http://www.eurasiareview.com/22122011-new-nexus-of-narcoterrorism-hezbollah-and-venezuela-analysis/

New Nexus Of Narcoterrorism: Hezbollah And Venezuela – Analysis

Written by: FPRI
December 22, 2011

By Vanessa Neumann

Press stories, as well as a television documentary, over the past two
months have detailed the growing cooperation between South American
drug traffickers and Middle Eastern terrorists, proving that the
United States continues to ignore the mounting terrorist threat in its
own “backyard” of Latin America at its own peril. A greater portion of
financing for Middle Eastern terrorist groups, including Hezbollah and
Al Qaeda, is coming from Latin America, while they are also setting up
training camps and recruiting centers throughout our continent,
endangering American lives and interests globally. Some Latin American
countries that were traditional allies for the U.S. (including
Venezuela) have now forged significant political and economic
alliances with regimes whose interests are at odds with those of the
U.S., particularly China, Russia and Iran. In fact Iran and Iran’s
Lebanese asset, “the Party of God,” Hezbollah, have now become the
main terror sponsors in the region and are increasingly funded by
South American cocaine.
Venezuela

Venezuela

Venezuela and Iran are strong allies: Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez
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. Chávez’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, resulting in the May 23rd, 2011
announcement by the US State Department that it was imposing sanctions
on the Venezuelan government-owned oil company Petróleos de Venezuela
(PDVSA) as a punishment for circumventing UN sanctions against Iran
and assisting in the development of the Iran’s nuclear program.

Besides its sponsored terrorist groups, Iran also has a growing direct
influence in Latin America, spurred by three principal motivations: 1)
a quest for uranium, 2) a quest for gasoline, 3) a quest for a base of
operations that is close to the US territory, in order to position
itself to resist diplomatic and possible military pressure, possibly
by setting up a missile base within striking distance of the mainland
US, as the Soviets did in the Cuban Missile Crisis. FARC, Hezbollah
and Al Qaeda all have training camps, recruiting bases and networks of
mutual assistance in Venezuela as well as throughout the continent.

I have long argued that Latin America is an increasing source of
funding for Middle Eastern terrorism and to overlook the political
changes and security threats in the region with such geographic
proximity to the US and its greatest source of immigrants is a huge
strategic mistake. It was inevitable that South American cocaine
traffickers and narcoterrorists would become of increasing importance
to Hezbollah and other groups. While intelligence officials believe
that Hezbollah used to receive as much as $200 million annually from
its primary patron, Iran, and additional money from Syria, both these
sources have largely dried up due to the onerous sanctions imposed on
the former and the turmoil in the latter.

A recent New York Times front-page article (December 14, 2011)
revealed the extensive and intricate connections between Hezbollah and
South American cocaine trafficking. Far from being the passive
beneficiaries of drug-trafficking expats and sympathizers, Hezbollah
has high-level officials directly involved in the South American
cocaine trade and its most violent cartels, including the Mexican gang
Los Zetas. The “Party of God’s” increasing foothold in the cocaine
trade is facilitated by an enormous Lebanese diaspora. As I wrote in
my May 2011 e-note, 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 Colón, 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.

Some 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 Cúcuta, 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 percent of the world’s supply and 60
percent 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.

After his arrest and incarceration in the Colombian prison La Picota,
Makled gave numerous interviews to various media outlets. When asked
on camera by a Univisión 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.” A prime
example of the importance of the Lebanese diaspora in triangulating
amongst South American cocaine and Middle Eastern terrorists, is Ayman
Joumaa, a Sunni Muslim of the Medellín cartel with deep ties with
Shiites in the Hezbollah strongholds of southern Lebanon. His
indictment made public on Tuesday “charges him with coordinating
shipments of Colombian cocaine to Los Zetas in Mexico for sale in the
United States, and laundering the proceeds” (NY Times, Dec. 14, 2011).

The growing routes linking South American cocaine to Middle Eastern
terrorists are primarily from Colombia through Venezuela. According to
an April 2011 report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
(UNODC) the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela is the most prominent
country of origin for direct cocaine shipments to Europe, with the
cocaine coming mainly from Colombia, primarily the FARC and ELN
terrorist groups. Shipments to Africa, mostly West Africa, gained in
importance between 2004 and 2007, resulting in the emergence of a new
key trans-shipment hub: centered on Guinea-Bissau and Guinea,
stretching to Cape Verde, The Gambia and Senegal, thus complementing
the already existing trafficking hub of the Bight of Benin, which
spans from Ghana to Nigeria. As the cocaine is transported through
Africa and into Europe, its safe passage is guaranteed (much as it was
in Latin America) by terrorist groups—most prominently, Al Qaeda and
Hezbollah. The cocaine can also travel from Latin America’s Tri‐Border
Area (TBA)—bounded by Puerto Iguazu, Argentina; Ciudad del Este,
Paraguay; and Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil—to West Africa (particularly
Benin, Gambia and Guinea-Bissau, with its poor governance and vast
archipelagos) and then north into Europe through Portugal and Spain or
east via Syria and Lebanon.

Hezbollah’s traditional continental home has been the TBA, where 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. The TBA, South America’s busiest contraband and
smuggling center, has long been an ideal breeding ground for terrorist
groups, including Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and Al Qaeda—the latter
since 1995 when Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammad first
visited.

Hezbollah is still active in the TBA, according to Argentine
officials. They 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 July 18, 1994, protesting
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. This region, the third in the world for cash
transactions (behind Hong Kong and Miami), continues to be an
epicenter for the conversion and recruitment of a new generation of
terrorists who then train in the Middle East and pursue their
activities both there and in the Americas.

According to Lebanon’s drug enforcement chief, Col. Adel Mashmoushi,
as cited in The New York Times, a main transportation route for
terrorists, cash and drugs was aboard a flight commonly referred to as
“Aeroterror,” about which I wrote in my May 2011 e-note for FPRI.
According to my own secret sources within the Venezuelan government,
the flight had the route Tehran-Damascus-Caracas-Madrid, where it
would wait for 15 days, and flew under the direct orders of the
Venezuelan Vice-President, according to the captain. The flight would
leave Caracas seemingly empty (though now it appears it carried a
cargo of cocaine) and returned full of Iranians, who boarded the
flight in Damascus, where they arrived by bus from Tehran. The Iranian
ambassador in Caracas would then distribute the new arrivals all over
Venezuela.

I wrote in my May 2011 e-note that 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, Chávez refused to accept
him as ambassador in Venezuela. Thousands of foreign terrorists have
in fact been given national identity cards that identify them as
Venezuelan citizens and give them full access to the benefits of
citizenship. In 2003, Gen. Marcos Ferreira, who had been in charge of
Venezuela’s Department of Immigration and Foreigners (DIEX) until he
decided to support the 2002 coup against Chávez, said that he had been
personally asked by Ramón Rodríguez Chacín (who served as both deputy
head of DISIP—Venezuela’s intelligence service, now renamed SEBIN—and
Interior Minister under Chávez) to allow the illegal entry Colombians
into Venezuela thirty-five times and that the DISIP itself regularly
fast-tracked insurgents including Hezbollah and Al Qaeda. The
newly-minted Venezuelan citizens during Ferreira’s tenure include
2,520 Colombians and 279 “Syrians.” And that was only during three of
the past twelve years of an increasingly radicalized Chávez regime.

While Chávez has done more than anyone to strengthen these
relationships with Middle Eastern terrorists, in an attempt to use
what he calls “the International Rebellion” (including Hezbollah,
Hamas and ETA) in order to negotiate with the US for power in Latin
America, the coziness of the seemingly strange bedfellows dates back
to the fall of the Soviet Union, when the USSR abandoned Cuba. At the
Sao Paulo Forum of 1990, prominent Venezuelans and international
terrorists were all in attendance, including: then-Venezuelan
President Carlos Andrés Pérez (against whom Chávez attempted a coup in
1992); Alí Rodríguez, then-President of PDVSA (Petróleos de Venezuela,
the government-owned oil company); Pablo Medina, a left-wing
Venezuelan politician who initially supported Chávez, but has now
moved to the opposition; as well as Fidel Castro, Moammar Qaddafi and
leaders of the FARC, Tupamaros and Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path).
The extent to which these alliances have deepened and become
institutionalized is exemplified by the Continental Bolivarian
Coordinator, the office that coordinates all the Latin American
terrorists. According to a well-placed Venezuelan military source of
mine, they are headquartered in the Venezuelan state of Barinas—the
same state that is effectively a Chávez family fiefdom, with their
sprawling family estate, La Chavera, and their total control of local
politics. Their extreme anti-Semitism is not ideological, but simply
out of convenience: to court and maintain Iranian support.

According to the Congressional Research Service, with enactment of the
sixth FY2011 Continuing Resolution through March 18, 2011, (H.J.Res.
48/P.L. 112-6) Congress has approved a total of $1.283 trillion for
military operations, base security, reconstruction, foreign aid,
embassy costs, and veterans’ health care for the three operations
initiated since the 9/11 attacks: Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF)
Afghanistan and other counter terror operations; Operation Noble Eagle
(ONE), providing enhanced security at military bases; and Operation
Iraqi Freedom (OIF).

Yet for all this massive spending on fighting terrorists and
insurgents in the Middle East, we are leaving ourselves vulnerable to
them here, on a number of fronts. First and foremost, the United
States is under territorial threat through its Mexican border.
Hezbollah operatives have already been smuggled, along with drugs and
weapons, in tunnels dug under the border with the US by Mexican drug
cartels. Only a week after my October 5th interview by KT McFarland on
Fox, where I specifically warned of a possibility of this resulting in
a terrorist attack carried out inside the US with the complicity of
South American drug traffickers, the global press revealed a plot by
the elite Iranian Quds Force to utilize the Mexican gang Los Zetas to
assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington in a bombing that would
have murdered many Americans on their lunch hour.

Second, American assets in Latin America are under threat. Embassies,
consulates, corporate headquarters, energy pipelines and American- or
Jewish-sponsored community centers and American citizens have already
been targeted by terrorist groups all over Latin America for decades:
FARC in Colombia, Sendero Luminoso and Tupac Amaru in Peru and
Hezbollah in Argentina. Al Qaeda is also rumored to have a strong
presence in Brazil.

Third, while American soldiers give their lives trying to defeat
terrorists and violent insurgents in the Middle East, these same
groups are being supported and strengthened increasingly by Latin
America, where they receive training, weapons and cash. This makes
American military engagement far more costly by any metric: loss of
life and financial cost.

Indeed over the last decade, Latin America is a region spiraling ever
more out of American control. It is a region with which the United
States has a growing asymmetry of power: it has more importance to the
United States, while the United States is losing influence over Latin
America, which remains the largest source of oil, drugs and
immigrants, both documented and not. Latinos now account for 15
percent of the US population and nearly 50 percent of recent US
population growth, as well as a growing portion of the electorate, as
seen in the last presidential elections. The discovery of huge new oil
reserves in Brazil and Argentina, that might even challenge Saudi
Arabia, and the 2012 presidential elections in Venezuela, make Latin
America of increasing strategic importance to the U.S., particularly
as the future political landscape of the Middle East becomes ever more
uncertain, in the wake of the Arab Spring and the political rise of
the Muslim Brotherhood in previously secular Arab governments. The
growth of transnational gangs and the resurgence of previously waning
terrorist organizations pose complicated new challenges, as violence
and murder cross the U.S. border, costing American lives and taking a
huge toll on U.S. law enforcement. The United States needs to develop
a smart policy to deal with these challenges.

So while the US is expending vast resources on the GWOT, the
terrorists are being armed and reinforced by America’s southern
neighbors, making the GWOT far more costly for the US and directly
threatening American security. Even though Venezuelan President Hugo
Chávez may be removed from the presidency either through an electoral
loss in the October 7, 2012 presidential elections or through his
battle with cancer, certain sectors of the Venezuelan government will
continue to support international terrorism, whose activities, bases
and training camps have now spread throughout this region. By
understanding the dynamics of the increasingly entrenched
narcoterrorist network, the U.S. can develop an effective policy to
contend with these, whether or not President Chávez remains in power.

Author:
Vanessa Neumann is a Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Research
Institute and is co-chair, with FPRI Trustee Devon Cross, of FPRI’s
Manhattan Initiative.

-- 
-Laye
==============================
"With fair speech thou might have thy will,
With it thou might thy self spoil."
--The R.M

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