Jon B. Perdue, director of the Latin American program at the Fund for American Studies, has written THE must-read book about our hemisphere, The War of All the People: The Nexus of Latin American Radicalism and Middle Eastern Terrorism.

The book arrived yesterday, and I read part I, A Brief History of Terror Collaboration, in one sitting. It is that good.

The title refers to Hugo Chavez’s name for his war on U.S. “imperialism”, an ideological and political, violent war involving Iran, terrorist organizations from around the world, and drug money. For instance (page 52),

The agreement between the Montoneros and the PLO had a clandestine aspect. When the PLO split and Fatah was formed, the new militant wing offerred the Montoneros training camps in Lebanon, military instructors, and heavy weaponry in exchange for the installation in southern Lebanon of a plastic explosives laboratory that had been developed by a Montonero with a PhD in chemical engineering. In Madrid in June 1978, Montonero comandante Horacio Mendizabal confirmed to reporters that a portable Montonero explosives unit had been set up in Lebanon for Fatah. And according to France’s intelligence service Deuxième Bureau, the 1983 bombing in Beirut that killed 299 U.S. and French servicemen was carried out with the explosives technology developed by the Montoneros.

Jon Perdue is not “connecting the dots”; instead, every connection, every fact, is thoroughly researched and well-documented in 30 pages of footnotes.

This is the most informative book on terrorism I have read since Andrew McCarthy’s Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad. Buy it, read it, recommend it.