In his weekly Canadian Jewish News media analysis column “According to Reports,” Paul Michaels, CIC Director of Communications, looks at a story receiving virtually no coverage in North America: how Hamas and Hezbollah are operating in Central and South America.
Last week, while most media were focused on the Obama-Netanyahu White House meeting, an interesting item appeared in several Israeli newspapers that deserves greater attention from North American journalists.
The report, first carried in the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Seyassah on July 6, stated that Mexican officials had thwarted efforts by Hezbollah cells, operating among drug cartels along the U.S.-Mexican border, to establish a logistics infrastructure there.
Citing that same story, Ha’aretz reporter Jack Khouri wrote (July 6) that “Hezbollah operatives employed Mexicans nationals with family ties to Lebanon to set up [a] network, designed to target Israel and the West.” He also noted that the group's leader, Jameel Nasr, reportedly spent months in Venezuela, whose president Hugo Chavez maintains close ties with Iran, Hezbollah’s sponsor.
This is not the first account, however, of Hezbollah activity in North America. As the Jerusalem Post noted (July 6), Anthony Placido, assistant administrator for intelligence at the Drug Enforcement Administration, testified at a U.S. Congressional subcommittee in March “that some drug smugglers in the U.S.-Mexico region have had relationships with Hezbollah [since] the 1980s and 1990s” and that lucrative proceeds from the cocaine trade have been used by Hezbollah and Hamas to fund their terrorist activities.
U.S. Republican Congresswoman Sue Myrick recently asked U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to set up a special team to investigate these allegations and threats. The Post noted a 2006 Homeland Security report that provided details about the arrests of Hezbollah agents trying to infiltrate the United States from Mexico.
Khouri wrote that last year U.S. Admiral James Stavridis told the Senate armed services committee that Hezbollah had links to drug-trafficking in Colombia. Stavridis warned that there has been “an increase in a wide level of activity by the Iranian government in this region."
All of these reports call to mind a riveting, detailed account of Iran and Hezbollah's nefarious activities in South America – the second part of a 15,00-word expose – that Jeffrey Goldberg wrote for the New Yorker in 2002.
At that time, Imad Mugniyah, the head of Hezbollah's "military" wing and a senior officer in Iran's Revolutionary Guard, was considered by many to be the most dangerous terrorist in the world. (He was behind numerous terror attacks, including the 1983 Beirut simultaneous suicide attacks which killed 241 U.S. Marines and 58 French paratroopers. He was killed in a car bombing in Damascus in 2008, in an operation Hezbollah blames on Israel.)
Indeed, "[i]t is commonly believed," Goldberg wrote, "that Mugniyah [has been] behind nearly every major act of terrorism that has been staged by Hezbollah during the last two decades; he is thought to have agents not only in South America but in Europe, Southeast Asia, West Africa, and even the United States."
Among other things, Mugniyah directed Hezbollah's South American operations.
Goldberg described a region in South America where Hezbollah was most active called the Triple Frontier, a lawless, porous zone where Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina meet, and which is "the centre of Middle Eastern terrorism in [the continent]." At the heart of this zone, in the region of the Paraguayan city of Ciudad del Este, is "a substantial minority of Arab Muslims" numbering around 30,000, among whom, according to intelligence experts, is "a hard core of terrorists, many of them associated with Hezbollah…some with Hamas…and some with Al Qaeda."
Mugniyah reportedly visited the Triple Frontier in 1994 when Hezbollah, acting for Iran, allegedly planned the suicide bombing of the Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, "the deadliest anti-Semitic attack since the end of the Second World War," Goldberg observed, in which 85 people were murdered. (Two years before that Hezbollah, Argentine police believe, bombed the Israeli embassy, killing 29.)
Perhaps this is coincidental, but especially since the appearance of Goldberg's article, a number of U.S. defence officials have raised concerns about Iranian influence in South and Central America, where, as Reuters reported in March 2009, "the left-wing governments in Venezuela, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Bolivia have all become allies of Iran in recent years."
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