Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

By

How will the Iranian protests affect Latin America?

There are 21 reported deaths from the protests that started last Thursday in Iran. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei blamed Iran’s “enemies”

Other Iranian officials had blamed “foreign agents” and an online “proxy war” waged by the US, the UK and Saudi Arabia for the violence.

Khamenei’s remarks followed more deadly violence on Monday, in which nine people were killed, including seven protesters, a member of a pro-government militia and a policeman. Twelve others were killed over the weekend as the protests intensified.

For years Iran has targeted Latin America for recruitment,

Iranian intelligence and military efforts to recruit young men in Peru, train them in Iran, and return them to Peru. A Hezbollah movement has now been established in the country.
. . .
a former Iranian official with knowledge of the country’s terror network who claimed that “more than 40,000 of the regime’s security, intelligence and propaganda forces” have been successfully placed in the region. According to another source cited in the article, the Quds Force has established command and control centers in two Latin American countries.

Last November, Iran promised to send warships to the Gulf of Mexico

Iran will likely use the warships’ visit to South America to advance its relationship with Venezuela, a US adversary, the outlet reported.

Seven years ago I was posting on Iran-Venezuela ties.  Hezbollah and Iran have continued their expansion in our hemisphere (emphasis added)

Overall, Latin America, Central America, and the Caribbean offer Iran and Hezbollah fertile territory to build relations, bolster economic development and spread their ideology. Their efforts are made easier by governments such as Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Ecuador, whose hostility to U.S. interests manifest as non-cooperation on U.S. counterterror and defense partnerships. The Iranian regime also associates with the Bolivarian Alliance of the Countries of Our America (ALBA), a group created by Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, which resists the United States through political and economic means.

What is perhaps the most worrisome tactic of Iran and Hezbollah is the use of seemingly innocuous acts of diplomacy to obscure drug smuggling and money laundering. According to the U.S. government, Iran has relied on Latin America to evade sanctions by signing economic and security agreements in order to create a network of diplomatic and economic relationships.

According to Infobae, Lebanon-based Hezbollah generates at least $10million/year from drugs and weapons trafficking, but Hezbollah’s total take may be much larger at  the Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay Tri-Border Area (TBA).

Venezuela – going back to the Aeroterror flights days – continues to be on top of Iran’s list, granting Iranian military firms large tracts of isolated land to develop missile technology.

Venezuela’s Vice President, Tareck El Aissami, has allegedly issued passports to members of Hamas and Hezbollah.

This means members of the two organizations, as well as drug lords from narco-terror groups such as FARC, not only coordinate and work together, but also are awarded state sponsorship from the highest levels of government

While this took place, the Obama administration allegedly covered up for Hezbollah in Latin America; They killed a probe of the terror group to get the Iran deal. According to Josh Meyer’s extensive report,

As a result, some Hezbollah operatives were not pursued via arrests, indictments, or Treasury designations that would have blocked their access to U.S. financial markets, according to Bauer, a career Treasury official, who served briefly in its Office of Terrorist Financing as a senior policy adviser for Iran before leaving in late 2015. And other “Hezbollah facilitators”arrested in France, Colombia, Lithuania have not been extradited — or indicted — in the U.S., she wrote.

Whether Iran and Hezbollah use the region to circumvent sanctions, traffic drugs, launder money or plan future attacks, there is a real and growing threat.

Will the protests in Iran have any effect on this? Only if there’s regime change.

But Iranian expansion in the Americas continues to be one of the ignored stories of the decade.
.

Share

By

Obama administration allegedly covered up for Hezbollah in Latin America

Long-time readers of this blog will remember that I have blogged about Hezbollah‘s inroads in our hemisphere for the last decade (for additional posts see also Hizballah Hizbollah).

Josh Meyer’s fascinating report, The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook, highlights the connections between the drug trade and terrorism:

Over the next eight years, agents working out of a top-secret DEA facility in Chantilly, Virginia, used wiretaps, undercover operations and informants to map Hezbollah’s illicit networks, with the help of 30 U.S. and foreign security agencies.

They followed cocaine shipments, some from Latin America to West Africa and on to Europe and the Middle East, and others through Venezuela and Mexico to the United States. They tracked the river of dirty cash as it was laundered by, among other tactics, buying American used cars and shipping them to Africa. And with the help of some key cooperating witnesses, the agents traced the conspiracy, they believed, to the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran.

And

The untold story of Project Cassandra illustrates the immense difficulty in mapping and countering illicit networks in an age where global terrorism, drug trafficking and organized crime have merged, but also the extent to which competing agendas among government agencies — and shifting priorities at the highest levels — can set back years of progress.

And while the pursuit may be shadowed in secrecy, from Latin American luxury hotels to car parks in Africa to the banks and battlefields of the Middle East, the impact is not: In this case, multi-ton loads of cocaine entering the United States, and hundreds of millions of dollars going to a U.S.-designated terrorist organization with vast reach.

What did the Obama administration do about it?

They killed a probe of the terror group to get the Iran deal (emphasis added)

After 9/11 the DEA launched investigations into Venezuelan crime syndicates, links between Colombian drug-traffickers and Lebanese money-launderers, and the “suspicious flow of thousands of used cars” from the U.S. to Benin, Mr. Meyer explains. The U.S. military was also investigating links between Iran and Shiite militias with improvised explosive devices that killed hundreds of U.S. soldiers. “All of these paths eventually converged on Hezbollah,” he writes.

By 2008 the DEA had “amassed evidence that Hezbollah had transformed itself” into a global crime syndicate “that some investigators believed was collecting $1 billion a year from drug and weapons trafficking and money laundering,” Mr. Meyer reports. DEA’s Project Cassandra was born to take down the Hezbollah operation by busting its “innermost circle.”

For instance,

Alleged Venezuelan drug kingpin Hugo Carvajal was arrested in Aruba in 2014. Venezuela’s close alliance with Iran is no secret and reeling in “the chicken,” as Carvajal was known, would have generated key intelligence about cocaine trafficking to the U.S. and North Africa. The Netherlands mysteriously intervened and returned him to Venezuela.

When Colombia arrested Walid Makled, a Syrian-born Venezuelan who was alleged to be shipping ten tons of cocaine to the U.S. each month, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos refused U.S. extradition requests and sent him to Venezuela. Mr. Obama repaid Mr. Santos by backing his amnesty for the FARC, the largest drug cartel in the Americas.

Additionally, (back to Meyer’s article),

As a result, some Hezbollah operatives were not pursued via arrests, indictments, or Treasury designations that would have blocked their access to U.S. financial markets, according to Bauer, a career Treasury official, who served briefly in its Office of Terrorist Financing as a senior policy adviser for Iran before leaving in late 2015. And other “Hezbollah facilitators”arrested in France, Colombia, Lithuania have not been extradited — or indicted — in the U.S., she wrote.

Billions of drug trade money funding terrorists. Tens of thousands of lives ruined. Read The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook.

This warrants a most rigorous congressional investigation.

Related: “Venezuela looks like a failed economy. In fact, it’s Iran’s frontier in the Americas”

Cross-posted at WoW! Magazine.

Share

By

Trump goes after Hezbollah in LatAm

Best news on the Hemisphere for a very long time,
How Trump Is Going After Hezbollah in America’s Backyard. The pro-Iranian militant group is up to no good in Latin America—and U.S. officials are pushing back.

The administration’s counter-Hezbollah campaign is an interagency effort that includes leveraging diplomatic, intelligence, financial and law enforcement tools to expose and disrupt the logistics, fundraising and operational activities of Iran, the Qods Force and the long list of Iranian proxies from Lebanese Hezbollah to other Shia militias in Iraq and elsewhere. But in the words of Ambassador Nathan Sale, the State Department coordinator for counterterrorism, “Countering Hezbollah is a top priority for the Trump administration.” Since it took office, the Trump administration has taken a series of actions against Hezbollah in particular—including indictments, extraditions, public statements and issues rewards for information on wanted Hezbollah terrorist leaders—and officials are signaling that more actions are expected, especially in Latin America. Congress has passed a series of bills aimed at Hezbollah as well. The goal, according to an administration official quoted by POLITICO, is to “expose them for their behavior.” The thinking goes: Hezbollah cannot claim to be a legitimate actor even as it engages in a laundry list of illicit activities that undermine stability at home in Lebanon, across the Middle East region and around the world.

Read the full article. It ends with, “Expect some aggressive disruption.”

As Capt. Picard used to say, “make it so.”

UPDATE
Linked to by Pirate’s Cove. Thank you!

Share

By

Argentina: Did Iran poison Nisman?

The WSJ editorial board asks,
Nisman and the Iranians: Did the Islamic Republic poison an Argentine prosecutor? (emphasis added)

Monday that a new toxicology analysis on the body of the late Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman has discovered the drug ketamine, an anesthetic mostly used on animals. It is highly unlikely Nisman would have voluntarily ingested such a drug. He had been investigating Iran’s role in the 1994 bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish community center when he was found dead in his apartment with a gunshot wound to the head in January 2015.

“There is a mountain of evidence in the case that indicates that it is a homicide; this would be one more,” said Mr. Sáenz, who worked to get the case moved to federal court last year so he could take over the probe.

In 2006 Nisman indicted seven Iranians and one Lebanese-born member of Hezbollah for the bombing, which killed 85. At the time of his death Nisman was a day away from testifying before the Argentine Congress about his more recent findings. He alleged that then-President Cristina Kirchner and her foreign minister Héctor Timerman had made a deal with Tehran to bury the matter in return for Iranian oil and Iranian purchases of Argentine grain.

Read the whole article.

I’ve been posting on this story for years: read the files here.

Share

By

Venezuela: Cuba and Iran in the picture

Yesterday’s referendum results will remain symbolic, by design:

“In reality, it is the Venezuelan regime that has already brought foreign intervention into Venezuela by calling on Cuba, Iran, and Russia to circumvent its sovereignty and provide lethal aid to its violent suppression and intimidation of the Venezuelan people.”

Cuba:
How Cuba Runs Venezuela. Havana’s security apparatus is deeply embedded in the armed forces.

To keep its hold on Venezuela, Cuba has embedded a Soviet-style security apparatus. In a July 13 column, titled “Cubazuela” for the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba website, Roberto Álvarez Quiñones reported that in Venezuela today there are almost 50 high-ranking Cuban military officers, 4,500 Cuban soldiers in nine battalions, and “34,000 doctors and health professionals with orders to defend the tyranny with arms.” Cuba’s interior ministry provides Mr. Maduro’s personal security. “Thousands of other Cubans hold key positions of the State, Government, military and repressive Venezuelan forces, in particular intelligence and counterintelligence services.”

Every Venezuelan armed-forces commander has at least one Cuban minder, if not more, a source close to the military told me. Soldiers complain that if they so much as mention regime shortcomings over a beer at a bar, their superiors know about it the next day. On July 6 Reuters reported that since the beginning of April “nearly 30 members of the military have been detained for deserting or abandoning their post and almost 40 for rebellion, treason, or insubordination.”

The idea of using civilian thugs to beat up Venezuelan protesters comes from Havana, as Cuban-born author Carlos Alberto Montanerexplained in a recent El Nuevo Herald column, “Venezuela at the Edge of the Abyss.”

Iran:
Venezuela is Syria in the New World
Podcast:

Read more (emphasis added)
[Read more…]

Share

By

Venezuela: Goldman Sachs bought PDVSA bonds

$2.8 billion worth:

Goldman Sachs Bought Venezuela’s State Oil Company’s Bonds Last Week. Sale comes as embattled government of President Maduro struggles to raise funds

The New York-based bank’s asset management division last week paid 31 cents on the dollar, or about $865 million, for bonds issued by state oil company Petróleos de Venezuela SA in 2014, which mature in 2022, according to five people familiar with the transaction. The price represents a 31% discount on the trading Venezuelan securities maturing the same year.

The investment comes as Mr. Maduro’s detractors lobby hard to block Western financial institutions from doing transactions that support the cash-strapped government, which has been accused by the U.S. and other countries of widespread rights abuses.

Apparently GS is betting that a change in government would double the bonds’ value.

Good luck with that.

This move is peanuts in GS’s $40 billion emerging markets amount out of the $1.3 trillion the asset management branch manages, but Frank Muci at Caracas Chronicles calls it Meth Finance: “It’s like ripping out the electric wiring from the walls of your own house to sell the copper and get your next crystal meth fix.”

The Wall Street Journal’s Kejal Vyas and Anatoly Kurmanaev report that Venezuela’s Central Bank struck a financing deal so bad last week it makes PDVSA’s swap and Fintech’s repo look harmless by comparison.

The government raised $865 million cash by selling $2.8 billion in previously untapped PDVSA bonds held by the Central Bank. The central bank got just 31 cents on the dollar for the bonds from Goldman Sachs’s asset management arm.
. . .
in return for $865 million now, the government committed to dishing out a total of $3.65 billion through 2022, split between $2.8 billion in principal and $756 million in interest. It’s unbelievable. The government now has to fork up the $865 million three times over by 2022 to make good on the $2.8 billion in bonds —and has to pay a crippling $756 million interest on top of that.

The deal has an “internal rate of return” of 48%. That means this is equivalent to taking out a loan at 48% interest… in dollars!

As long as someone is willing to be part of the debt pyramid scheme, it’ll continue. Let’s hope it’s not the U.S.

Previously, the plan by Venezuela and Syria to circumvent Western sanctions on the Middle Eastern nation and ship its crude oil to Aruba to refine it and then market it internationally, including in the U.S., didn’t work.
As you may recall, Caracas, Syria and Iran had secret flights without passport controls, flight manifests and other documents for years among the three countries. It’s unclear whether the flights ceased. Venezuela continued to issue official passports and visas to Syrians and Iranians.

Still, some of the money ends up in Miami,
Controversial Venezuelan tax collector enjoys luxury life in Miami. Numerous ex-officials of the Venezuela’s socialist government have set up businesses and residences in the United States, despite repeatedly blaming Washington for the country’s current political and economic crisis. Ten years ago Jose Cedillo played a major role in targeting opposition TV stations.

UPDATE

Share

By

“Venezuela looks like a failed economy. In fact, it’s Iran’s frontier in the Americas”

While the media was only broadcasting stories about the women’s march, the grownups were paying attention to serious matters. John Batchelor’s January 21, 2016 (emphasis added):
Venezuela Falls to Iran & What is to be done?

Facing a parliamentary vote to oust him and a call for new elections, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on Jan. 4 replaced Vice President Aristóbulo Istúriz with regime loyalist Tareck El Aissami, the governor of Aragua State. El Aissami’s appointment comes at a critical time for the embattled Bolivarian regime. Venezuela’s economy is spiraling into chaos under the crushing weight of triple-digit inflation, basic commodities shortages, widespread corruption and violent crime. Maduro is relying on El Aissami to tighten the regime’s grip on power. As it turns out, that is in no small part thanks to his Iran and Hezbollah connections. Brig. Gen. Mohammad-Reza Naqdi, the new cultural adviser to the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) chief commander and a former chief of the IRGC’s Basij militia, recently announced that a Latin American team visited Iran to learn how to form a Basij-like mobilization force, praising “Iran’s perseverance and success.” – See more at:
• Meet Venezuela’s new VP, fan of Iran and Hezbollah
• Should Boeing and Airbus sell planes to Iran Air?

Listen to the full podcast:

Batchelor concludes with, “Venezuela looks like a failed economy. In fact, it’s Iran’s frontier in the Americas”.

You can’t say you haven’t been told.

Share

By

The Halloween Carnival of Latin America and the Caribbean

ARGENTINA
Vatican, Argentina to open ‘dirty war’ files. The initial opening will be restricted to those directly affected by the purges from 1976 to 1983

The Vatican and Argentina’s bishops have finished cataloguing their archives from the country’s “dirty war” and will soon make them available to victims and their relatives who have long accused church members of complicity with the military dictatorship. The 3,000 files being released, though, are a fraction of the documentation believed to be in the possession of the Argentine church.

A joint statement Tuesday by the Vatican and the Argentine bishops’ conference said the process of digitizing the archives had been completed and that procedures to access the information would be forthcoming. No date was set, and the opening for now is restricted to victims, detainees, their relatives and the religious superiors of victims who were priests or nuns.

BOLIVIA
Gold Rush in Bolivia sparks conflict between miners and the community. Community members and miners are clashing north of Bolivia’s La Paz. Meanwhile, Bolivian Amazon rivers are being affected by the excessive dumping of mercury.

BRAZIL
Brazil Turns Away From Establishment Politicians in Local Elections.

Even as President Michel Temer struggles to assure investors that Brazil is politically stable, this month’s municipal elections show restless voters fed up with Brazil’s ruling class and willing to gamble on unconventional newcomers

CHILE
Is Chile leaning to the right again?

COLOMBIA
Colombia government peace team to meet with Uribe allies

CUBA
What could possibly go wrong? Congress: Cuba to Share Critical U.S. Intel With Iranian Spies. Intel sharing with Cuba endangers America, lawmakers warn

ECUADOR
HABITAT III: UN conference agrees new urban development agenda creating sustainable, equitable cities for all

He said that the action-oriented outcome document, known as the New Urban Agenda, enshrined now in the ‘Quito Declaration on Sustainable Cities and Human Settlements for All,’ should be seen as an extension of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, agreed by 193 Member States of the UN in September 2015.

GUATEMALA
Comparing Presidential Corruption Scandals in Guatemala and Brazil: Part 2

HAITI
Clinton Campaign Coordinated With State Department to Answer Foundation Questions About Haiti. Clinton faced questions about $500,000 donation from Algeria

Following a report in the Washington Post that the foundation raked in millions from foreign governments while Clinton was at the State Department, Clinton’s team discussed over email how to address questions about the Algeria donation from other outlets.

JAMAICA
More soldiers for western Jamaica

Government has announced plans to augment the Jamaica Defence Force (JDF) in western Jamaica in an effort to have speedier and more effective response to any violent upsurge in that section of the island

MEXICO
The daily struggle for life in Ecatepec, Mexico’s most dangerous city. At least 600 women have been murdered since 2012 in this slum, half-an-hour from capital

DoD Official: U.S.-Mexico Military-to-Military Relationship ‘Worth Strengthening’

Clinton Trots Out Mexican Music Legend Vicente Fernández on Univision, Telemundo, as she panders,

PANAMA
COPA Launches New Low Cost Carrier to Colombia and More (H/T JC)

Panama’s Copa Holdings has unveiled a new low-cost carrier, Wingo, as it aims to turn its loss-making Colombian operations around.

Bogota-based Wingo will operate its first flight on 1 December, and will take over all of Copa Colombia’s routes except its flights to and from Panama City.

PUERTO RICO
Patients left in limbo as more doctors flee Puerto Rico

URUGUAY
Possible new home for Gitmo ex-detainee unhappy in Uruguay, but Lord knows where,

The group did not say which country made the offer and it was unclear if Dhiab has travel documents. Uruguayan officials did not respond to requests for comment on Saturday.

VENEZUELA
Opposition Protests Will Be Met With Colectivos: Venezuelan VP



Share