Fwd: The New Nexus of Narcoterrorism AZMEX

A AZMEX Must Read

Note:  This report by Dr. Neumann adds to what the AZMEX reports have also been piecing together.

A destabilized or failed Mexican state is clearly on the agenda of these players, as that would have so

impact on the USA.  Take into account also the extensive access these states and groups have to international arms markets. The Cuban and

Venezuelan new capabilities in weapons and munitions production.  The dots are connecting.

thx

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Foreign Policy Research Institute" <fpri@fpri.org>

Date: December 26, 2011 11:34:28 PM MST

To: "landisaden@cox.net" <landisaden@cox.net>

Subject: The New Nexus of Narcoterrorism

Foreign Policy Research Institute

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E-Notes

Distributed Exclusively via Email

THE NEW NEXUS OF NARCOTERRORISM:

HEZBOLLAH AND VENEZUELA

by Vanessa Neumann

December 26, 2011

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.

Available on the web and in pdf format at:

http://www.fpri.org/enotes/2011/201112.neumann.narcoterrorism.html

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The Winter 2012 issue of Orbis, FPRI's Journal of World Affairs

is now available. Orbis is edited by Mackubin (Mac) Owens, Associate

Dean of Academics for Electives and Directed Research and Professor

of National Security Affairs at the Naval War College in Newport,

Rhode Island. A prolific writer on military affairs, Dr. Owens is

a long-time associate of FPRI, where he is a Senior Fellow in

the Program on National Security.

Current issue featuring:

Margin Call: How To Cut A Trillion From Defense

     Kori Schake

China's Naval Rise And The South China Sea: An Operational Assessment

     Felix K. Chang

Confronting A Powerful China With Western Characteristics

     James Kurth

Religious Relations Across The Taiwan Strait: Patterns, Alignments, And

Political Effects

     Deborah A. Brown and Tun-jen Cheng

Jordan: Between The Arab Spring And The Gulf Cooperation Council

     Samuel Helfont and Tally Helfont

The Arab Spring And The Saudi-Led Counterrevolution

     Mehran Kamrava

India's 'Af-Pak' Conundrum: South Asia In Flux

     Harsh V. Pant

Intelligence And Grand Strategy

     Thomas Fingar

The Reform Of Military Education: Twenty-Five Years Later

     Joan Johnson-Freese

Complete Table of Contents and links to all articles:

http://www.fpri.org/orbis/

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              THE NEW NEXUS OF NARCOTERRORISM:

                  HEZBOLLAH AND VENEZUELA

                     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 and Iran are strong allies: 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, resulting

in the May 23rd, 2011 announcement by the US State

Department that it was imposing sanctions on the Venezuelan

government-owned oil company Petroleos 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 Colon,

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

Cucuta, 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 Univision 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 Medell¡n 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 Iguacu, 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, Chavez 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 Chavez, said that he had been

personally asked by Ramon Rodr¡guez Chac¡n (who served as

both deputy head of DISIP-Venezuela's intelligence service,

now renamed SEBIN-and Interior Minister under Chavez) 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 Chavez regime.

While Chavez 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 Andres Perez (against whom

Chavez attempted a coup in 1992); Al¡ Rodr¡guez, then-

President of PDVSA (Petroleos de Venezuela, the government-

owned oil company); Pablo Medina, a left-wing Venezuelan

politician who initially supported Chavez, 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 Chavez 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 Chavez 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 Chavez remains in power.

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