Radical Islam in Latin America Jon Perdue

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Radicalism southofthe BoRdeR

Jon B. Perdue

Jon B. PeRdue is the Director o Latin America Programs at The Fund or American Studies in Washington, D.C. This article is excerpted rom hisorthcoming book on Iran and Venezuela, The War o All the People (PotomacBooks).

The point at which the United States southern borderchanges rom a political issue to a security issue has beenreached. While it has been utilized primarily as a politi-

cal tool in recent years, new revelations o actual terror cellsin Mexico have made border security a ar more serious issue.

When General Douglas Fraser, Commander o U.S. Southern Command,mentioned the increased presence in Venezuela o the Quds Force, the sectiono Irans Revolutionary Guard Corps responsible or oreign operations, in ahearing in March, it put Islamist inltration on the radar amongst policy circlesin Washington, though the issue received little attention in the media.

But the issue received greater scrutiny ater June 23rd o this year, whenRep. Sue Myrick (R-NC) wrote a letter to Director o Homeland Security Janet

Napolitano requesting a task orce be set up and a report to Congress issuedon the cooperation between Islamic terrorist groups and Mexican drug cartels.Myricks letter quoted ormer Chie o Operations or the Drug Enorcement

Administration (DEA) Michael Braun, who reported: Hezbollah relies on thesame criminal weapons smugglers, document trackers and transportationexperts as the drug cartel They work together; they rely on the same shadowacilitators. One way or another they are all connected.1

The issue was given urther import with the July 22 presentation to the Per-manent Council o the Organization o American States (OAS) by Colombias


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OAS representative AmbassadorLuis Alonso Hoyos, revealing that

Venezuela was allowing the regionsmost lethal terrorist group, the Revo-lutionary Armed Forces o Colombia

(FARC), a sae haven within its ter-ritory. Hoyos two-hour presentationincluded intelligence reports, satel-lite photos and witness testimoniesthat laid out the case with embarrass-ingly irreutable evidence to an OASthat had grown accustomed to littlemore than supportive silence aboutthe regions rogue regimes.2

The religious of theMiddle East and thesecular of Latin America

The nexus o Middle EasternIslamist terrorist groups with Marxistand Maoist terrorists in Latin Americais oten treated as a novel and unusualpartnership between strange bedel-lows that share no cultural or ideolog-

ical ties. This burqa-bikini paradox,so to speak, is too oten mistaken asa new, and likely ephemeral, relation-ship o convenience.

In truth, the history o MiddleEastern and Latin American terror-ist cooperation is long and varied,and belies the notion that regimesthat use radicalized religion to gainand hold power are incompatible with

those that use radicalized politicalideology, despite their ostensible cul-tural dierences. Since the end o theCold War, Soviet infuence in Latin

America has been supplanted by thear more radicalized and menacingthreat o Islamic terrorism. To gaugethe problem, it is important or policymakers to understand the dierences

between long-term migration andstrategic inltration in the Westernhemisphere.

The rst Muslim to arrive in the Americas, Estavanico, or Stephenthe Moor, traveled to Cuba andHispaniola (present day DominicanRepublic and Haiti) in 1527 with Pn-lo de Narvezs utile expedition tocolonize Florida. In the nearly 500

years since, only Suriname, whereMuslims make up 21 percent o thecountrys small population o some510,000 people, boasts a Muslimpopulation greater than 10 percento the total.

Just 30 years ago, Roman Cathol-icism claimed almost 90 percent othe total population in Latin America.

Today, only 55 to 65 percent o LatinAmericans count themselves as Cath-olic. While there has been a largeincrease in evangelicos, or non-Catholic Christians, there has alsobeen an eective recruiting eort by

various Muslim groups.Whereas the infuence o Islam in

the past in Latin America was mostlybased on smaller immigrant Muslimenclaves, there has been some recentsuccess in proselytizing indigenoustribes and remote populations by bothShia and Sunni preachers and activ-ists. Muslim populations signicantin numbers i not total percentagesexist today in Argentina, Panama,Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, andBrazil, which contains the largestMuslim community in South Amer-ica with estimates o its size rangingrom 250,000 to nearly one million.

The most successul Islamic prosely-tizing movement in Latin America isbelieved to be Spains al-Murabitun.

The history of Middle Easternand Latin American terroristcooperation is long and varied,and belies the notion that regimesthat use radicalized religionto gain and hold power areincompatible with those that useradicalized political ideology.


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Radicalism South o the Border

The al-Murabitun, an Islamistrevival movement ounded by a Scot-tish convert to Islam who goes bythe name Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadiras-Su, draws inspiration rom the

Almoravids, a Berber dynasty o the western Sahara who ruled NorthArica and Spain in the 11th and 12thcentury and included a signicantpopulation o converts to Islam romSpain and other European countries.

The al-Murabitun advocate acollective reversion to Islam and areturn to the regions true heritage,as opposed to what most Muslims

would consider a true conversion toIslam. The al-Murabitun preach aorm o Islam that is not imbued withimperialism, but instead claims toserve as a remedy or the oppres-sion and destruction brought bySpanish conquest.3

It has been reported that theal-Murabitun made an attempt,though unsuccessul, to orm analliance with Mexicos Subcoman-dante Marcos, the head o theZapatista Army o National Libera-tion (EZLN) o Mexico, ater hisunsuccessul 1994 uprising in Chi-apas. Although Marcos reusedthe oer, many o the Zapatistainsurgents that belong to the

Tzotzils, a Yucatan tribe, did convert to Islam, a act that alarmedMexican President Vicente Foxenough to accuse them o havinglinks to al-Qaeda.4

Since the 1980s, the terroristgroup Hezbollah has been recruit-ing and raising money rom Leba-nese and Syrian immigrants livingmostly in three specic areasthe

Tri-Border (TBA) Area at the inter-section o Argentina, Brazil and Para-guay, Venezuelas Margarita Island,and the Caribbean coastline oColombia, concentrated in the townso Maicao and San Andres.

In March 2009, the then-com-mander o U.S. Southern Command,

Admiral James G. Stavridis, told theHouse Armed Services Committeethat the connection between illicit

drug tracking and Islamic radicalterrorism was a growing threat to theUnited States, and stated that the pre-

vious August, U.S. Southern Com-mand supported a Drug Enorcement

Administration operation, in coor-dination with host countries, whichtargeted a Hezbollah-connected drugtracking organization in the Tri-Border Area.

Stavridis also mentioned that aninteragency operation the previousOctober led to the arrest o dozens oColombians associated with a Hezbol-lah-connected narco-tracking andmoney-laundering ring that undedHezbollah terrorism worldwide.5

Recently, numerous cases havebeen reported o Hezbollah operat-ing on the border with Mexico. In2008, Salim Boughader Mucharra-lle, a Mexican o Lebanese descent,

was sentenced to 60 years in prisonon charges o organized crime andimmigrant smuggling. Mucharra-lle had been arrested six years ear-lier or smuggling immigrants intothe United States, some o whom

were connected to Hezbollah. A yearbeore, in 2001, Mahmoud YousseKourani illegally crossed the Mexi-can border and traveled to Dear-born, Michigan, where he was latercharged and convicted or materialsupport and resources ... to Hezbol-lah, according to the indictment.6

In July 2008, it was reported inthe Mexican newspaperEl Universalthat a U.S. Drug Enorcement Admin-istration (DEA) document suggestedthat since 2005 two Mexican drugcartels had been sending operativesto train in Iran with the RevolutionaryGuard Corps. Reportedly, the train-


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ing included instruction in snipertactics and use o rocket launchers.7

Though the DEA would not conrmthe report, it clearly indicated thatthere was now a link between Latin

American narco-trackers andMiddle Eastern terrorists.In a speech in Mexico in 2007,

Robert Grenier, the ormer head othe CIAs Counterterrorism Center,

warned that the U.S. was concernedthat Hezbollah or Hamas would tryto set up operations in Mexico inorder to inltrate Americas south-ern border and carry out terrorist

attacks.

8

His warning proved pre-scient when, as recently as July othis year, a Hezbollah cell was bustedby Mexican police in Tijuana, whereMexicans o Lebanese origin hadbeen recruited to set up a cell totrain or attacks against Israel andthe West. The head o the opera-tion, Jameel Nasr, had been underMexican police surveillance as hetraveled requently back and orth toLebanon, and also spent two monthsin Venezuela in the summer o 2008.9

Nasrs 2008 stay in Venezuelahas become more troubling since the2010 publication o the bookEl Pales-tino, by Antonio Salas. Salas, a Span-ish journalist known or his earlierbook,Diario de un Skin, in which heinltrated a skinhead group, repeatedthe exploit by going undercover as aMuslim terrorist-in-training. Salas

was able to travel worldwide amongstterrorist operatives, and shot under-cover video o several supposed terror-ist training camps inside Venezuela.

Spain, whose socialist president Jos Luis Zapatero would normallymaintain a close relationship withellow traveler Venezuela PresidentHugo Chvez, demanded that Vene-zuela explain its assistance to BasqueETA terrorists plotting attacks onSpanish soil. In March o 2010, Span-

ish High Court Judge Eloy Velascoissued warrants or 13 ETA andFARC terrorists, one o whom wasa Venezuelan government employee

who was born in Spain. The Span-

ish High Court declared that the Venezuelan government had servedas a go-between or ETA and FARC,and that, ater the contact, the FARChad sought logistical assistance romETA i it chose to assassinate Colom-bian ocials visiting Spain. Colom-bias President Alvaro Uribe, thecourt said, was one o the targets.

According to the magistrate,

several ETA terrorists had traveledto Venezuela to train members o theFARC to use cell phones as detona-tors or bombs containing the explo-sive C4, and members o Venezuelasarmed orces had accompanied themon at least one occasion. SeveralETA terrorists had also traveled toFARC camps in Colombia, via Ven-ezuela, to receive guerrilla training.

The same day that the magistratesreport was released, Spanish policereleased the names o three ETAterrorists that were captured the daybeore. One o those terrorists, Jos

Ayestaran, was wanted by Spainishauthorities in connection with 10killings. Ayestaran had lived in Ven-ezuela or many years.10

The Chvez problem As Hugo Chvez has consoli-dated power in Venezuela and usedhis countrys oil wealth to spread hisinfuence into other countries in theregion, his relationship with Iran hasemerged as a growing threat to boththe United States and his neighbors.

And while many have blithely dis-missed Chvez as more o a sideshow

than a threat, his ability to unctionas a sanctions buster or Iran makeshim a much bigger problem. But thethreat does not stop there.


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Within the Chvez regime, thereare a large number o apparatchiksand bureaucrats with ties to Hezbol-lah and other terrorist groups in posi-tions that allow them to aid not only

Iran, but other terrorists in the regionas well.The Miami Heraldreported

on Tarek El Aissami as ar back as2003a young Chvez condante

who serves as both Minister o Inte-rior and Minister o Justice. El Ais-sami, age 34, was previously a radicalstudent leader at the Universidad delos Andes, where, during his tenure

as student body president, support-ers are alleged to have consolidatedtheir control o the Domingo Salazarstudent dormitories and turned theminto a haven or armed political andcriminal groups.11

TheMiami Heraldarticle aboutEl Aissami noted that a report doneby Oswaldo Alcala, the vice-rectoro academic aairs at the univer-sity, stated that o 1,122 peopleliving in the eight residences, only387 are active students and morethan 600 have no university con-nections. In other words, radicalgroups with strong connections toboth Marxist terrorists as well asHezbollah and the Syr ian and IraqiBaath Parties had taken over theuniversitys dormitories.

The vice-rector also mentionedto theMiami Heraldthat, in the resi-dences where this group o radicalstudents lived with other students,Theres always weapons there. Thisis something you see in the movies.Beore he was named minister o inte-rior and justice, El Aissami servedas deputy director in the ministrythat issues cedulas (national identitycards) and passports.

Roger Noriega, ormer Assis-tant Secretary o State or WesternHemisphere Aairs, reported a cadre

o other Chvez acolytes with con-nections to Hezbollah, Iraqs BaathParty, and other terrorist and radicalgroups:

Tarek William Saab Halabi, gover-nor o the province o Anzoategui;George Kabboul Abdelnour, whoheads Bariven, the purchasingarm o state-owned Petroleos de Venezuela, SA (PDVSA); ImaadSaab, Venezuelas ambassador toSyria; Radwan Sabbagh, presidento a mining company operating inthe province o Orinoco; Are Rich-any Jimenez, a brigadier generalin the Venezuelan army who heads

the militarys industrial companyand is a director o PDVSA; FadiKabboul Abdelnour, PDVSAsdirector o planning; the ministero interiors sister, Amin ObaydaEl Aissami Maddah, an execu-tive in PDVSAs technology arm;Kamal Naim Naim, president othe Bolvar provincial assembly.12

As he has purged many o hisormer closest riends and militarycolleagues that have denounced hisdescent into dictatorship, Chvezscabinet has become both youngerand more radical.

The Venezuela-Iran axis The modern relationship

between Venezuela and Iran began

in the 1960s, when both countriesbecame ounding members o theOrganization o Petroleum ExportingCountries (OPEC). Despite the suc-cess o OPEC in keeping petroleumprices high and the coers o its mem-bers, including several terrorism-sponsoring states, lled, the mostcurrent threat to the hemispheredidnt arrive until Hugo Chvez was

elected president o Venezuela.Almost immediately ater he took

oce in 1999, Chvez made his rst


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world. He works perpetually againstthe dominant system. He is a workero God and a servant o the people.

Many o those in the oreignpolicy establishment didnt take

Hugo Chvez seriously until NewYork County District Attorney RobertMorgenthau decided to hold a publicpress conerence in September 2009,

where he reported the ollowing:

In April 2008, Venezuela and Iranentered into a Memorandum oUnderstanding pledging ull mili-tary support and cooperation. Ithas been reported that since 2006

Iranian military advisors havebeen embedded with Venezu-elan troops. Asymmetric warare,taught to members o Irans Revo-lutionary Guard, Hezbollah andHamas, has replaced U.S. Armyeld manuals as the standard Venezuelan military doctrine.18

Morgenthau laid out a very good

case or taking the Iran-Venezuelapartnership seriously, even more sowith the world watching Irans esca-lating belligerence and its nuclearintransigence. As the IAEA tries tomonitor Irans nuclear program, andthe United States tries to implementsanctions designed to stop the roguenations ability to develop a deploy-able nuclear warhead, the veteran

DAs statement sounded even moreominous: based on inormationdeveloped by my oce, the Iranians

with the help o Venezuela are nowengaged in economic and proliera-tion sanctions-busting schemes.

Though the active policythroughout the Bush and Obamaadministrations has been to ignoreHugo Chvezs histrionics, the abil-

ity o oil-rich Venezuela to underminethe sanctions regime designed todeter Iranian nuclear ambitions hasgiven this cross-cultural relationship

new gravitas. Chvez promised to sell20,000 barrels o gasoline per day toIran, a sanctions-busting maneuverdesigned to help the regime, which,though awash in oil, lacks sucient

rening capacity or its domesticneeds. He has also been implicated by various security agencies in provid-ing the uranium necessary to eectu-ate an Iranian nuclear warhead.19

Last year, Haaretz reported ona secret three-page memo that Israelprepared beore Deputy ForeignMinister Danny Ayalons visit to anOrganization o American States

conerence in Honduras. Chvezand Bolivian President Evo Moralesstrenuously denied the reports nd-ing that Venezuela and Bolivia wereproviding Iran with uranium.20

But it was recently announcedby the Iranian minister o industryand mines, Ali Akhbar Mehravian,that Iran is providing $250 millionin unding or mining operationsin Bolivia that include geologicalprospecting or uranium and lith-ium. President Mahm[o]ud Ahma-dinejad has ordered us, in keeping

with whatever priorities and proj-ects are suggested, to begin assist-ing and transerring technology toBolivia through Iranian and Libyanexperts, the Iranian minister saidat a joint press conerence in La Paz

with President Evo Morales.

The method within themadness

It is hard not to dismiss HugoChvez as a madman or buoon. Hehas a weekly television show,Alo Pres-idente! (Hello President!), in whichhe ponticates or Castro-length epi-sodes on everything rom novel ideas

on statecrat that pop into his head tothe length o time that Venezuelansshould spend in the shower (in orderto save water during state-induced


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water shortages). He has changedthe name o the country to match hisersatz socialist governing program,and on a whim changed Venezuelanstandard time by 30 minutes.

It would be oolhardy to dismissChvezs machinations as the ravingso a lunatic caudillo, however. He hasbeen part o a th column group

within the Venezuelan military sinceat least 1980, where he and othershave planned coups as well as howthey would govern once their coupsucceeded. And it should be notedthat the main reason that the coup

to remove Chvez in 2002 ailed isbecause the opposition had no planin place to make a constitutional tran-sition in the event o a coup. Yet theChvez plan has continued apace.

And whether coordinated or coinci-dental, Venezuela and Iran have ol-lowed similar military paths sinceChvez became president.

Since the Iran-Iraq War, althoughIran has built up all branches o itsmilitary orces, it has not budgetedor a war-ready conventional army.Instead, Iran has ocused on missiletechnology to harass its neighborsand naval capacity to be able to causeproblems in the Persian Gul. Butmore importantly, Iran has ortiedits networks or international sub-

version with groups like Hezbollahand the Iranian Revolutionary GuardCorps, or IRGC, that specialize inasymmetrical warare.

Similarly, Chvez began train-ing his military in this method in2004, at the 1st Military Forum onFourth Generation War and Asym-metric War, where he encouragedhis soldiers to change their tacticalthinking rom a conventional style toa peoples war paradigm.21

Chvez then had a specialedition o La Guerra Perierica

y Islam Revolucionaria (Periph-

eral Warare and RevolutionaryIslam: Origins, Rules and Ethicso Asymmetric Warare), by Jorge

Verstrynge, a Spanish social-ist, distributed to the Venezuelan

Army as its new training manual. The manual calls Islamic ter-rorism the ultimate and preerredmethod o asymmetric wararebecause it involves ghters willing tosacrice their lives to kill the enemy.22

The manual also includes instruc-tions or building and exploding anuclear dirty bomb. Verstrynge hassince become a consultant to the Ven-

ezuelan Army, whose members havealso been orced by Chvez to recitethe Cuban-style pledge Fatherland,Socialism or Death.23

The peripheral portion o Ver-strynges title denes the strategyused by Iran o gradually increas-ing its military capacity throughsurrogates along the borders o itsadversaries. Iran used Hezbollahand Hamas on Israels northernand southern borders to preparespecialized missile crews. TheseHezbollah terrorists would be theones responsible or starting the2006 Israel-Hezbollah War by ringKatyusha rockets into Israeli civil-ian areas.24

Even beore the United Statesgovernment decided to removeSaddam Hussein in 2003, Iran hadbeen utilizing this peripheral wararetactic by nancing, supplying andtraining several Shiite groups withinIraq. Iran continued this strategyby building up a presence in Sudan,

just south o Egypt, in order to sup-port terrorist operations againstPresident Hosni Mubaraks govern-ment, and supported or inltratedanti-government groups into Yemento enable them to threaten Saudi Ara-bias oil inrastructure.25


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The Hezbollah infuence

on ChvezHugo Chvez also utilizes

peripheral warare methods mod-eled ater Hezbollahs war with Israel.

He recently sent an invitation to sev-eral mayors in the Amazon region oPeru whose municipalities lie nearthe area where the borders o Peru,Colombia and Brazil meet. Althoughsome mayors reused the invitation,others stated that they knew o somethat had accepted. One o the mayorsexplained, Chvez is searching orriends on the border with Colom-

bia, probably because he considersColombia an enemy and a threat.26

In this region o Peru, FARCmembers have also orced armers togrow coca leaves to supply its cocaineoperations that have been displacedby the Colombian governmentsaggressive anti-drug and counter-terror policies. Chavezs entreaties tomayors in the region, it is also specu-

lated, are to buy their acquiescencein the cross-border gambit o bothdrug smuggling and coca cultivation,as well as providing a FARC reuge

within Peru.Peripheral warare conducted by

Hugo Chvez also includes the useo ALBA houses, ostensible medi-cal oces or the poor that serve asrecruitment centers or insurgents

in neighboring countries. These aremodeled ater Cubas Barrio Aden-tro program that has been utilizedor years to inltrate spies and agi-tators into neighboring countriesunder the guise o doctors, coachesand advisors to help the poor.

The concept o asymmetricor ourth generation warare wasrst dened in a 1989 Marine Corps

Gazette article, The Changing Faceo War: Into the Fourth Generation,as a return to a decentralized orm

o warare in which at least one othe combatants is not a state but a

violent non-state entity. It has sincebeen elaborated upon by militaryand security experts, but it has yet

to be internalized within the statesecurity bureaucracy in Washing-ton, although military commandersand the Department o Deense haveshown a much greater comprehen-sion and acceptance o the concept.

More recently, as cooperationhas increased between Iran and Ven-ezuela against the U.S., the necessityo eectively countering the threat

has become a higher priority amongpolicy circles.

Iranian involvementsouth of the border notunnoticed

On January 27, 2009, Secretary oDeense Robert Gates testied aboutthe threat o Iran in Latin America:

Im concerned about the levelo, rankly, subversive activitythat the Iranians are carryingon in a number o places in Latin America, particularly in South America and Central America.

Theyre opening a lot o ocesand a lot o ronts, behind whichthey interere in what is going onin some o these countries. To

be honest, Im more concernedabout Iranian meddling in theregion than I am the Russians.27

Still, there has been a tendencyamong regional security analysts todownplay this threat in Americasbackyard. Chris Zambelis, a MiddleEast analyst with the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation, hasstated that, although Latin Ameri-can islands like San Andres and IslaMargarita do have large numbers oMuslims, theres no evidence at all


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to suggest that local Arab merchantsare nancing Hezbollah.

Zambelis reasoning is worthconsidering, as there is an incentiveto cast any suspect activity within a

host governments territory as ter-ror-related. According to Zambelis,Colombian and regional govern-ments have played on U.S. concernsby moving to curry avor with theUnited States to urther their owndomestic agendas and internationalstanding. In doing so, they oten high-light the alleged threat o al Qaeda orother brands o radical Islamist ter-rorism within their own borders.28

The Tri-Border AreaStill, this tendency to understate

the potential threat sounds oddly sim-ilar to the treatment given al Qaedaollowing the 1993 World TradeCenter bombing, and more impor-tantly, it ignores previous attackssuch as the 1994 bombing o the main

Jewish community center in BuenosAires, Argentina, in which 85 peopledied. The bombing was traced back toHezbollah members that planned theoperation rom within the Tri-Border

Area where the borders o Argentina,Paragay and Brazil come together.29

The U.S. Southern Command, which oversees coordination opera-tions in Latin America and the Carib-

bean, said the ollowing concerningsecurity in Latin America:

We have detected a number oIslamic Radical Group acilita-tors that continue to participatein undraising and logistical sup-port activities such as moneylaundering, document orgery,and illicit tracking. Proceedsrom these activities are support-ing worldwide terrorist activi-ties. Not only do these activitiesserve to support Islamic terroristgroups in the Middle East, these

same activities perormed byother groups make up the greatercriminal network so prominent inthe AOR [Area o Responsibility].Illicit activities, acilitated by the AORs permissive environment,

are the backbone or criminalentities like urban gangs, narco-terrorists, Islamic terrorists, and worldwide organized crime.30

The Treasury Departmentissued memos in 2002 and 2006that stated that there were clearexamples o Islamic groups inthe region that inance terror-ist activities through ventures inthe Tri-Border Area. The groupsmentioned in the memos includedal Qaeda, Hezbollah, Egypts al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya, and Islamic

Jihad, among others.31

In this Tri-Border Area, thereexists a sophisticated operation ocountereiting in everything romluxury goods to health and beautyproducts, alongside a growing popu-

lation o Hezbollah converts that aresuspected o terrorist undraising.

While many o the converts may bear rom radical, the ability o theenclave to harbor terrorist elements,even unwittingly, makes its presencea concern.

The New Yorkers Jerey Gold-berg described the Tri-Border Areaas ollows:

The sidewalks are dense withstands selling sunglasses andperume, and with tables o por-nographic videos. Marijuana issold openly; so are pirated CDs.The music o Eminem came romone shop; rom another, there were sounds amiliar to me romSouth Lebanon and the Bekaa Valleymartial Hezbollah music.

I bought a cassette recording othe speeches o Sayyid HassanNasrallah, Hezbollahs leader.32


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As non-state actors utilizeperipheral warare tactics aroundborder areas, the aected states willbe orced to decide to use asymmet-ric tactics in retaliation, or to watch

their borders be used against them.When Ecuador, under Chvez acolyteRaael Correa, let the FARC cross itsborders while the Colombian Army

was denied the same right in orderto pursue them, Colombian Presi-dent Alvaro Uribe decided to invokeColombias right to attack on eitherside o the border.

Uribes predecessor, President Andres Pastrana, had ceded a Swit-zerland-sized swath o Colombian ter-ritory to the FARC while they workedon a peace treaty a strategy thatillustrated a lack o understanding oasymmetric warare. And while Pas-tranas administration subsequentlycrumbled or its ailure to understandthe confict, the FARC consolidatedits power and utilized the peacezone as a rest and staging area orincreased terrorist operations. WhenUribe won the presidency ater cam-paigning on using the mano dura(iron hand) against terrorism, theFARC had grown such that it wasable to re mortars within strikingdistance o the reviewing stand atUribes inauguration.

Advent of fourthgeneration warPresident Uribe, more than any

other president in the hemisphere,demonstrated an understanding othe need to break rom conventionaltechniques to ght a ourth genera-tion war. On a visit to Colombia inMarch 2009, Admiral Mike Mullen,Chairman o the Joint Chies o

Sta, congratulated Colombianleaders or the great successes you have achieved against narco-terrorists, and stated, We in the

United States, as we have done [or]a long time, continue to stronglysupport your approach, your execu-tion, and obviously your results.33

The chairmans remarks were a vin-

dication or Uribe, who had beencriticized or the very tactics thatwould turn the tide against a terror-ist insurgency that killed and kid-napped civilians as a policy.

For the previous ve years, mostAmerican military leaders and politi-cians had treated Uribe as radioac-tive, since he had made a speech inSeptember 2003 in which he calledhuman rights groups spokesmenor terrorism and politickers o ter-rorism, challenging them to takeo their masks... and drop this cow-ardice o hiding their ideas behindhuman rights.

Uribe was reerring to the pan-oply o soi disanthuman rightsgroups that seemed to nd abusesand atrocities everywhere thatcould be blamed on state police ormilitary, but hardly commented onthe atrocities o the FARC and otherterrorist groups that killed andkidnapped civilians as a matter opolicy. Moreover, these groups hadbeen successul in bringing pros-ecutions against members o themilitary while deending the FARCas beleaguered reedom ghters.

Although Uribe was attacked ero-ciously or his comments, he wouldbe later vindicated when some o hiscritics names showed up in FARCdocuments as allies or abettors othe terrorists.34

Fighting and winning afourth generation war

In a ourth generation war, or

every tactic that terrorist groupsutilize to gain an advantage overthe state security apparatus, theyexpose themselves to having those


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tactics turned against them. But thiscan only occur once the state actu-ally makes the decision to take thethreat seriously. The primary arma-ment in a ourth generation war is

psychological or political warare,or better stated, the will to use onesarmaments carries as much impactas the amount o killing power thatthey contain.

The decision by President Bushto do the surge in Iraq was as mucha psychological warare tactic as it

was a conventional tactic. Althoughthe increase in troops would be usedto secure and hold territory, it wasthe decision itsel, to send in moretroops despite worldwide condem-nation, that let Iraqs people andpoliticians know that the U.S. wasserious and in or the long haul. Themessage was as important as thenumber o troops.

The enemies o modernity under-stand this too, though policymakersmay not yet. In a 1982 article in The

New York Times, Salvadoran guerrillaHector Oqueli summed up ourthgeneration warare succinctly, stat-ing, We have to win the war insidethe United States.35 This sentiment

was reinorced two years later by theSandinista leader Tomas Borge in a

Newsweek interview, when he stated,The battle or Nicaragua is not being

waged in Nicaragua. It is being oughtin the United States.36 This type opolitical warare, as these men under-stood, is much closer to think tank

warare than tank warare, and itscombatants understand that winningthe hearts and minds o some policy-makers in Washington is a ar moreattainable objective than winningover their own populations to theirthreadbare ideologies.

The two bombings in Argentinain 1992 and 1994, already believed tobe the work o Hezbollah terrorists

trained in Latin America, make theissue o Islamist inltration in theregion a security priority. Since then,there has been constant cooperationbetween Latin American and Middle

Eastern terrorist groups. As Mexicobattles its own escalating war againstnarco-terrorists, the U.S. border willbecome an increasingly precarioussecurity issue as Hezbollah and otheroperatives take advantage o thechaos to inltrate the United States.

And as Irans nuclear brinksmanshipbrings the world closer to conron-tation, its proxies in Latin America

will become an increasingly perilousthreat much closer to home.

1. Myrick Calls or Taskorce to Investi-gate Presence o Hezbollah on the USSouthern Border, Letter to HomelandSecurity Director Napolitano, June 25,2010, http://myrick.house.gov/index.cm?sectionid=22&itemid=55.

2. Uribe Ramps up Tension with Venezuela, Financial Times, July 25 2010, http://www.t.com/cms/s/0/01a6718-981a-11d-b218-00144eab49a.html.

3. Chris Zambelis, Radical Islam in LatinAmerica, Terrorism Monitor, JamestownFoundation, Vol. 3, No. 23, December 2,2005.

4. Ibid.5. Ibid.6. EXCLUSIVE: Hezbollah Uses Mexican

Drug Routes into U.S.,Washington Times,March 27, 2009, http://www.washington-times.com/news/2009/mar/27/hezbollah-uses-mexican-drug-routes-into-us/.

7. Iran Increases Its Political and EconomicPresence in Latin America, Israel News,April 19, 2009, 34.

8. Roee Nahmias, Expert: Hama, HizbollahCells May Be Active in Mexico, YNET,November 2, 2007.

9. Mexico Thwarts Hezbollah Bid to Set UpSouth American Network, Haaretz, June7, 2010, http://www.haaretz.com/news/

diplomacy-deense/mexico-thwarts-hez-bollah-bid-to-set-up-south-american-net-work-1.300360.


13/13

the JouRnal of inteRnational secuRity affaiRs 113


10. Hugo Chvez Terrorist Link Sparks Dip-lomatic Row between Spain and Venezu-ela, The Guardian, Tuesday, 2 March 2010,http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/01/hugo-chavez-venezuela-spain-eta.

11. Phil Gunson, Chvez Appoints Radical toHead Venezuelan Passport Agency,Miami

Herald, November 28, 2003.12. Hugo Chvezs Criminal Nuclear Network:

A Grave and Growing Threat, by Roger F.Noriega, Latin American Outlook, October2009.

13. U.S.: Will Oil Worries Send the EconomySkidding?Business Week , January 20, 2003.

14. Venezuela: OPEC Should Become a Politi-cal Actor against Imperialism, Publishedon November 19th 2007, by Kiraz JanickeVenezuelanalysis.com.

15. Irans Latin American Power Play, by Dina

Siegel Vann, InFocus, Summer 2007. http://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/26/irans-latin-american-power-play.

16. Chvez, Ahmadinejad Vow to Deeat U.S.,The Associated Press, November 11, 2007.

17. The Meeting o Minds and Moves: TheSubstance and Signicance o the MiddleEast to Venezuelas Foreign Policy 1999-2008, Makram Haluani, Department oEconomics and Business Administration,Simon Bolivar University, Caracas, Venezu-ela, February 2009.

18. Remarks by NY County District At torney

Robert M. Morgenthau at Brookings Institu-tion, Washington, D.C., September 8, 2009.

19. Venezuela to Export Gasoline to Iran,CNN.com, September 7, 2009. www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/09/07/iran. venezuela.gasoline/index.html (accessedOctober 7, 2009).

20. Secret Document: Venezuela, Bolivia Sup-plying Iran with Uranium, May 5, 2009,

Haaretz, http://www.haaretz.com/news/secret-document-venezuela-bolivia-supply-ing-iran-with-uranium-1.276675.

21.Latin Americas New Security Reality: Irregu-lar Asymmetric Confict and Hugo Chvez,Max G. Manwaring, August 2007, publishedby Strategic Studies Institute, pp. 23-24.

22. See Joe Sweeny, Jorge Verstrynge: TheGuru o Bolivarian Asymmetric Warare, inhttp://www.vcrisis.com/index.php?content=letters/200509091152.

23. Chvez Seeks Tighter Grip on Mil itary, New York Times, May 29, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/30/world/americas/30venez.html.

24. Clashes Spread to Lebanon as Hezbollah

Raids Israel, International Herald Tribune,The New York Times, July 12, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/13/world/arica/13iht-web.0713mideast.2188501.html?_r=1.

25. The Rise o Nuclear Iran, by Dore Gold,(Regnery Press, 2009), pp. 276-277.

26. Interview by the author during travel to theLoreto region o Peru in October 2009.

27. Gates: Iran Opening Oces and a Lot oFronts throughout Latin America, World- Tribune.com, Tuesday, February 10, 2009,

http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtri-bune/WTARC/2009/la_iran0118_02_10.asp.

28. Chris Zambelis, Al-Qaeda in the Andes:Spotlight on Colombia, Terrorism Moni-tor, Volume: 4 Issue: 7, April 6, 2006,http://www.jamestown.org/programs/gta/single/?tx_ttnews[tt_news]=727&tx_ttnews[backPid]=181&no_cache=1.

29. Iran Increases Its Political and EconomicPresence in Latin America, Intelligenceand Terrorism Inormation Center, April 8,

2009 (Hebrew Edition), 36.30. Gen. Brantz J. Craddock, U.S. Army Com-mander, U.S. Southern Command, State-ment to the 109th Congress, Senate ArmedServices Committee, March 15, 2005.

31. Terrorist and Organized Crime Groupsin the Tri-Border Area (TBA) o SouthAmerica, a report prepared by the FederalResearch Division, Library o Congress, July 2003, http://www.loc.gov/rr/rd/pd-les/TerrOrgCrime_TBA.pd.

32. Jerey Goldberg, In the Party o God, Part2 o 2, The New Yorker, 28 October 2002.

33. Lessons o Colombia Can Be Applied Else- where, Mullen Says, by Jim Garamone, American Forces Press Service, Mar 5,2009, www.southcom.mil/AppsSC/news.php?storyId=1578.

34. A FARC Fans Notes, Mary AnastasiaOGrady, Wall Street Journal, March 25,2008.

35. Phil ip Taubman, Salvadorans U.S. Cam-paign: Selling o Revolution, The New YorkTimes, February 26, 1982, p. A-10.

36. From Mainline to Sideline: The Social Wit-ness o the National Council o Churches,Lloyd Billingsley, University Press o Amer-ica (February 12, 1990), p. 116.

Documents

Radical Islam in Latin America Jon Perdue