detonation of a car bomb outside
Israel's embassy in Buenos Aires on 17 March 1992 to
Hezbollah extremists. Officials also maintain that with
Iran's assistance, Hezbollah carried out a car-bomb attack
on the main building of the Jewish Community Center (AMIA)
in Buenos Aires on 18 July 1994 in protest of the Israeli-
Jordanian peace agreement that year.
Today, one of the masterminds of those attacks, the Iranian
citizen and Shia Muslim teacher, Mohsen Rabbani, remains not
only at large, but extremely active in recruiting young
Brazilians, according to reports in Brazilian magazine
Veja.[3] "Now based in Iran, he continues to play a
significant role in the spread of extremism in Latin
America," prosecutor Alberto Nisman, head of the special
unit of the Argentine prosecutors charged with investigating
the attacks, said to VEJA. The enticement of Brazilians for
courses abroad has been monitored for four years by the
Federal Police and the ABIN, the government's secret
service.
One hundred eighty kilometers away from Recife, in rural
Pernambuco, the city of Belo Jardim remains the most active
center for the recruitment of extremists in Latin
America.[4] Along with the recruits in Belo Jardim, youth
from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Mexico also
travel to Iran for religious instruction under Rabbani.
The Federal Police has information that Rabbani has been to
Brazil several times in recent years. In one of those
visits, almost three years ago, he boarded the Iran Air
flight from Tehran to Caracas, Venezuela and then from
there, entered Brazil illegally.
So while ungovernability through either government weakness
(or lack of will) to exert controls over immigration and the
flows of money, drugs and weapons has always been an issue,
it is the new government complicity that makes it all the
more dangerous.
Even ahead of the IISS dossier's publication, the most
shocking revelations into the global interconnectedness of
Latin American governments and Middle Eastern terrorist
groups have come from Walid Makled, Venezuela's latter-day
Pablo Escobar, who was arrested on August 19, 2010 in
C£cuta, a town on the Venezuelan-Colombian border. A
Venezuelan of Syrian descent known variously as "El Turco"
("The Turk") or "El Arabe" ("The Arab"), he is allegedly
responsible for smuggling 10 tons of cocaine a month into
the US and Europe - a full 10% of the world's supply and 60%
of Europe's supply. His massive infrastructure and
distribution network make this entirely plausible, as well
as entirely implausible the Venezuelan government did not
know. Makled owned Venezuela's biggest airline, Aeropostal,
huge warehouses in Venezuela's biggest port, Puerto Cabello,
and bought enormous quantities of urea (used in cocaine
processing) from a government-owned chemical company.
Indeed since his arrest and incarceration in the Colombian
prison La Picota, Makled has given numerous interviews to
various media outlets, in which he has claimed that he paid
more than a million dollars a month to various high-ranking
Venezuelan government officials who were his partners in
trafficking FARC cocaine - amongst the named: Venezuelan
Minister of the Interior and also Minister of Justice, Tarek
El Aissami, the General-in-Chief of the Armed Forces Unified
Command, General Henry Rangel Silva, and the Director of
Military Intelligence, General Hugo Carvajal.
Although the US had issued an arrest warrant and subjected
him to sanctions under the Kingpin Act, Makled is being
extradited to Venezuela, not the US. While the US dithered
on Colombia's offer of extradition to the US, Venezuelan
President Hugo Chavez requested Makled's extradition to
Venezuela, where he is (in the ultimate ironic twist) wanted
for cocaine trafficking and at least two murders.
When asked on camera by a Univisi¢n television reporter
whether he had any relation to the FARC, he answered: "That
is what I would say to the American prosecutor." Asked
directly whether he knew of Hezbollah operations in
Venezuela, he answered: "In Venezuela? Of course! That which
I understand is that they work in Venezuela. [Hezbollah]
make money and all of that money they send to the Middle
East."[5]
Makled's extradition to Venezuela rather than the US is thus
a terrible loss for both the United States's Global War on
Terror (GWOT) and the world's intelligence communities: in
Venezuela's heavily politicized judicial system Makled will
never receive a fair trial and any testimony he might give
will certainly be concealed.
The problem now is that Latin American support for terrorism
has growing state support-and this should worry everyone.
----------------------------------------------------------
Notes
[1] http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/hugo-ch-vezs-military-buildup-and-iranian-ties_511234.html
[2] http://www.army.mil/professionalWriting/volumes/volume3/january_2005/1_05_4.html
[3] http://veja.abril.com.br/blog/reinaldo/geral/brasil-vigia-suspeitos-de-elo-com-extremistas-no-ira/
http://veja.abril.com.br/blog/reinaldo/geral/quantos-sao-os-aneis-que-separam-o-pt-dos-terroristas-islamicos-que-atuam-no-brasil/
http://veja.abril.com.br/blog/reinaldo/geral/acordem-senhores-congressistas-ja-o-governo-nao-da-bola-terrorista-alicia-homens-pobres-do-interior-do-brasil-para-fazer-%E2%80%9Ccurso-de-religiao%E2%80%9D-no-ira/
[4] http://interamericansecuritywatch.com/2011/04/20/the-terrorist-%E2%80%9Cprofessor%E2%80%9D/
[5] http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/15355-venezuela-houses-farc-and-hezbollah-drug-lord.html
----------------------------------------------------------
Copyright Foreign Policy Research Institute
(http://www.fpri.org/)
THE MIDDLE EASTERN-LATIN AMERICAN
TERRORIST CONNECTION
by Vanessa Neumann
In a global triangulation that would excite any conspiracy
buff, the globalization of terrorism now links Colombian
FARC with Hezbollah, Iran with Russia, elected governments
with violent insurgencies, uranium with AK-103s, and cocaine
with oil. At the center of it all, is Latin
America-especially the countries under the influence of
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
The most publicized (and publicly contested) connection
between Hugo Chavez and the Colombian narcoterrorist
organization Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)
was revealed after the March 2008 Colombian raid on the FARC
camp in Dev¡a, inside Ecuador, where a laptop was discovered
that apparently belonged to Luis Edgar Dev¡a Silva (aka,
"Ra£l Reyes"), head of FARC's International Committee
(COMINTER). The Colombian government under then-President
_lvaro Uribe announced that Interpol had certified the
authenticity of the contents of the computer disks, whose
files traced over US$ 200 million funneled to the FARC
through the Venezuelan state-owned, and completely Chavez-
dominated, Petr¢leos de Venezuela (PDVSA). On May 10th,
2011, the International Institute of Strategic Studies
(IISS) will publish one of its strategic dossiers based on a
study of the computer disks entitled The FARC Files:
Venezuela, Ecuador and the Secret Archives of 'Ra£l Reyes'
that purports to elucidate the organization's development
and internationalization.
According to some already leaked documents, Venezuelan
General Hugo Carvajal and other members of the armed forces
were in direct contact with and lending financial support to
the late FARC leader Antonio Mar¡n, aka "Tirofijo" ("Sure
Shot") and "Manuel Marulanda." Of the fact that the FARC
enjoys at least ideological support from the governments of
Ecuador and Venezuela, there can be no doubt: Venezuelan
President Hugo Chavez and Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa
have both argued that the FARC should not be considered a
terrorist organization.
While support of the insurgents next door is certainly
nothing new, Venezuelan military and terror alliances are
spanning the globe and expanding at a worrying rate for all,
especially US interests in the region.
As I wrote in The Weekly Standard last October[1],
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Russian President
Dimitry Medvedev jointly announced that they had reached an
agreement for Russia to build two 1200-megawatt nuclear
reactors in Venezuela. Also part of the deal was the latest
installment of $6.6 billion of conventional weapons
purchases since 2005: ninety-two T-72 and T-90 tanks that
will replace the aging French MX-30s, ten Ilyushin Il-76MD-
90 planes, two Il-78MK refueling aircraft, as well as five
S-300 missile systems. Iran had also sought the S-300 but
Medvedev banned the sale for fear of violating U.N. Security
Council Resolution 1929, concerning sanctions on Iran. The
S-300 missiles and their attendant Smerch multiple rocket
launchers are considered far more powerful than the Tor M-1
missile systems that both Venezuela and Iran have previously
purchased in the past five years. Caracas has also confirmed
plans to purchase up to 10 Mi-28NE attack helicopters on top
of the 10 Mi-35M helicopters purchased in the past half-
decade. That is an awful lot of weaponry for a country that
has not fought a war since its independence from Spain in
1821.
While Chavez has said that he is arming his citizen
militias, known as Bolivarian Circles, rumor has it that the
weapons may also be going to agents and fighters from the
Colombian FARC, the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah
and Cuban security and intelligence services, whose numbers,
according to many think tanks and U.S. security sources,
have swelled in Venezuela. Interpol has confirmed evidence
that Venezuela has funneled well over $300 million to the
FARC and has built an ammunition plant to supply AK-103s,
the FARC weapon of choice.
That is only one piece of the puzzle; the other is Iran,
where Venezuelan money has also been flowing.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Iranian President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad publicly call each other "brothers" and
last year signed 11 memoranda of understanding for, among
other initiatives, joint oil and gas exploration, as well as
the construction of tanker ships and petrochemical plants.
Chavez's assistance to the Islamic Republic in circumventing
U.N. sanctions has got the attention of the new Republican
leadership of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Ileana
Ros-Lehtinen and Connie Mack (both R-FL) have said they
intend to launch a money-laundering investigation into the
Venezuelan state oil company Petr¢leos de Venezuela, S.A.
(PDVSA). In July 2010, the EU ordered the seizure of all the
assets of the Venezuelan International Development Bank, an
affiliate of the Export Development Bank of Iran (EDBI), one
of 34 Iranian entities implicated in the development of
nuclear or ballistic technology and sanctioned by the
Treasury Department. In the meantime, Tehran and Caracas
have announced that PDVSA will be investing $780 million in
the South Pars gas field in southern Iran.
Uranium, sought by both Iran and Russia, is a key aspect of
the two countries' strategic relationship: Iran is
reportedly helping Venezuela find and refine its estimated
50,000 tons of uranium reserves.
So, on one side Venezuela is funding and arming the FARC; on
the other it is purchasing nuclear reactors and weapons from
the Russians; on yet another, it is sending money to Iran
and helping it find and enrich uranium. And then there is
Hezbollah, Iran's Lebanon-based asset.
Reports that Venezuela has provided Hezbollah operatives
with Venezuelan national identity cards are so rife, they
were raised in the July 27, 2010, Senate hearing for the
recently nominated U.S. ambassador to Venezuela, Larry
Palmer. When Palmer answered that he believed the reports,
Chavez refused to accept him as ambassador in Venezuela.
Meanwhile, Iran Air, the self-proclaimed "airline of the
Islamic Republic of Iran," operates a Tehran-Caracas flight
commonly referred to as "Aeroterror" by intelligence
officials for allegedly facilitating the access of terrorist
suspects to South America. The Venezuelan government
shields passenger lists from Interpol on that flight.
Iran, meanwhile, has developed significant relationships
elsewhere in Latin America - most prominently with Chavez's
allies and fellow Bolivarian Revolutionaries: Bolivian
President Evo Morales, Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa
and Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega.
In December 2008 the EDBI offered to deposit $120 million in
the Ecuadorean Central Bank to fund bilateral trade, and
Iran and Ecuador have signed a $30 million deal to conduct
joint mining projects in Ecuador through the Chemical-
Geotechnical-Metallurgical Research Center in Ecuador. Even
as that deal carefully avoids mentioning uranium, the IAEA's
March 2009 plans to help Ecuador explore its vast uranium
reserves were largely intended to highlight and preclude
Iranian involvement. In February 2010 the Paris-based
Financial Action Task Force, a multilateral organization
that combats money laundering and terrorist financing,
placed Ecuador on a list of countries that failed to comply
with its regulations.
Middle Eastern terrorism, however, is not new to Latin
America and has been on the US Army's radar for many
years.[2]
Latin America's Tri-Border Area (TBA), bounded by Puerto
Iguazu, Argentina; Ciudad del Este, Paraguay; and Foz do
Iguacu, Brazil, has long been an ideal breeding ground for
terrorist groups. The TBA, South America's busiest
contraband and smuggling center, is home to a large, active
Arab and Muslim community consisting of a Shi'a majority, a
Sunni minority, and a small population of Christians who
emigrated from Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and the Palestinian
territories about 50 years ago. Most of these Arab
immigrants are involved in commerce in Ciudad del Este but
live in Foz do Iguacu on the Brazilian side of the Iguacu
River.
In 2005, six million Muslims were estimated to inhabit Latin
American cities. However, ungoverned areas, primarily in the
Amazon regions of Suriname, Guyana, Venezuela, Colombia,
Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil, present easily
exploitable terrain over which to move people and material.
The Free Trade Zones of Iquique, Chile; Maicao, Colombia;
and Col¢n, Panama, can generate undetected financial and
logistical support for terrorist groups. Colombia, Bolivia,
and Peru offer cocaine as a lucrative source of income. In
addition, Cuba and Venezuela have cooperative agreements
with Syria, Libya, and Iran.
Argentine officials believe Hezbollah is still active in the
TBA. They attribute the detonation of a car bomb outside
Israel's embassy in Buenos Aires on 17 March 1992 to
Hezbollah extremists. Officials also maintain that with
Iran's assistance, Hezbollah carried out a car-bomb attack
on the main building of the Jewish Community Center (AMIA)
in Buenos Aires on 18 July 1994 in protest of the Israeli-
Jordanian peace agreement that year.
Today, one of the masterminds of those attacks, the Iranian
citizen and Shia Muslim teacher, Mohsen Rabbani, remains not
only at large, but extremely active in recruiting young
Brazilians, according to reports in Brazilian magazine
Veja.[3] "Now based in Iran, he continues to play a
significant role in the spread of extremism in Latin
America," prosecutor Alberto Nisman, head of the special
unit of the Argentine prosecutors charged with investigating
the attacks, said to VEJA. The enticement of Brazilians for
courses abroad has been monitored for four years by the
Federal Police and the ABIN, the government's secret
service.
One hundred eighty kilometers away from Recife, in rural
Pernambuco, the city of Belo Jardim remains the most active
center for the recruitment of extremists in Latin
America.[4] Along with the recruits in Belo Jardim, youth
from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Mexico also
travel to Iran for religious instruction under Rabbani.
The Federal Police has information that Rabbani has been to
Brazil several times in recent years. In one of those
visits, almost three years ago, he boarded the Iran Air
flight from Tehran to Caracas, Venezuela and then from
there, entered Brazil illegally.
So while ungovernability through either government weakness
(or lack of will) to exert controls over immigration and the
flows of money, drugs and weapons has always been an issue,
it is the new government complicity that makes it all the
more dangerous.
Even ahead of the IISS dossier's publication, the most
shocking revelations into the global interconnectedness of
Latin American governments and Middle Eastern terrorist
groups have come from Walid Makled, Venezuela's latter-day
Pablo Escobar, who was arrested on August 19, 2010 in
C£cuta, a town on the Venezuelan-Colombian border. A
Venezuelan of Syrian descent known variously as "El Turco"
("The Turk") or "El Arabe" ("The Arab"), he is allegedly
responsible for smuggling 10 tons of cocaine a month into
the US and Europe - a full 10% of the world's supply and 60%
of Europe's supply. His massive infrastructure and
distribution network make this entirely plausible, as well
as entirely implausible the Venezuelan government did not
know. Makled owned Venezuela's biggest airline, Aeropostal,
huge warehouses in Venezuela's biggest port, Puerto Cabello,
and bought enormous quantities of urea (used in cocaine
processing) from a government-owned chemical company.
Indeed since his arrest and incarceration in the Colombian
prison La Picota, Makled has given numerous interviews to
various media outlets, in which he has claimed that he paid
more than a million dollars a month to various high-ranking
Venezuelan government officials who were his partners in
trafficking FARC cocaine - amongst the named: Venezuelan
Minister of the Interior and also Minister of Justice, Tarek
El Aissami, the General-in-Chief of the Armed Forces Unified
Command, General Henry Rangel Silva, and the Director of
Military Intelligence, General Hugo Carvajal.
Although the US had issued an arrest warrant and subjected
him to sanctions under the Kingpin Act, Makled is being
extradited to Venezuela, not the US. While the US dithered
on Colombia's offer of extradition to the US, Venezuelan
President Hugo Chavez requested Makled's extradition to
Venezuela, where he is (in the ultimate ironic twist) wanted
for cocaine trafficking and at least two murders.
When asked on camera by a Univisi¢n television reporter
whether he had any relation to the FARC, he answered: "That
is what I would say to the American prosecutor." Asked
directly whether he knew of Hezbollah operations in
Venezuela, he answered: "In Venezuela? Of course! That which
I understand is that they work in Venezuela. [Hezbollah]
make money and all of that money they send to the Middle
East."[5]
Makled's extradition to Venezuela rather than the US is thus
a terrible loss for both the United States's Global War on
Terror (GWOT) and the world's intelligence communities: in
Venezuela's heavily politicized judicial system Makled will
never receive a fair trial and any testimony he might give
will certainly be concealed.
The problem now is that Latin American support for terrorism
has growing state support-and this should worry everyone.
----------------------------------------------------------
Notes
[1] http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/hugo-ch-vezs-military-buildup-and-iranian-ties_511234.html
[2] http://www.army.mil/professionalWriting/volumes/volume3/january_2005/1_05_4.html
[3] http://veja.abril.com.br/blog/reinaldo/geral/brasil-vigia-suspeitos-de-elo-com-extremistas-no-ira/
http://veja.abril.com.br/blog/reinaldo/geral/quantos-sao-os-aneis-que-separam-o-pt-dos-terroristas-islamicos-que-atuam-no-brasil/
http://veja.abril.com.br/blog/reinaldo/geral/acordem-senhores-congressistas-ja-o-governo-nao-da-bola-terrorista-alicia-homens-pobres-do-interior-do-brasil-para-fazer-%E2%80%9Ccurso-de-religiao%E2%80%9D-no-ira/
[4] http://interamericansecuritywatch.com/2011/04/20/the-terrorist-%E2%80%9Cprofessor%E2%80%9D/
[5] http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/15355-venezuela-houses-farc-and-hezbollah-drug-lord.html
----------------------------------------------------------
Copyright Foreign Policy Research Institute
(http://www.fpri.org/)
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