Review of American Marxism

Mark R. Levin is a former advisor to several members of President Ronald Reagan’s cabinet, chairman on the Landmark Legal Foundation and a syndicated commentator on television and radio. His stated goal for writing American Marxism is to examine the history of Marxist activist networks operating in the United States. Having sold over one million copies since its publication in 2021 it is likely the most widely read of all “history” books on Marxist political groups in the United States. This is unfortunate. While Levin’s analysis of discourse is skillful and his knowledge of the political efforts led by Communist Party state, the book largely fails to achieve the goal of a distinctly American network analysis and historiography of American Marxists. I’ll alternate my commentary on what’s praiseworthy and what’s blameworth.

Levin deftly highlight how different movements, such as degrowth, environmental justice, racial justice, gender justice, etc. are political projects that are frequently directed by self-avowed or crypto Marxists whose claims justifying the necessity for political change have no social/scientific validity and whose demands are just thinly coded Marxism.

In chapter after chapter Levin shows how the zero-growth movement is anti-capitalism in different language, how Critical Race Theory discourse of authors such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DeAngelo is a variant of Marxism that uses racial language and pulls quotes from numerous books such as Laura Miles, a contributor to Social Review magazine and author of Transgender Resistance: Socialism and the Fight for Trans Liberation, Professor of Economics at Pepperdine University George Reisman’s book Capitalism, and professor of Environmental Justice at University of California David Pellow’s essay What is Critical Environmental Justice? to highlight how the ‘trans liberation, ‘economic justice’ and the degrowth wing of the ‘environmental justice’ movement is really socialism.

He also cites research articles such as one showing that the New York Times and Washington Post’s meteoric rise in the percentage of instances that “white” and racial privilege” has appeared in their publications – 1200% and 1500% respectively, case studies by the Media Research Center and highly publicized events such as the suppression of Project Veritas’ Twitter account and the Hunter Biden laptop story to demonstrate mainstream media’s role in promoting conspiracy theories (i.e. there is no effort in Big Tech to limit speech and the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop is Russian disinformation) in the name of discouraging conspiracy theories.

Levin deftly shows how legislation linked to the Green New Deal is an effort at refashioning the individual rights framework of the U.S. Constitution to a collectivist definition of rights; how reparations legislation legitimizes racial discrimination that undermines the meritocratic structure of social, educational and financial institutions; how the legislative movement to “protect” people from “hate speech” which occurs online is a trojan horse for massive government intervention in the Free Speech arena, how colleges are increasingly locations for political recruitment, etc.

This is all to say that there is a lot of good research here. And yet despite this to me the book feels as if themes/topics were collected, examples were chosen to cover the themes/topics, and little thought was given to explication of the connection between. One example of this could be how several years before the current “attack” on standardization in testing a similar process was ongoing in Venezuela, how several of the books now promoted in the teaching of “math justice” cite attendance at the World Social Forum or cite Communists such a Angela Davis as their inspiration, and that high ranking members of unions in Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, Texas, etc. have all gone to Venezuela for consultations with members of their government. This would allows to maintain the frame within which he operates – people pursuing the above agendas are indeed utopians, AND the first which sustains their actions was galvanized in part by foreigners with their own political ends. In other words, by establishing the linkages to foreign inspiration, gives us cause to then assess whether or not what we see there is truly all that venerable and if not to highlight how those within borders X must even more fervently resist the effort of internal groups to change conditions so they approximate those in borders Y.

One example of this is returning focus on the thoughts and actions of Marx, Mao, Marcuse, and Stalin, for example, rather than detailing the contemporary activities of Socialist sections of various academic professional organizations and their linkages to international networks results in an analysis – such as the Cuban developed Network of Artists and Intellectuals in Defense of Humanities – or their indicators – such as the number of socialists philosophers cited within academic literature or the number of self-avowedly socialist presidents of professional academic organizations – means that he fails to capture a full picture of their undertakings. Furthermore, examples depicting how these groups have co-operated organizationally within the context of recent history is not examined, the few details of links to foreign governments highlights are only to a few events that are sensationalist but of minor importance, and the funds which these groups rely on to operate are only slightly analyzed.

To summarize, Levin foregoes extensive engagement with Marxist sociology: the examination of the histories and primary texts of actually existing parties and movements and instead focuses on texts claimed as seminal to these movements and events that occurred in other countries. While knowledge of “what happened elsewhere” is clearly useful for developing insight on the U.S. groups, there’s clearly no formal methodology shown to be informing his particular mode of investigation.

American Marxism is definitely worth reading for getting an overview of the deceptive practices of various justice movements – these are largely wings of a popular front – and yet the definitive book about U.S. Socialist movements since the collapse of the Soviet Union has yet to be written.

Review of Cuba’s Intervention in Venezuela: A Strategic Occupation with Global Implications

Maria C. Werlau is the Executive Director of Cuba Archive – a non-profit organization incorporated in 2001 in Washington, D.C., whose mission is to promote human rights through research and information about the Communist Party takeover of Cuba and its subsequent oppression of political opposition. In her book Cuba’s Intervention in Venezuela: A Strategic Occupation with Global Implications Werlau provides a theoretical framework and extensive documentation with which to justify her claim that that “revolutionary” Cuba essentially occupied Venezuela. This occupation occurred through asymmetric measures rather than a conquering military force, i.e. the strategic placement of assets which could be used to monitor, command and control Venezuela’s security forces, economy, information, communications, and society in general. It also explores the evolution of a longstanding ambition of Fidel Castro’s – to unite Central America, South America and the Caribbean into a confederation under his leadership and how the political alliance with Hugo Chavez and their regional integration project, ALBA, operating in conjunction with an international criminal network organized to support their political goals supports this end goal. Cuba’s Intervention in Venezuela, along with other books such as Why Cuba Matters: New Threats in America’s Backyard, La Franquicua Cubana: Una Dictradura Cientifica and others, shows how  Cuba, with its smaller population and economy, was able to take over Venezuela thanks to a highly trained intelligence community and a unique methodological tool kit first transferred by the Soviets and refined through decades of operations in Cuba and abroad. As the book implies by the title, Werlau also shows how implications of this occupation is not just regional, but global.

The book’s first chapter covers Fidel Castro’s dream of a united Latin American and details plans enacted by the Cuban Communist Party to establish armed political fronts, training of foreign political operatives in support roles for the Cubans, as well as developing collaborative relationships with the leaders of Socialist and Communist parties in Venezuela as well as other parts of Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa. Citing an interview with former Captain of Cuba’s General Directorate of Intelligence, Enrique Garcia, Cuba efforts financed by the Soviet Union included espionage, penetration of organizations, and buying influence via substantial cash payments to presidential candidates all throughout these regions.

Chapters two through six cover an incredibly large number of diverse and detailed examples of the legal, economic, military and political cooperative agreements, accords, treaties and charters between Venezuela and Cuba as well as their social impact. Coverage of this judicial, economic, political, technological, national security and social intertwining takes a hundred pages. It shows how Cuban advisors in the military, economy, and social fields has come to play huge roles in both monitoring and managing the country. Reading these chapters makes the calls by the Venezuelan opposition for the expulsion of all Cuban contractors from Venezuela more than understandable – several thousand people in key roles are able to function as an occupying force when they are able to collude with a domestic party, the PSUV, that wishes to have their country turned into Cuba. Citing Lt. Col Juan Reinaldo, who for 17 years was a member of Fidel Castro’s personal security detail, she shows how there is no doubt that Cuba’s expertise in totalitarian social control was transferred to the PSUC via training and placement of advisors throughout Venezuela’s armed forced and key social and economy sectors.

Chapter 7, A Post-Cold War Continental Project, opens with warnings by General Guaicapuro Lameda, the former president of PDVSA, published shortly after a trip to Venezuela intended to indoctrinate him into the Fidel Castro’s plans for ensuring Hugo Chavez and the PSUV would stay in power and radically transform the content over a period to last no less than 30 years. Fidel’s recipe for Venezuela included:

  1. Let those who dislike the revolution leave
  2. Keep people busy covering their basic needs and repressed
  3. Burn non-essential oil money to buy loyalties and disable opponents
  4. Find or create a credible and powerful enemy
  5. Keep the poor impoverished but hopeful
  6. Corner the opposition
  7. Establish a parallel/dual economy: one for the government’s purposes (for the poor), the other one, unattainable and unbearable, for the opposition
  8. Implant terror: among supporters, the fear of losing what the government gives; among opponents, the fear of losing what they have, including their life and freedom
  9. Make it difficult to do things legally in order to keep people tied up, compromised, dominated, and disabled
  10. Galvanize hope through elections

This blueprint for the creation of a new historical block appears inspired by Antonio Gramsci, the political philosopher and founder of the Italian Communist Party, who Chavez stated that he had “an excellent knowledge of” and is frequently cited within PSUV materials such as their Red Book. Venezuela’s transformation into the barrack-style Communism of Cuba with ‘more frills’ was the first big step towards their post-Cold War Continental Transformation Project called Nuestra America.

In addition to these policies which increased political polarization, marginalized parties organized around traditional democratic values, attitudes and beliefs, Venezuela’s educational model transformed to align with based on Cuba’s indoctrination/education system. More than 20 million books for all levels of the Venezuelan education system were published in Cuba that taught a Marxist worldview and highlighted how Simon Bolivar, the greatest Venezuelan, had a Cuban nursemaid.

Chapter 8, A Criminal Network with Extra Regional Ties, continues where the last pages of Chapter Seven began to address – the numerous political and criminal groups that have come to partner with the Chavez/Maduro/Castro governments. One of the admirable qualities of this book is its citation of sources – from personal interviews to judicial proceedings, memoirs published by Cuban and Venezuelan regime insiders, etc. In this section highlighting how Cuba helped make Venezuela into a mafia state through support of narco-trafficking, the rich source list here is worth the cost of the book.

In this section, Werlau links the interests of transnational criminal organizations with the political policies promoted by the Foro de Sao Paulo. Embezzlement of public funds, drug proceeds and disruptive targeting by media and criminal actors enables high public officials, prosecutors, judges, journalists to be bribed or threatened. Targets are, basically, given the choice of plata (money) or plomo (bullets). Some of the highlighted acts include state-sanctioned bribery rings, money laundering rings, schemes to sell passports, overbidding, underperforming, direct and indirect kickbacks, and providing safe haven for designated terrorist organizations.

Links with non-national organizations, such as Hezbollah, IRA, ETA, and others are covered along with Iran, China, and Russia – which provide loans that somehow never make it to the national accounts. She describes complex networks that use a diverse criminal portfolios to undermine the rule of law, democratic governance, and US alliances throughout the Western Hemisphere.

Chapter 9, Cuba’s Core Competency: Soft Power on Steroids, links together the activities described in the preceding chapters and explains how they all demonstrate a comprehensive effort at organizational and political technology transfer. What’s been ongoing since the first election of Hugo Chavez – just as Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez admit in their published statements – is an effort from the outside in to transform Venezuelan society.

Werlau summarizes this as follows:

“Cuba’s core competency, or comparative advantage, is rooted in the centralized command-and-control totalitarian nature of the system, unconstrained by judicial, ethical, and moral boundaries or by term limits, balance of powers, transparency, accountability, and bureaucratic-institutional rules and restraints that characterize even the weakest democracy. The Cuban Politburo and Communist Party leadership has absolute power to strategize with great consistency as well as ample flexibility to use even the most unsavory tactics. It can act very quickly without a need for consultation and it can plan for the long term as well as wait patiently, as its power is enduring, it does not have to face electoral challenges or term limits.

Werlau notes that Cuba is an innovator in this field, as this all predates Russia’s Gerasimov Doctrine of 2013 –  which states that the rules of war have changed and the military should embrace hybrid and asymmetrical actions and nonmilitary means to achieve military and strategic goals, combining the use of special forces with information warfare to create a permanently operating front through the entire territory of the enemy state. I would, however, disagree with this assessment as this is a variation of the same sort of tactics that the Soviets/Russians first developed following the professionalization of the CCCP and they were the ones that transferred their knowledge to Cuba.

Citing interviews from a Cuban Intelligence Officer that defected, Werlau describes how Cuba’s Directorate of Intelligence systematically penetrates governments, international organizations, media, academia, and all of society in select countries – particularly the United States. She highlights a number of these organizations – such as the ICAP, Prensa Latina, and organizations targeted for influence such as LSA and CLACSO. Highlighting the role of U.N. in facilitating these activities, she highlights how Cuba has the second highest per capita number of people given diplomatic credential, credentials which enable ambassadors and their staff to engage in espionage and recruitment in other countries with a ‘get out of jail free’ card.

Following further details on similar events, Werlau highlights how Venezuela has come to enact policies that function as asymmetrical warfare, such as forced migration as state policy, creation of export-based criminal networks, and a state-supported human trafficking business.

Chapter Ten, The International Response, highlights how as a result of such an extensive intelligence apparatus that the international response to Cuba’s occupation of Venezuela at the invitation of Hugo Chavez and then Nicolas Maduro has largely been muted. It’s all the more understandable given the large number of individuals, networks, groups, companies, and countries involved. Werlau’s book, however, does a great job in organizing this material to present a holistic picture of just what asymmetric warfare can accomplish – the takeover of a state government without military battle and only military-supported intelligence agents.

Review of Irresistible Revolution: Marxism’s Coal of Conquest & The Unmaking of the American Military

Irresistible Revolution: Marxism’s Goal of Conquest & the Unmaking of the American Military was written by a former lieutenant colonel in the United State Space Force, Matthew Lohmeier, and published in 2021. The book is, roughly, three-fifths about the history of Marxism as an intellectual project and two-fifths about the author’s personal experiences in the U.S. Military

The opening chapter, Transforming American History, provides a brief account of the controversies and figures involved in the 1619 Project and the 1776 Commission in the context of cultural war. There is a struggle over the meaning of America presently underway that is at the heart of a social and political polarization that threatens to permanently fracture American civil society. Lohmeier describes it as a contest over the meaning of America highlighting how civil rights icons Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr. recognized the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as “deep wells of democracy” with the Marxist view which holds these documents in contempt. This is framed via reference to George Orwell and the power one gains via dictation over official truth and a broader account of slavery is briefly touched upon, highlighting how president of the National Association of Scholars Peter W. Wood’s historical research shows slavery was a worldwide phenomenon as early as the 14th century – far before the 1619 period cited by the 1619 Project.

In Chapter Two, America’s Founding Philosophy, Lormeier provides a historiography of American political economy as embodied in the Founder’s ideology that is instructive in highlighting how, in contrast to the claims made by those on the left, that women and blacks were never conceived of us being innately inferior but inherently equal as human beings but historically unequal due to the conditions of the society. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were enablers of the means by which historically unequal groups could achieve legal equality. Their Transitional Program then, to borrow a Marxian turn of phrase, was not delineated in a strategic set of actions to be taken to achieve a quasi-utopian outcome but by their ability to reference to the Declaration, the Constitution and legal literature to enable to legitimize what was already granted to them “by God”.

In chapter 3, Marxism’s Goal of Conquest, Lohmeier shares knowledge he learned while taking courses within the U.S. military to give context to the schools of thought in Europe that Marxism developed from. He explains how the writings of a wide-number of political conspiracists positively valued collectivism, which made it fundamentally difference from the individual rights framework of the Constitution. In relating their communalist concepts to historical precedents, such as the Cultural Revolution in China, wherein ‘forced equality’ became a government mandate it becomes appear how this collectivist approach which holds no respect for individual rights becomes a cudgel to legitimize and legalize sorts of abuses. Marx’s relationship to Hegel and the secret social orders in not-yet-united regions of Germany organized against the Kings and Princes are described, as was the view that Universal Revolution – one which inverted the current system of values in the home, economy and nation – was necessary and how the most strategic way to achieve this was through corruption and unseen influence.

In Chapter 4, Marx, Marxism and Revolution, Lohmeier provides a more thorough biographical account of Marx as well as focused analysis of Marx’s writing. From the context provided in the previous chapter we see the how writings and actions of Marx, those that influenced his thought, and his contemporary comrades in political arms all viewed the individual with disdain. History is class struggle, nothing more, and the bourgeoisie that prevents the dictatorship of the proletariat from being enacted are akin to devils keeping man from reaching heaven. A few examples of how the Communist Manifesto has been used by practitioners such as Lenin and Mao to justify atrocities are cited – but the majority of the chapter is devoted to explicating in detail the rhetorical and political innovations of Marxism. Marxism is a totalitarian legitimization of social destruction and replacement with something that – due to it’s “collectiveness” – is claimed to be an improvement.

In Chapter 5, Marx’s Many Faces, provides several historic accounts that highlight how Communist societies have treated outsiders, examples of communist infiltration into social bodies, and modern examples of this collectivist language making its way into U.S. institutions. One such example of the first category is the processes that American service-members had to go experience following capture in the Korean and Vietnamese War – prolonged, tortuous interrogation combined with efforts to indoctrinate. An example of the middle category – subversions – is that of William Montgomery Brown’s entrance at the behest of the Communist Party into the Episcopal church and his training to become a Bishop.  Such efforts, as described in Color, Communism, & Common Sense, were coordinated at a national level with guidance at the international level from the Kremlin in Soviet Russia. An example of the last is reflected in Critical Race Theory, which is shown not only to have many of the same rhetorical and political elements as that of Marxist thought – but that many of it’s early developers and current advocated openly avow such a worldview.

In Chapter 6, The New American Military Culture, Lohmeier’s descriptions on how Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) concepts and practices have been made necessary components of armed services training and how policies linked to them have affected combat readiness is insightful. He focuses on the way in which normative social values are promoted via mandatory training that teaches an iteration of ‘anti-racism’ that functions to smuggle in Marxist, revolutionary values. He highlights how how “Servicemembers are allowed to support the BLM movement. They are not, however, allowed to criticize it.” (Lohmeier 121). As a personal account of the impact of such training on troop morale, retention rates and the way that political controversy has come to inform hiring, firing and promotions the book is insightful. It’s impact on morale (teaching as it does that people within a racially diverse unit represent oppressors and oppressed), professionalism (teaching as it does that people from historically oppressed groups should be ascend professionally because of that rather than traditional metrics of merit, and combat readiness (teaching as it does that the U.S. is an immoral country), and other factors is shown to be real and concerning. Accounts are shared, for example, about how cadets cite how the transformation of the merit-based system that they elected to join becoming a racialized organization as the reason for their decision not to re-enlist; about lieutenant colonels adopting the language of radical extremism and saying that if elections don’t go his way the system should be “burned to the ground”; and lowered recruitment numbers amongst other examples. Citing a 40-page June 25, 2020 policy proposal written by officers commissioned at West Point, he shows how the new demands for “racial inclusion” – influenced by Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi – was nothing more than Marxism using racial language and mirrored more the Port Huron Statement than a document written by those supposedly trained to understand American values, i.e. individualism and meritocracy.

Chapter 7 closes the books primarily with comparing the contemporary U.S. context, to historical precedents for the type of ideological warfare now running unchecked, from the Civil War in Yugoslavia to the actions of the Red Guards following the Communist Party’s capture of China. Lohmeier highlights examples of laws advocated by the Democratic Socialists of America – whose worldview is influenced by Marxism – as well as interpretations of historic events such as the January 6th Protests at the U.S. Capital Building.

As a whole, my primary criticism of Lohmeier’s book is in the descriptions of actors and networks in the U.S. that are currently involved in political and ideological activism. In the first chapter, for example, he describes how (1) materials written by an author (Hannah-Jones) that had received a fellowship to study in Cuba, (2) produced by a foundation started by Howard Zinn and (3) promoted by a group whose roots trace to the United States Social Forum made their way into a suggested reading list for high school students and enlisted personnel. And yet there is no mention of the fact that Zinn was a founding member of the Cuban and Venezuelan-directed Networks of Artists and Intellectuals in Defense of Humanity, nor the relationship of Black Lives Matter’s founders, executives and elders’ relationship to the World Social Forum and the Cuban and Venezuelan. Because of this lack of intelligence-based analysis, amorphous descriptions of the groups involved in the force as being a “potent cultural force” seem to be merely creatures of individual choices responding to national issues even though they are not.

Lohmeier’s focus of the book primarily being on “Marxism’s Goal of Conquest” – however – this is understandable. Assessed from this vantage point the book is a success – though I do wish that more focus would have been given on examples of how DEI/crypto-Marxism has impacted U.S. military culture.

Review of Race to the Bottom: Uncovering the Secret Forces Destroying American Public Education

Race to the Bottom: Uncovering the Secret Forces Destroying American Public Education by Luke Rosiak is a journalistic account of a network of radical political activists, unions with leadership captured by leftist ideology, bureaucrats that value their own interests above that of their constituents, and philanthropy organizations that use racist rhetoric to fundamentally upend the American education system and to indoctrinate students with political views which are empirically false. The stories about people across several school districts illustrates how powerful national and regional interests have captured local government and used their power to implement busing systems that was neither desired by residents nor benefitted students academic performance, to promote lesson plans that promote leftist ideology, to alter government’s border lines to financially benefit housing developers, and to transform the personal dysfunction of mentally troubled individuals into a social contagion. At the core of these efforts is a push towards “equity” and “anti-racism” – which Rosiak masterfully demonstrates are floating signifiers that can be mobilized for contradictory and counter-productive policy changes that are often passed due to most citizens being uninformed and disempowered actors in a local political setting.

Race to the Bottom covers numerous professional organizations and consultancies such as the American Educational Research Association (AERA), PolicyLink, Pacific Education Group (PEG), and the National Education Association (NEA) and how they work in collaboration with teachers’ unions and the Democratic Socialists of America

Chapter One, Cheating Math, shows how school districts across the country were engaged in deceptive practices to artificially inflate the test scores, passing rates, and enrollments numbers of students while also lowering the standards involved in demonstrations of subject area mastery to ensure that they had statistics which made them appear to be “highly effective”. Students in Montgomery County, Maryland that had failed the state-mandated exams to pass were not just given an alternative project to complete as an equivalent but were given worksheets filled out in advance so they had to do nothing. At Ballou in Washington D.C., students that were truant for more than three months – which meant according to district policy that they should be automatically failed – nevertheless still graduated. In Los Angeles, out of school suspensions decreased by 1/3 over a seven year period – leading to a major jump in the rate which teachers quit and in-class time was disrupted by small groups of poorly behaved students that knew discipline options were limited. The sections on the elimination of standards requirements, the alteration of their calculation, or the reduction of their importance were also disturbing. In the name of restorative justice and equity, the denominator for “good academic work” was drastically reduced.

Chapter Two, The Mathematician, is framed with a concerned parent seeking data to help him understand why the school district – and those around him – that his child was in was doing so poorly and getting stonewalled by the state Department of Education. This shows to highlight how the vast educational bureaucracy operates together to hide what’s actually going on in the classroom and the board rooms which decide what is “accomplished” and what is “proficient” from parents. Close examination of the minutes of labor union resolutions hints at the extent to which these groups have transitioned from being organizations concerned about workplace conditions to political bodies directed by the radicals that have captured the leadership positions. An example of this is found at the annual NEA conference in July 2019:

“…one of the first actions union delegates took was voting down a motion to “rededicate itself to the pursuit of increased student learning in every public school in America by putting a renewed emphasis on quality education.” Instead, it approved motions to “involve educators, students, and communities in the discussion around support for reparations”; to blame the United States for destabilizing Central America, therefor causing a flood of immigrants, and to “incorporate the concept of ‘White Fragility’ into NEA trainings/staff development”.

https://ra.nea.org/business-item/20109-nbi-002

https://ra.nea.org/business-item/20109-nbi-025

https://ra.nea.org/business-item/20109-nbi-118

https://ra.nea.org/business-item/20109-nbi-011

The reason why so many teachers might be ignorant of these developments is hinted at in an earlier section of this chapter. The results of aggregate test results show that those seeking graduate degrees in education had the lowest math and verbal reasoning scores.

Chapter Three, School Board, focuses on how down-ballot elections for school boards that received little media coverage were targeted by individuals that frequently had no children, were funded primarily by outside individuals and groups, were leftist/progressive/Islamist activists that employed by activist organizations – such as Media Matters or New Ventures Fund, and sought to change established educational standards towards indoctrination.

Karl Frisch, Elaine Tholen, Karen Keys-Gamarra, Abrar Omeish, Rachna Sizemore Heizer, are just several of those shown to pursue a political agenda. Heizer is even described as carrying a copy of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States when she was sworn into the school board in December of 2019. While the funding comes from outside networks, so too does the campaign infrastructure for their election. Rather than engaging parents of students going door to door for outreach regarding candidates that they believe would be best for their children, unions, gay pride clubs at nearby college campuses, and national interest groups funded by billionaire Michael Bloomberg became involved. Once empowered, these activists show themselves to be incompetent, self-serving, and political in a viral manner: people that are competent and serve the students and community resign rather than follow orders which will not offer meaningful learning experiences for children. They sought to cut advanced academic programs – even when racial considerations were resulting in black students being placed into higher-level classes in which they were underperforming. Their election also becomes a way to promote activists whose work and policies aligns with their worldview rather than what’s best for children. One example of this is Ibram X. Kendi receiving $20,000 from school board funds for a one-hour Zoom speech. The most disturbing example shown, however, is how these activist school board members and the teacher’s unions united against the CDC guidelines that suggested schools reopen and used refused to use funds intended to go to PPE to promote the notion that the DOE was “underfunding” schools. While clearly not a comprehensive picture of all educational labor union activity – it’s clear from the accounts shared here how they’ve turned into highly politicized instruments of power rather than an organ for collective bargaining between employer and employee.

Chapter Four, Riots, highlights Glenn Singleton’s Pacific Education Group – an educational consulting group that “has made millions implanting radical ideas into K-12 school through his trademarked Courageous Conversation programming (Rosiak 64). The costs of his training and the extent to which this company is able to impact lesson plans and hiring decisions is shocking – with some principals at schools quitting in protest rather than allowing what they see to be a toxic set of principles to be disseminated in their schools. In St. Paul, Edina, and other locales disciplinary rules change to ensure disruptive students face no repercussions for their behavior and academic standards are lowered and redirected to topics that openly promote leftist indoctrination within the student body.

Chapter Five, Don Quixote, opens with a journalistic account parsed from court documents about Tracy Hammond. She starts off as a housewife who, after numerous online exchanges with a convicted child molester who she eventually marries turns into a masochist, an anarchist and radical atheist who claims a Hispanic heritage that her parents say is fabricated would come to wield immense power in the Seattle School Board system. The power she wields, notably, continues the trend mentioned above: a heightened focus on ‘ethnic’ and ‘racial’ issues – such as the creation of ‘math ethnic studies’ – and the decreased ability of students to pass standardized exams required to demonstrate subject area mastery. Rosniak chronicles the life of this morbidly obese activist who was the Regional Teacher of the Year up until she was later deemed a racial fraud like Rachel Dolezal and fired from her job. He shows how the small network she formed was able to build a significant footing within the school bureaucracy, to link up with outside funders (the NAACP), and then push for changes oriented to her vision of “social justice” while at the same time attacking anyone that questioned the value of these equity initiatives. Reports published by the educational think tank Brightbeam, notably, came to show that the more progressive the policies the worst the achievement gap.

Chapter Six, Critical Race Theory, provides an account of how Critical Race Theory was repackaged as equity and how activists were successful in clandestinely adding its tenants to school curriculums in several school districts – such as Loudon County, Virginia. Michelle Thomas, who would become the NAACP brand president in Loudon in 2018, was the “pastor” leading the charge in her district. Pastor is in quotations as while she wore the collar of someone in the clergy, she has no theological training and despite claims of a connection to American slaves – she is the daughter of Jamaican immigrants. It’s these people – with tenuous connections to the racial communities they claim to serve which act in a manner that could be categorized as over-compensation and that have dubious ethics (The ‘black owned’ business which Thomas once ran sub-contracted out all of the work to white-owned firms, i.e. was a mere intermediary, and she previously had an arrest warrant for her arrest for passing bad-checks). During her leadership a poorly researched report written by Kenya Savage, the leader of a group operating in the school system called the Minority Student Achievement Advisory Committee, ispromoted by Katrecia Nolen, Wendy Caudle Hodge, Lara Profitt, Zerell Johnson-Welch, and other pro-CRT activists which is then used to demand the district to pay over $500,000 for school staff training. Some of those advocating for the necessity of the training, notably, were heads of companies that received money from these and related contracts.

This training sought to promote the view that “whiteness” was inherently “anti-black” and is noticeably silent about Hispanic students – despite being a demographic that was nearly double the population of blacks in schools. These equity projects, in essence, exploited administrators’ and school board members’ fears of being deemed “racist” for not supporting an initiative to fill the pockets of themselves and their friends. This allowed activists to promote force the school district to promote ethnic studies that, essentially, promoted the notion that capitalism was inherently racist, that it ought to be overcome, and that liberal notions such as the neutrality of law were nothing more than a sham to perpetuate racial injustice.

The following nine chapters continue with similar accounts as those described above. The details of educator organizations that have been captured by radicals, how these groups partner with activist cliques seeks to change school policy as well as private firms which rely upon such actors to change regulations to their benefit or obtain contracts are truly disturbing. Rosniak traces how many of the people now pushing for these changes have long histories of radical activism which goes back to the New Left and who now receive funding from people like Michael Bloomberg, whose wealth is in large part a product of his connections to the Chinese Communist Party. The section on government-funded lobbying – wherein groups are paid to train students to essentially function as the radical activist wing of the democratic party – is also worth further examination. While this book does not apply intelligence analysis to develop a larger picture of all the efforts of those described, the book does present a compelling series of accounts of the extent to which radicals are seeking to lay the groundwork for Cultural Revolution-style changes in the U.S. and is thus highly recommended.

Notes from Transnational Organized Crime, Terrorism, and Criminalized States in Latin America – An Emerging Tier-One National Security Priority

Douglas Farah is an American journalist, national security consultant, a Senior Fellow of Financial Investigations and Transparency at the International Assessment of Strategy Center and also an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Farah served as United Press International bureau chief in El Salvador from 1985 to 1987, and a freelance journalist for The Washington Post, Newsweek, and other publications until being hired as a staff correspondent for The Washington Post in 1992.

These are notes from his monograph published by the Strategic Studies Institute Monograph Transnational Organized Crime, Terrorism, and Criminalized States in Latin America – An Emerging Tier-One National Security Priority in August of 2012.

NOTES

The emergence of new hybrid (state and nonstate) transnational criminal and terrorist franchises in Latin America poses a tier-one security threat for the United States. These organizations operate under broad state protection and undermine democratic governance, sovereignty, growth, trade, and stability.

Leaders of these organizations share a publicly articulated doctrine to employ asymmetric warfare against the United States and its allies that explicitly endorses the use of WMD as a legitimate tactic.

illicit forces in Latin America within criminalized states have begun using tactical operations centers as a means of pursuing their view of statecraft. That brings new elements to the “dangerous spaces” where nonstate actors intersect with regions characterized by weak sovereignty and alternative governance systems. This new dynamic fundamentally alters the structure underpinning global order.

Being capable of understanding and mitigating this threat requires a whole-of-government approach, including collection, analysis, law enforcement, policy, and programming. The traditional state/nonstate dichotomy is no longer useful for an adequate illumination of these problems. Similarly, the historical divide between transnational organized crime and terrorism is becoming increasingly irrelevant.

TRANSNATIONAL ORGANIZED CRIME, TERRORISM, AND CRIMINALIZED STATES IN LATIN AMERICA: AN EMERGING TIER-ONE NATIONAL SECURITY PRIORITY

INTRODUCTION AND GENERAL FRAMEWORK

The Changing Nature of the Threat.

The purpose of this monograph is to identify and discuss the role played by transnational organized crime groups (TOCs) in Latin America, and the inter- play of these groups with criminalizing state structures, “stateless” regions, extra-regional actors, and the multiple networks that exploit them. It particularly focuses on those areas that pose, or potentially pose, a threat to U.S. interests at home and abroad; and, it can be used as a model for understanding similar threats in other parts of the world.

This emerging combination of threats comprises a hybrid of criminal-terrorist, and state and nonstate franchises, combining multiple nations acting in concert, and traditional TOCs and terrorist groups acting as proxies for the nation-states that sponsor them. These hybrid franchises should now be viewed as a tier-one security threat for the United States. Under- standing and mitigating the threat requires a whole- of-government approach, including collection, analysis, law enforcement, policy, and programming. No longer is the state/nonstate dichotomy useful in illuminating these problems, just as the TOC/terrorism divide is increasingly disappearing.

These franchises operate in, and control, specific geographic territories which allow them to function in a relatively safe environment. These pipelines, or recombinant chains of networks, are highly adaptive and able to move a multiplicity of illicit products (cocaine, weapons, humans, and bulk cash) that ultimately cross U.S. borders undetected thousands of times each day. The actors along the pipeline form and dis- solve alliances quickly, occupy both physical and cyber space, and use both highly developed and modern institutions, including the global financial system, as well as ancient smuggling routes and methods.

This totals to some $6.2 trillion— fully 10 percent of the world’s GDP, placing it behind only the United States and the European Union (EU), but well ahead of China, in terms of global GDP ranking.1 Other estimates of global criminal proceeds range from a low of about 4 percent to a high of 15 percent of global GDP.

Latin American networks now extend not only to the United States and Canada, but outward to Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and Asia, where they have begun to form alliances with other networks. A clear understanding of how these rela- tionships evolve, and the relative benefits derived from the relationships among and between state and nonstate actors, will greatly enhance the understand- ing of this new hybrid threat.

 

There is no universally accepted definition of “transnational organized crime.” Here it is defined as, at a minimum, serious crimes or offenses spanning at least one border, undertaken by self-perpetuating associations of individuals who cooperate transnationally, motivated primarily by the desire to obtain a financial or other material benefit and/or power and influence.3 This definition can encompass a number of vitally important phenomena not usually addressed by studies of TOC:

  • A spectrum or continuum of state participation in TOC, ranging from strong but “criminalized” states to weak and “captured” states, with various intermediate stages of state criminal behavior.
  • A nexus between TOCs on the one hand, and terrorist and insurgent groups on the other, with a shifting balance between terrorist and criminal activity on both sides of the divide.
  • Recombinant networks of criminal agents, potentially including not only multiple TOCs, but also terrorist groups as well as states and proxies.
  • Enduring geographical “pipelines” for moving various kinds of commodities and illicit profits in multiple directions, to and from a major destination.
  • We have also crafted this definition to be broadly inclusive: It can potentially encompass the virtual world of TOC, e.g., cybercrime;
  • It can be applied to other regions; the recombinant pipelines and networks model offers an analytical framework which can be applied to multiple regions and circumstances.

 

The term criminalized state” used in this mono- graph refers to states where the senior leadership is aware of and involved—either actively or through passive acquiescence—on behalf of the state in trans- national criminal enterprises, where TOC is used as an instrument of statecraft, and where levers of state power are incorporated into the operational structure of one or more TOC groups.

New Actors in Latin American TOC-State Relations.

Significant TOC organizations, principally drug trafficking groups, have posed serious challenges for U.S. security since the rise of the Medellín cartel in the early 1980s, and the growth of the Mexican drug trafficking organizations in the 1990s. In addition, Latin America has a long history of revolutionary movements, from the earliest days of independence, to the Marxist movements that sprouted up across the region in the 1960s to 1980s. Within this context, these groups often served as elements of governance, primarily to advance or defeat the spread of Marxism in the region. These Marxist revolutions were victorious in Cuba and Nicaragua, which, in turn, became state sponsors of external revolutionary movements, themselves relying on significant economic and military support from the Soviet Union and its network of aligned states’ intelligence and security services.

With the end of the Cold War, the negotiated end to numerous armed conflicts (the Farabund Marti National Liberation Front [FMLN] in El Salvador; the Contra rebels in Nicaragua; the Popular Liberation Army [EPL], M-19, and other small groups in Colom- bia), and the collapse of Marxism, most of the armed groups moved into the democratic process. However, this was not true for all groups, and armed nonstate groups are again being sponsored in Latin America under the banner of the “Bolivarian Revolution.”4

Other states that traditionally have had little inter- est or influence in Latin America have emerged over the past decade, primarily at the invitation of the self- described Bolivarian states seeking to establish 21st- century socialism. This bloc of nations—led by Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, also including Rafael Correa of Ecuador, Evo Morales of Bolivia, and Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua—seeks to break the traditional ties of the region to the United States. To this end, the Bolivar- ian alliance has formed numerous organizations and military alliances—including a military academy in Bolivia to erase the vestiges of U.S. military training— which explicitly exclude the United States.

Over the past decade, China’s trade with Latin America has jumped from $10 billion to $179 billion.11 With the increased presence has come a significantly enhanced Chinese intelligence capacity and access across Latin America. At the same time, Chinese Triads—modern remnants of ancient Chinese secret societies that evolved into criminal organizations—are now operating extensive money laundering services for drug trafficking organizations via Chinese banks.

China also has shown a distinct willingness to bail out financially strapped authoritarian governments if the price is right. For example, China lent Venezuela $20 billion, in the form of a joint venture with a company to pump crude oil that China then locked up for a decade at an average price of about $18 a barrel. The money came as Chávez was facing a financial crisis, rolling blackouts, and a severe liquidity shortage across the economy.12 Since then, China has extended several other significant loans to Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia.

The dynamics of the relationship between China and the Bolivarian bloc and its nonstate proxies will be one of the key determinants of the future of Latin America and the survival of the Bolivarian project. Without significant material support from China, the economic model of the Bolivarian alliance will likely collapse under its own weight of statist inefficiency and massive corruption, despite being richly endowed with natural resources.

Chinese leaders likely understand that any real replacement of the Bolivarian structure leadership by truly democratic forces could result in a significant loss of access to the region, and a cancellation of existing contracts. This, in turn, gives China an incentive to continue to support some form of the Bolivarian project going forward, even if ailing leaders such as Chávez and Fidel Castro are no longer on the scene.

While there have been criminalized states in the past (the García Meza regime of “cocaine colonels” in Bolivia in 1980, and Desi Bouterse in Suriname in the 1980s, for ex- ample), what is new with the Bolivarian structure is the simultaneous and mutually supporting merger of state with TOC activities across multiple state and nonstate platforms. While García Meza, Bouterse, and others were generally treated as international pariahs with little outside support, the new criminalized states offer each other economic, diplomatic, political, and military support that shields them from international isolation and allows for mutually reinforcing structures to be built.

Rather than operating in isolation, these groups have complex but significant interaction with each other, based primarily on the ability of each actor or set of actors to provide a critical service while profiting mutually from the transactions.

While not directly addressing the threat from criminalized states, the Strategy notes that:

  • TOC penetration of states is deepening and leading to co-option in some states and weakening of governance in many others. TOC net- works insinuate themselves into the political process through bribery and in some cases have become alternate providers of governance, security, and livelihoods to win popular support. The nexus in some states among TOC groups and elements of government—including intelligence services and personnel—and big business figures, threatens the rule of law.
  • TOC threatens U.S. economic interests and can cause significant damage to the world financial system by subverting legitimate markets. The World Bank estimates that about $1 trillion is spent each year to bribe public officials. TOC groups, through their state relationships, could gain influence over strategic markets.
  • Terrorists and insurgents increasingly are turn- ing to crime and criminal networks for funding and logistics. In fiscal year (FY) 2010, 29 of the 63 top drug trafficking organizations identified by the Department of Justice had links to terror- ist organizations. While many terrorist links to TOC are opportunistic, this nexus is dangerous, especially if it leads a TOC network to facilitate the transfer of WMD material to terrorists.17

Stewart Patrick and others correctly argue that, contrary to the predominant thinking that emerged immediately after September 11, 2001 (9/11) (i.e., failed states are a magnet for terrorist organizations), failed or nonfunctional states are actually less attractive to terrorist organizations and TOC groups than “weak but functional” states.18 But there is another category, perhaps the most attractive of all to TOC and terrorist groups they are allied with: strong and functional states that participate in TOC activities.

The Unrecognized Role of the Criminalized States.

While it is true that TOC penetration of the state threatens the rule of law, as the administration’s strategy notes, it also poses significant new threats to the homeland. Criminalized states frequently use TOCs as a form of statecraft, bringing new elements to the dangerous spaces where nonstate actors intersect with regions of weak sovereignty and alternative governance systems.19 This fundamentally alters the structure of global order.

As the state relationships consolidate, the recombinant criminal-terrorist pipelines become more rooted and thus more dangerous. Rather than being pursued by state law enforcement and intelligence services in an effort to impede their activities, TOC groups (and perhaps terrorist groups) are able to operate in a more stable, secure environment, something that most businesses, both licit and illicit, crave.

Rather than operating on the margins of the state or seeking to co-opt small pieces of the state machinery, the TOC groups in this construct operate in concert with the state on multiple levels. Within that stable environment, a host of new options open, from the sale of weapons, to the use of national aircraft and ship- ping registries, to easy use of banking structures, to the use of national airlines and shipping lines to move large quantities of unregistered goods, and the acquisition of diplomatic passports and other identification means.

Examples of the benefits of a criminal state can be seen across the globe. For example, the breakaway republic of Transnistria, near Moldova, known as “Europe’s Black Hole,” is a notorious weapons trafficking center from which dozens of surface-to-air missiles have disappeared; it is run by former Russian secret police (KGB) officials.

The FARC needs to move cocaine to U.S. and European markets in order to obtain the money necessary to maintain its army of some 9,000 troops. In order to do that, the FARC, with the help of tra- ditional drug trafficking organizations, must move its product through Central America and Mexico to the United States—the same route used by those who want to move illegal aliens to the United States, and those who want to move bulk cash shipments, stolen cars, and weapons from the United States southward. All of these goods traverse the same territory, pass through the same gatekeepers, and are often inter- changeable along the way. A kilo of cocaine can be traded for roughly one ton of AK-47 assault rifles before either of the goods reaches what would normally be its final destination.

Though the presence of a state government (as op- posed to its absence) is ordinarily considered to be a positive situation, the presence of the state is beneficial or positive only if it meets the needs of its people. If the state, as it is in many parts of Latin America and many other parts of the world, is present but is viewed, with good reason, as corrupt, incompetent, and/or predatory, then its presence is not beneficial in terms of creating state strength or state capacity. In fact, where the state is strongest but least accountable for abuses, people often prefer nonstate actors to exercise authority.25

This has led to an underlying conceptual problem in much of the current literature describing regions or territories as “governed” or “ungoverned,” a frame- work that presents a false dichotomy suggesting that the lack of state presence means a lack of a governing authority. “Ungoverned spaces” connotes a lawless region with no controlling authority. In reality, the stateless regions in question almost always fall under the control of nonstate actors who have sufficient force or popular support (or a mixture of both), to impose their decisions and norms, thus creating alternate power structures that directly challenge the state, or that take the role of the state in its absence.

The notion of ungoverned spaces can be more broadly applied to legal, functional, virtual, and social arenas that either are not regulated by states or are contested by non-state actors and spoilers.26

THE NATURE OF THE THREAT IN THE AMERICAS

Old Paradigms Are Not Enough.

Control of broad swaths of land by these nonstate groups in Latin America not only facilitates the movement of illegal products, both northward and south- ward, through transcontinental pipelines, but also undermines the stability of an entire region of great strategic interest to the United States.

The traditional threat is broadly understood to be posed by the illicit movement of goods (drugs, money, weapons, and stolen cars), people (human traffic, gang members, and drug cartel enforcers), and the billions of dollars these illicit activities generate in an area where states have few resources and little legal or law enforcement capacity .

As Moisés Naim wrote:

Ultimately, it is the fabric of society which is at stake. Global illicit trade is sinking entire industries while boosting others, ravaging countries and sparking booms, making and breaking political careers, desta- bilizing some governments and propping up others.27

The threat increases dramatically with the nesting of criminal/terrorist groups within governments that are closely aligned ideologically, such as Iran and the Bolivarian states in Latin America, and that are identified sponsors of designated terrorist groups, including those that actively participate in the cocaine trafficking trade.

While Robert Killebrew28 and Max Manwaring29 make compelling cases that specific parts of this dangerous cocktail could be defined as insurgencies (narco-insurgency in Mexico and gangs in Central America, respectively), the new combination of TOC, criminalized states, and terrorist organizations presents a new reality that breaks the traditional paradigms.

While Mexico is not the focus of this monograph, the regional convulsions from Mexico through Central America are not viewed as a narco-insurgency. Instead, this hybrid mixture of groups with a variety of motives, including those engaged in TOC, insurgencies, and criminalized states with a declared hatred for the United States, is something new and in many ways more dangerous than a traditional insurgency.

The New Geopolitical Alignment.

The visible TOC threats are only a part of the geo- strategic threats to the United States emerging from Latin America’s current geopolitical alignment. The criminalized states are already extending their grip on power through strengthened alliances with hostile outside state and quasi-state actors such as Iran and Hezbollah. The primary unifying theme among these groups is a deep hatred for the United States.

they have carried out a similar pattern of rewriting the constitution to concentrate powers in the executive and to allow for unlimited reelection; a systematic takeover of the judiciary by the executive and the subsequent criminalizing of the opposition through vaguely worded laws and constitutional amendments that make it illegal to oppose the revolution; systematic attacks on independent news media, and the use of criminal libel prosecutions to silence media critics; and, overall, the increasing criminalization of the state. These measures are officially justified as necessary to ensure the revolution can be carried out without U.S. “lackeys” sabotaging it.

The Model: Recombinant Networks and Geographical Pipelines.

To understand the full significance of the new geopolitical reality in Latin America, it is necessary to think in terms of the geopolitics of TOC. Because of the clandestine nature of the criminal and terrorist activities, designed to be as opaque as possible, one must start from the assumption that, whatever is known of specific operations along the criminal-terrorist pipeline, or whatever combinations of links are seen, represents merely a snapshot in time, not a video of continuing events. Moreover, it is often out of date by the time it is assessed.

Nonstate armed actors as treated in this mono- graph are defined as:

  • Terrorist groups, motivated by religion, politics, ethnic forces, or at times, even by financial considerations;
  • Transnational criminal organizations, both structured and disaggregated, including third generation gangs as defined by Manwaring;35
  • Militias that control “black hole” or “stateless” sectors of one or more national territories; Insurgencies, which have more well-defined and specific political aims within a particular national territory, but may operate from out- side of that national territory.

“In some cases, the terrorists simply imitate the criminal behavior they see around them, borrowing techniques such as credit card fraud and extortion in a phenomenon we refer to as activity appropriation. This is a shared approach rather than true interaction, but it often leads to more intimate connections within a short time.” This can evolve into a more symbiotic relationship, which in turn can (but many do not) turn into hybrid groups.38

While the groups that overlap in different networks are not necessarily allies, and in fact occasionally are enemies, they often can and do make alliances of convenience that are short-lived and shifting. Even violent drug cartels, which regularly engage in bloody turf battles, also frequently engage in truces and alliances, although most end when they are no longer mutually beneficial or the balance of power shifts among them.

Another indication of the scope of the emerging alliances is the dramatic rise of Latin American drug trafficking organizations operating in West Africa, for onward shipment to Western Europe. Among the drug trafficking organizations found to be working on the ground in West Africa are the FARC, Mexican drug cartels, Colombian organizations, and Italian organized crime. It is worth bearing in mind that al- most every major load of cocaine seized in West Africa in recent years has been traced to Venezuela as the point of origin.

This overlapping web of networks was described in a July 2010 federal indictment from the Southern District of New York, which showed that drug trafficking organizations in Colombia and Venezuela, including the FARC, had agreed to move several multi-ton loads of cocaine through Liberia en route to Europe.

The head of Liberian security forces, who is also the son of the president, negotiated the transshipment deals with a Colombian, a Russian, and three West Africans.

On December 8, 2011, it aired footage of the Iranian ambassador in Mexico urging a group of Mexican university students who were hackers to launch broad cyber attacks against U.S. defense and intelligence facilities, claiming such an attack would be “bigger than 9/11.”

Geographical “Pipelines.”

The central feature binding together these disparate organizations and networks which, in aggregate, make up the bulk of nonstate armed actors, is the in- formal (meaning outside legitimate state control and competence) “pipeline” or series of overlapping pipe- lines that these operations need to move products, money, weapons, personnel, and goods. The pipelines often form well-worn, customary, geographical routes and conduits developed during past conflicts, or traditionally used to smuggle goods without paying taxes to the state. Their exploitation by various communities, organizations, and networks yields recognizable patterns of activity.

The geography of the pipelines may be seen as both physical (i.e., terrain and topography), and human (i.e., historical and sociological patterns of local criminal activity).

These regions may develop their own cultures that accept what the state considers to be illicit activities as normal and desirable. This is especially true in areas where the state has been considered an enemy for generations.

The criminal pipeline itself is often a resource in dispute, and one of the primary sources of violence. Control of the pipeline can dramatically alter the relative power among different trafficking groups, as has been seen in the ongoing war between the Juarez and Sinaloa cartels in Mexico.47 Because of the lucrative nature of control of the actual physical space of the pipeline, these types of conflicts are increasingly carried out in gruesome fashion in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.

These states are not collapsing. They risk becoming shell-states: sovereign in name, but hollowed out from the inside by criminals in collusion with corrupt officials in the government and the security services. This not only jeopardizes their survival, it poses a serious threat to regional security because of the trans-national nature of the crimes.

CRIMINALIZING STATES AS NEW REGIONAL ACTORS

While nonstate actors make up the bulk of criminal agents engaged in illicit activities, state actors play an increasingly important yet under-reported role. That role pertains in part to the availability of pipeline territory, and in part to the sponsorship and even direction of criminal activity. TOC groups can certainly exploit the geographical vulnerabilities of weak or failing states, but they also thrive on the services provided by stronger states.

There are traditional categories for describing state performance as developed by Robert Rotberg and others in the wake of state failures at the end of the Cold War. The premise is that that “nation-states fail because they are convulsed by internal violence and can no longer deliver positive political goods to their inhabitants.”52 These categories are:

  • Strong, i.e., able to control its territory and offer quality political goods to its people;
  • Weak, i.e., filled with social tensions, the state has only a limited monopoly on the use of force;
  • Failed, i.e., in a state of conflict with a preda- tory ruler, with no state monopoly on the use of force;
  • Collapsed, i.e., no functioning state institutions and a vacuum of authority.

This conceptualization, while useful, is extremely limited, as is the underlying premise. It fails to make a critical distinction between countries where the state has little or no power in certain areas and may be fighting to assert that control, and countries where the government, in fact, has a virtual monopoly on power and the use of force, but turns the state into a functioning criminal enterprise for the benefit of a small elite.

The 4-tier categorization also suffers from a significant omission with regard to geographical areas of operation rather than criminal actors. The model pre- supposes that stateless regions are largely confined within the borders of a single state.

 

State absence can be the product of a successful bid for local dominance by TOC groups, but it can also result from a perception on the part of the local population that the state poses a threat to their communities, livelihoods, or interests.

 

 

A 2001 Naval War College report insightfully described some of the reasons in terms of “commercial” and “political” in- surgencies. These are applicable to organized criminal groups as well and have grown in importance since then:

The border zones offer obvious advantages for political and economic insurgencies. Political insurgents prefer to set up in adjacent territories that are poorly integrated, while the commercial insurgents favor active border areas, preferring to blend in amid business and government activity and corruption. The border offers a safe place to the political insurgent and easier access to communications, weapons, provisions, transport, and banks.

For the commercial insurgency, the frontier creates a fluid, trade-friendly environment. Border controls are perfunctory in ‘free trade’ areas, and there is a great demand for goods that are linked to smuggling, document fraud, illegal immigration, and money laundering.

For the political insurgency, terrain and topography often favor the narco-guerilla. Jungles permit him to hide massive bases and training camps, and also laboratories, plantations, and clandestine runways. The Amazon region, huge and impenetrable, is a clear example of the shelter that the jungle areas give. On all of Colombia’s borders—with Panama, Ecuador, Brazil, and Venezuela—jungles cloak illegal activity.

The Weak State-Criminal State Continuum.

One may array the degree of state control of, or par- ticipation in, criminal activity along a spectrum (see Figure 2). At one end are strong but criminal states, with the state acting as a TOC element or an important component of a TOC group.

In Latin America, the government of Suriname (formerly Dutch Guiana) in the 1980s and early 1990s under Desi Bouterse, a convicted drug trafficker with strong ties to the FARC, was (and perhaps still is) an operational player in an ongoing criminal enterprise and benefited from it.

Bouterse’s only public defender in the region is Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.

Again, the elements of TOC as statecraft can be seen. Chávez reportedly funded Bouterse’s improbable electoral comeback in Suriname, funneling money to his campaign and hosting him in Venezuela on several visits.60 While no other heads of state accepted Bouterse’s invitation to attend his inauguration, Chávez did, although he had to cancel at the last minute. In recompense, he promised to host Bouterse on a state visit to Venezuela.

One of the key differences between the Bolivarian alliance and earlier criminalized states in the region is the mutually reinforcing structure of the alliance. While other criminalized states have been widely viewed as international pariahs and broadly shunned, thus hastening their demise, the new Bolivarian structures unite several states in a joint, if loosely-knit, criminal enterprise. This ensures these mutually sup- porting regimes can endure for much longer.

At the other end are weak and captured states, where certain nodes of governmental authority, whether local or central, have been seized by TOCs, who in turn are the primary beneficiaries of the proceeds from the criminal activity. Penetration of the state usually centers on one or more of three functions: judiciary (to ensure impunity), border control and customs (to ensure the safe passage of persons and goods), and legislature (to codify the structures necessary to TOC organizations, such as a ban on extradition, weak asset forfeiture laws, etc.). It also is more local in its focus, rather than national.

Typically, TOC elements aim at dislodging the state from local territory, rather than assuming the role of the state in overall political authority across the country. As Shelley noted, “Older crime groups, often in long-established states, have developed along with their states and are dependent on existing institution- al and financial structures to move their products and invest their profits.”

By definition, insurgents aim to wrest political control from the state and transfer it to their own leadership.

“Captured states” are taken hostage by criminal organizations, often through intimidation and threats, giving the criminal enterprise access to some parts of the state apparatus. Guatemala would be an example: the government lacks control of roughly 60 percent of the national territory, with the cartels enjoying local power and free access to the border; but the central government itself is not under siege.

In the middle range between the extremes, more criminalized cases include participation in criminal activity by state leaders, some acting out of personal interest, others in the interest of financing the services or the ideology of the state. A variant of this category occurs when a functioning state essentially turns over, or “franchises out” part of its territory to non- state groups to carry out their own agenda with the blessing and protection of the central government or a regional power. Both state and nonstate actors share in the profits and proceeds from criminal activity thus generated. Venezuela under Hugo Chávez is perhaps the clearest example of this model in the region, given his relationship with the FARC.

Hugo Chávez and the FARC: The Franchising Model.

Chávez’s most active support for the FARC came after the FARC had already become primarily a drug trafficking organization vice political insurgency. The FARC has also traditionally earned considerable income (and wide international condemnation) from the kidnapping for ransom of hundreds of individuals, in violation of the Geneva Convention and other international conventions governing armed conflicts. It was impossible, by the early part of the 21st century, to separate support for the FARC from support for TOC, as these two activities were the insurgent group’s primary source of income.

Chávez had cultivated a relationship with the FARC long before becoming president. As one recent study of internal FARC documents noted:

When Chávez became president of Venezuela in February 1999, FARC had not only enjoyed a relationship with him for at least some of the previous seven years but had also penetrated and learned how to best use Venezuelan territory and politics, manipulating and building alliances with new and traditional Venezuelan political sectors, traversing the Colombia-Venezuela border in areas ranging from coastal desert to Amazonian jungle and building cooperative relation- ships with the Venezuelan armed forces. Once Chávez was inaugurated, Venezuelan border security and foreign policies shifted in the FARC’s favor.67

Perhaps the strongest public evidence of the importance of Venezuela to the FARC is the public fingering of three of Chávez’s closest advisers and senior government officials by the U.S Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).

OFAC said the three—Hugo Armando Carvajál, director of Venezuelan Military Intelligence; Henry de Jesus Rangél, director of the Venezuelan Directorate of Intelligence and Prevention Services; and Ramón Emilio Rodriguez Chacín, former minister of justice and former minister of interior—were responsible for “materially supporting the FARC, a narco-terrorist organization.” It specifically accused Carvajál and Rangél of protecting FARC cocaine shipments moving through Venezuela, and said Rodriguez Chacín, who resigned his government position just a few days before the designations, was the “Venezuelan government’s main weapons contact for the FARC.”

According to the U.S. indictment against him, Makled exported at least 10 tons of cocaine a month to the United States by keeping more than 40 Venezuelan generals and senior government officials on his payroll. “All my business associates are generals. The highest,” Makled said. “I am telling you, we dis- patched 300,000 kilos of coke. I couldn’t have done it without the top of the government.”75 What added credibility to Makled’s claims were the documents he presented showing what appear to be the signatures of several generals and senior Ministry of Interior officials accepting payment from Makled. “I have enough evidence to justify the invasion of Venezuela” as a criminal state, he said.76

The FARC and Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua.

Since the electoral victories of Correa in Ecuador and Morales in Bolivia, and the re-election of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, their governments have actively supported FARC rebels in their war of more than 4 decades against the Colombian state, as well as significant drug trafficking activities.77 While Ecuador and Venezuela have allowed their territory to be used for years as rear guard and transshipment stations for the FARC and other drug trafficking organizations, Bolivia has become a recruitment hub and safe haven; and Nicaragua, a key safe haven and weapons procurement center. In addition, several senior members of both the Correa and Morales administrations have been directly implicated in drug trafficking incidents, showing the complicity of the state in the criminal enterprises.

In Bolivia, the Morales government, which has maintained cordial ties with the FARC at senior levels,78 has, as noted, faced an escalating series of drug trafficking scandals at the highest levels.79 It is worth noting that Alvaro García Linera, the nation’s vice president and a major power center in the Morales administration, was a member of the armed Tupac Katari Revolutionary Movement (Movimiento Revolucionario Tupak Katari [MRTK]), an ally of the FARC, and served several years in prison.

An analysis of the Reyes computer documents concluded that the FARC donated several hundred thousand dollars to Correa’s campaign,84 a conclusion drawn by other national and international investigations.85 The Reyes documents show senior Ecuadoran officials meeting with FARC commanders and offering to remove certain commanders in the border region so the FARC would not be under so much pressure on the Ecuadoran side.

A closer friend, at least for a time, was Hugo Mol- dis, who helped found the MAS and has been one of the movement’s intellectual guides, and was seriously considered for senior cabinet positions. Instead, he was given the job as leader of the government-backed confederation of unions and social groups called the “People’s High Command” (Estado Mayor del Pueblo [EMP]),93 and he maintains a fairly high profile as journalist and writer for several Marxist publications.

The EMP was one of the principal vehicles of the MAS and its supporters in forcing the 2003 resignation of the government of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, and Morales, as president, named it the organization responsible for giving social movements a voice in the government.

Moldiz told the group that “our purpose is to defend the government, defend the political process of change, which we have conquered with blood, strikes, marches, sacrifice, and pain. Our main enemy is called United States imperialism and the Bolivian oligarchy.”95

The Regional Infrastructure.

Brazil and Peru, while not actively supporting the FARC, have serious drug trafficking issues to contend with on their own and exercise little real control over their border regions. Despite this geographic and geopolitical reality, Colombia has undertaken a costly and somewhat successful effort to reestablish state control in many long-abandoned regions of its own national territory. Yet the Colombian experience offers an object lesson in the limits of what can be done even if the political will exists and if significant national treasure is invested in reestablishing a positive state presence. Once nonstate actors have established uncontested authority over significant parts of the national territory, the cost of recouping control and establishing a functional state presence is enormous.

It becomes even more costly when criminal/terrorist groups such as the FARC become instruments of regional statecraft. The FARC has been using its ideological affinity with Correa, Morales, Chávez, and Nicaragua’s Ortega to press for a change in status to “belligerent group” in lieu of terrorist entity or simple insurgency. “Belligerent” status is a less pejorative term and brings certain international protections.

the FARC and its political arm, the Continental Bolivarian Movement (Movimiento Continental Bolivariano[MCB] discussed below), has become a vehicle for a broader-based alliance of nonstate armed groups seeking to end the traditional democratic representative government model and replace it with an ideology centered on Marxism, anti-globalization, and anti-United States.

…not all states are criminal, not all TOCs are engaged in terrorism or collude with terrorist groups, and not all terrorist groups conduct criminal activities. The overlap between all three groups constitutes a small but highly dangerous subset of cases, and ap- plies most particularly to the Bolivarian states.

The TOC-Terrorist State Alliance.

At the center of the nexus of the Bolivarian move- ment with TOC, terrorism, and armed revolution is the FARC, and its political wing, the Continental Boli- varian Coordinator (Coordinadora Continental Bolivari- ana [CCB]), a continental political movement founded in 2003, funded and directed by the FARC. In 2009, the CCB officially changed its name to the MCB to re- flect its growth across Latin America. For purposes of consistency, we refer to the organization as the CCB throughout this monograph.

In a November 24, 2004, letter from Raúl Reyes, the FARC’s second-in-command, to another member of the FARC General Secretariat, he laid out the FARC’s role in the CCB, as well as the Chávez government’s role, in the following unambiguous terms:

The CCB has the following structure: an executive, some chapters by region . . . and a “foreign legion.” Headquarters: Caracas. It has a newspaper called “Correo Bolivariano,” [Bolivarian Mail] and Internet site and an FM radio station heard throughout Caracas. . . . This is an example of coordinated struggle for the creation of the Bolivarian project. We do not exclude any forms of struggle. It was founded in Fuerte Tiuna in Caracas. [Author’s Note: Fuerte Tiuna is the main government military and intelligence center in Venezuela, and this is a clear indication that the Venezuelan government fully supported the founding of the organization.] The political ammunition and the leadership is provided by the FARC. 97

According to an internal FARC report dated March 11, 2005, on the CCB’s activities in 2004, there were already active groups in Mexico, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Chile. International brigades from the Basque region of Spain, Italy, France, and Denmark were operational. Work was underway in Argentina, Guatemala, and Brazil. The number of organizations that were being actively coordinated by the CCB was listed at 63, and there were “political relations” with 45 groups and 25 institutions. The CCB database contained 500 e-mails.

Numerous other documents show that different Bolivarian governments directly supported the CCB, whose president is always the FARC leader.

The government of Rafael Correa in Ecuador of- ficially hosted the second congress of the organization in Quito in late February 2008. The meeting was at- tended by members of Peru’s Tupac Amaru Revolu- tionary Movement (Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru [MRTA]); the Mapuches and MIR of Chile; Spain’s ETA, and other terrorist and insurgent groups.

The 2009 meeting at which the CCB became the MCB was held in Caracas and the keynote address was given Alfonso Cano, the current FARC leader. Past FARC leaders are honorary presidents of the organization.101 This places the FARC—a well-identified drug trafficking organization with significant ties to the major Mexican drug cartels102 and a designated terrorist entity with a broad-based alliance that spans the globe—directly in the center of a state-sponsored project to fundamentally reshape Latin America and its political structure and culture.

The importance of the cocaine transit increase through Venezuela was documented by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which estimates that the product transit rose fourfold from 2004 to 2007, from 60 metric tons to 240 metric tons.

Finally, the CCB, as a revolutionary meeting house for “anti-imperialist” forces around the world, provides the political and ideological underpinning and justification for the growing alliance among the Bolivarian states, again led by Chávez, and Iran, led by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Hezbollah’s influence extends to the nature of the war and diplomacy pursued by Chávez and his Bolivarian comrades. The franchising model strongly resembles the template pioneered by Hezbollah.

THE BOLIVARIAN AND IRANIAN REVOLUTIONS: THE TIES THAT BIND

The most common assumption among those who view the Iran-Bolivarian alliance as troublesome, and many do not view it as a significant threat at all, is that there are two points of convergence between the radical and reactionary theocratic Iranian government and the self-proclaimed socialist and progressive Bolivarian revolution.

These assumed points of convergence are: 1) an overt and often stated hatred for the United States and a shared belief in how to destroy a common enemy; and 2) a shared acceptance of authoritarian state structures that tolerate little dissent and encroach on all aspects of a citizen’s life.

While Iran’s revolutionary rulers view the 1979 revolution in theological terms as a miracle of divine intervention in which the United States, the Great Satan, was defeated, the Bolivarians view it from a secular point of view as a roadmap to defeat the United States as the Evil Empire. To both, it has strong political con- notations and serves as a model for how asymmetrical leverage, whether applied by Allah or humans, can conjure the equivalent of a David defeating a Goliath on the world stage.

Ortega has declared the Iranian and Nicaraguan revolutions to be “twin revolutions, with the same objectives of justice, liberty, sovereignty and peace . . . despite the aggressions of the imperialist policies.” Ahmadinejad couched the alliances as part of “a large anti-imperialist movement that has emerged in the region.”

Among the first to articulate the possible merging of radical Shite Islamic thought with Marxist aspirations of destroying capitalism and U.S. hegemony was Illich Sánchez Ramirez, better known as the terrorist leader, “Carlos the Jackal,” a Venezuelan citizen who was, until his arrest in 1994, one of the world’s most wanted terrorists.

The emerging military doctrine of the “Bolivarian Revolution,” officially adopted in Venezuela and rapidly spreading to Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Ecuador, explicitly embraces the radical Islamist model of asymmetrical or “fourth generation warfare,” and its heavy reliance on suicide bombings and different types of terrorism, including the use of nuclear weapons and other WMD.

Chávez has adopted as his military doctrine the concepts and strategies articulated in Peripheral Warfare and Revolutionary Is- lam: Origins, Rules and Ethics of Asymmetrical Warfare (Guerra Periférica y el Islam Revolucionario: Orígenes, Reglas y Ética de la Guerra Asimétrica ) by the Spanish politician and ideologue, Jorge Verstrynge (see Figure 4).110 The tract is a continuation of and exploration of Sánchez Ramirez’s thoughts, incorporating an explicit endorsement of the use of WMD to destroy the United States. Verstrynge argues for the destruction of the United States through a series of asymmetrical attacks like those of 9/11, in the belief that the United States will simply crumble when its vast military strength cannot be used to combat its enemies.

Central to Verstrynge’s idealized view of terrorists is the belief in the sacredness of fighters sacrificing their lives in pursuit of their goals.

An Alliance of Mutual Benefit.

This ideological framework of a combined Marxism and radical Islamic methodology for successfully attacking the United States is an important, though little examined, underpinning for the greatly enhanced relationships among the Bolivarian states and Iran. These relationships are being expanded, absorbing significant resources despite the fact that there is little economic rationale to the ties and little in terms of legitimate commerce.

One need only look at how rapidly Iran has in- creased its diplomatic, economic, and intelligence presence in Latin America to see the priority it places on this emerging axis, given that it is an area where it has virtually no trade, no historic or cultural ties, and no obvious strategic interests. The gains, in financial institutions, bilateral trade agreements, and state visits (eight state visits between Chávez and Ahmadinejad alone since 2006), are almost entirely within the Bolivarian orbit; and, as noted, the Bolivarian states have jointly declared their intention to help Iran break international sanctions.

The most recent salvo by Iran is the launching of a Spanish language satellite TV station, HispanTV, aimed at Latin America. Bolivia and Venezuela are collaborating in producing documentaries for the station. Mohammed Sarafraz, deputy di- rector of international affairs, said Iran was “launching a channel to act as a bridge between Iran and the countries of Latin America [there being] a need to help familiarize Spanish-speaking citizens with the Iranian nation.” He said that HispanTV was launched with the aim of reinforcing cultural ties with the Spanish- speaking nations and helping to introduce the traditions, customs, and beliefs of the Iranian people.

What is of particular concern is that many of the bilateral and multilateral agreements signed between Iran and Bolivarian nations, such as the creation of a dedicated shipping line between Iran and Ecuador, or the deposit of $120 million by an internationally sanctioned Iranian bank into the Central Bank of Ecuador, are based on no economic rationale.

Iran, whose banks, including its central bank, are largely barred from the Western financial systems, benefits from access to the international financial mar- ket through Venezuelan, Ecuadoran, and Bolivian financial institutions, which act as proxies by moving Iranian money as if it originated in their own legal financial systems.120 Venezuela also agreed to provide Iran with 20,000 barrels of gasoline per day, leading to U.S. sanctions against the state petroleum company.

CONCLUSIONS

Latin America, while not generally viewed as part of the stateless regions phenomenon, or part of the failed state discussion, presents multiple threats that center on criminalized states, their hybrid alliance with extra-regional sponsors of terrorism, and nonstate TOC actors. The groups within this hybrid threat—often rivals, but willing to work in temporary alliances—are part of the recombinant criminal/terrorist pipeline, and their violence is often aimed at gaining control of specific territory or parts of that pipeline, either from state forces or other nonstate groups.

pipelines are seldom disrupted for more than a minimal amount of time, in part because the critical human nodes in the chain, and key chokepoints in the pipelines, are not identified, and the relationships among the different actors and groups are not under- stood adequately. As noted, pipelines are adaptable and versatile as to product—the epitome of modern management systems—often intersecting with formal commercial institutions (banks, commodity exchanges, legitimate companies, etc.), both in a physical and virtual/cyber manner, in ways difficult to determine, collect intelligence on, or disaggregate from protected commercial activities which may be both domestic and international in nature, with built-in legal and secrecy protections.

While the situation is already critical, it is likely to get worse quickly. There is growing evidence of Russian and Chinese organized crime penetration of the region, particularly in Mexico and Central America, greatly strengthening the criminal organizations and allowing them to diversify their portfolios and sup- ply routes—a particular example being precursor chemicals for the manufacture of methamphetamines and cocaine. The Chinese efforts to acquire ports, re- sources, and intelligence-gathering capacity in the region demonstrate just how quickly the situation can develop, given that China was not a major player in the region 5 years ago.

This is a new type of alliance of secular (self-proclaimed socialist and Marxist) and radical Islamist organizations with a common goal directly aimed at challenging and undermining the security of the United States and its primary allies in the region (Colombia, Chile, Peru, Panama, and Guatemala). This represents a fundamental change because both primary state allies in the alliance (the governments of Venezuela and Iran) host and support nonstate actors, allowing the nonstate actors to thrive in ways that would be impossible without state protection.

Under- standing how these groups develop, and how they relate to each other and to groups from outside the region, is vital—particularly given the rapid pace with which they are expanding their control across the continent, across the hemisphere, and beyond. Developing a predictive capacity can be done based only on a more realistic understanding of the shifting networks of actors exploiting the pipelines; the nature and location of the geographic space in which they operate; the critical nodes where these groups are most vulnerable; and their behaviors in adapting to new political and economic developments, market opportunities and setbacks, internal competition, and the countering actions of governments.

In turn, an effective strategy for combating TOC must rest on a solid foundation of regional intelligence which, while cognizant of the overarching transnational connections, remains sensitive to unique local realities behind seemingly ubiquitous behaviors. A one-size-fits-all policy will not suffice.

It is not a problem that is only, or primarily, a matter of state or regional security, narcotics, money laundering, terrorism, human smuggling, weakening governance, democracy reversal, trade and energy, counterfeiting and contraband, immigration and refugees, hostile states seeking advantage, or alterations in the military balance and alliances. It is increasingly a combination of all of these. It is a comprehensive threat that requires analysis and management within a comprehensive, integrated whole-of-government approach. At the same time, however expansive in global terms, a strategy based on geopolitics—the fundamental understanding of how human behavior relates to geo- graphic space—must always be rooted in the local.

ENDNOTES

  1. “Fact Sheet: Strategy to Combat Transnational Organized Crime,” Washington, DC: Office of the Press Secretary, the White House, July 25, 2011.
  2. On the lower end, the United Nations (UN) Office of Drugs and Crime estimate transnational organized crime (TOC) earn- ings for 2009 at $2.1 trillion, or 3.6 percent of global gross domes- tic product (GDP). Of that, typical TOC activities such as drug trafficking, counterfeiting, human trafficking, weapons traffick- ing, and oil smuggling, account for about $1 trillion or 1.5 per- cent of global GDP. For details, see “Estimating Illicit Financial Flows Resulting from Drug Trafficking and other Transnational Organized Crimes,” Washington, DC: UN Office of Drugs and Crime, September 2011. On the higher end, in a speech to Interpol in Singapore in 2009, U.S. Deputy Attorney General Ogden cited 15 percent of world GDP as total annual turnover of TOC. See Josh Meyer, “U.S. attorney general calls for global effort to fight organized crime,” Los Angeles Times, October 13, 2009, available from articles.latimes.com/print/2009/oct/13/nation/na-crime13.
  3. This definition is adapted from the 1998 UN Conven- tion on Transnational Organized Crime and Protocols Thereto, UNODC, Vienna, Austria; and the 2011 Strategy to Combat Trans- national Organized Crime, available from www.whitehouse.gov/ administration/eop/nsc/transnational-crime/definition.
  4. The self-proclaimed “Bolivarian” states (Venezuela, Ecua- dor, Bolivia, and Nicaragua) take their name from Simón Bolivar, the revered 19th-century leader of South American independence from Spain. They espouse 21st-century socialism, a vague notion that is deeply hostile to free market reforms, to the United States as an imperial power, and toward traditional liberal democratic concepts, as will be described in detail.
  5. One of the most detailed cases involved the 2001 weapons transfers among Hezbollah operatives in Liberia, a retired Israeli officer in Panama, and a Russian weapons merchant in Guatema- la. A portion of the weapons, mostly AK-47 assault rifles, ended up with the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia (Autodefensas Unidads de Colombia [AUC]), a designated terrorist organization heavily involved in cocaine trafficking. The rest of the weapons, including anti-tank systems and anti-aircraft weapons, likely end- ed up with Hezbollah. For details, see Douglas Farah, Blood From Stones: The Secret Financial Network of Terror, New York: Broadway Books, 2004.
  6. For a detailed look at this development, see Antonio L. Mazzitelli, “The New Transatlantic Bonanza: Cocaine on High- way 10,” North Miami, FL: Western Hemisphere Security Analy- sis Center, Florida International University, March 2011.
  7. The FARC is the oldest insurgency in the Western hemi- sphere, launched in 1964 by Colombia’s Liberal Party militias, and enduring to the present as a self-described Marxist revolu- tionary movement. For a more detailed look at the history of the FARC, see Douglas Farah, “The FARC in Transition: The Fatal Weakening of the Western Hemisphere’s Oldest Guerrilla Move- ment,” NEFA Foundation, July 2, 2008, available from www.nefa- foundation.org/miscellaneous/nefafarc0708.pdf.
  8. These include recently founded Community of Latin Amer- ican and Caribbean States (Comunidad de Estados Latinoamericanos y Caribeños [CELAC]), and the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América [ALBA]).
  9. James R. Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, “Un- classified Statement for the Record: Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,” January 31, 2012, p. 6.
  10. For the most comprehensive look at Russian Organized Crime in Latin America, see Bruce Bagley, “Globalization, Ungov- erned Spaces and Transnational Organized Crime in the Western Hemisphere: The Russian Mafia,” paper prepared for Internation- al Studies Association, Honolulu, HI, March 2, 2005.
  11. Ruth Morris, “China: Latin America Trade Jumps,” Latin American Business Chronicle, May 9, 2011, available from www. latinbusinesschronicle.com/app/article.aspx?id=4893.
  12. Daniel Cancel, “China Lends Venezuela $20 Billion, Se- cures Oil Supply,” Bloomberg News Service, April 18, 2010. By the end of August 2011, Venezuela’s publicly acknowledged debt to China stood at some $36 billion, equal to the rest of its out- standing international debt. See Benedict Mander, “More Chinese Loans for Venezuela,” FT Blog, September 16, 2011, available from blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/2011/09/16/more-chinese-loans-4bn- worth-for-venezuela/#axzz1Z3km4bdg.
  13. “Quito y Buenos Aires, Ciudades preferidas para narcos nigerianos” (“Quito and Buenos Aires, Favorite Cities of Narco Nigerians”), El Universo Guayaquil, Ecuador, January 3, 2011.
  14. Louise Shelley, “The Unholy Trinity: Transnational Crime, Corruption and Terrorism,” Brown Journal of World Affairs, Vol. XI, Issue 2, Winter/Spring 2005.
  15. National Security Council, “Strategy to Combat Trans- national Organized Crime: Addressing Converging Threats to National Security,” Washington, DC: Office of the President, July 2011. The Strategy grew out of a National Intelligence Estimate inititated by the Bush administration and completed in December 2008, and is a comprehensive government review of transnational organized crime, the first since 1995.
  16. “Fact Sheet: Strategy to Combat Transnational Organized Crime,” Washington, DC: Office of the Press Secretary, the White House, July 25, 2011.
  17. Ibid.
  18. Stewart Patrick, Weak Links: Fragile States, Global Threats and International Security, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011.
  19. The phrase “dangerous spaces” was used by Phil Williams to describe 21st-century security challenges in terms of spaces and gaps, including geographical, functional, social, economic, legal, and regulatory holes. See Phil Williams, “Here Be Dragons: Dan- gerous Spaces and International Security,” Anne L. Clunan and Harold A. Trinkunas eds., Ungoverned Spaces: Alternatives to State Authority in an Era of Softened Sovereignty, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010, pp. 34-37.
  20. For a more complete look at Transnistria and an excellent overview of the global illicit trade, see Misha Glenny, McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
  21. For a complete look at the operations of Taylor, recently convicted in the Special Court for Sierra Leone in the Hague for crimes against humanity, see Douglas Farah, Blood From Stones: The Secret Financial Network of Terror, New York: Broadway Books, 2004.
  22. For a look at the weapons transfers, see “Los ‘rockets’ Venezolanos” Semana, Colombia, July 28, 2009. For a look at doc- umented financial and logistical support of Chávez and Correa for the FARC, see “The FARC Files: Venezuela, Ecuador, and the Secret Archives of ‘Raúl Reyes,’” An IISS Strategic Dossier, Wash- ington, DC: International Institute for Strategic Studies, May 2011. To see FARC connections to Evo Morales, see Douglas Farah, “Into the Abyss: Bolivia Under Evo Morales and the MAS,” Alex- andria, VA: International Assessment and Strategy Center, 2009.
  23. Douglas Farah, “Iran in Latin America: Strategic Security Issues,” Alexandria, VA: International Assessment and Strategy Center, Defense Threat Reduction Agency Advanced Systems and Concept Office, May 2011.
  24. Rem Korteweg and David Ehrhardt, “Terrorist Black Holes: A Study into Terrorist Sanctuaries and Governmental Weakness,” The Hague, The Netherlands: Clingendael Centre for Strategic Studies, November 2005, p. 22.
  25. Robert H. Jackson, Quasi-states: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 1990. Jackson defines negative sovereignty as freedom from outside interference, the ability of a sovereign state to act in- dependently, both in its external relations and internally, towards its people. Positive sovereignty is the acquisition and enjoyment of capacities, not merely immunities. In Jackson’s definition, it presupposes “capabilities which enable governments to be their own masters” (p. 29). The absence of either type of sovereignty can lead to the collapse of or absence of state control.
  26. Anne L. Clunan and Harold A. Trinkunas eds., Ungov- erned Spaces: Alternatives to State Authority in an Era of Softened Sovereignty, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010, p. 19.
  27. Moises Naim, Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copy- cats are Hijacking the Global Economy, New York: Anchor Books, 2006, p. 33.
  28. Robert Killebrew and Jennifer Bernal, “Crime Wars: Gangs, Cartels and U.S. National Security,” Washington, DC: Center for New American Security, September 2010, available from www.cnas.org/files/documents/publications/CNAS_CrimeWars_ KillebrewBernal_3.pdf.
  29. Max G. Manwaring, Street Gangs: The New Urban Insurgency, Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, March 2005.
  30. As is true in much of Central America and Colombia, in Mexico there are centuries-old sanctuaries used by outlaws where the state had little authority. For a more complete explanation, see Gary Moore, “Mexico, the Un-failed State: A Geography Lesson,” InsightCrime, November 9, 2011, available from insight- crime.com/insight-latest-news/item/1820-mexico-the-un-failed-state-a- geography-lesson.
  31. For a look at the factors that led to the rise of the Bolivarian leaders, see Eduardo Gamarra, “Bolivia on the Brink: Center for Preventative Action, Council on Foreign Relations, February 2007; Cynthia J. Arnson et al., La Nueva Izquierda en América Latina: Derechos Humanos, Participación Política y Sociedad Civil (The New Left in Latin America: Human Rights, Political Participation and Civil Society), Washington, DC: The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, January 2009; Farah, “Into the Abyss: Bolivia Under Evo Morales and the MAS”; Farah and Simpson.
  32. See “Iran to Help Bolivia Build Peaceful Nuclear Power Plant,” Xinhua, October 31, 2010; Russia Izvestia Information, September 30, 2008; and Agence France Presse, “Venezuela Wants to Work With Russia on Nuclear Energy: Chávez,” September 29, 2008.
  33. Author interview with IAEA member in November, 2011. The official said the agency had found that Iran possessed enough uranium stockpiled to last a decade. Moreover, he said the evidence pointed to acquisition of minerals useful in missile production. He also stressed that dual-use technologies or items specifically used in the nuclear program had often been shipped to Iran as automotive or tractor parts. Some of the principal investments Iran has made in the Bolivarian states have been in a tractor fac- tory that is barely operational, a bicycle factory that does not seem to produce bicycles, and automotive factories that have yet to be built.
  34. “Venezuela/Iran ALBA Resolved to Continue Economic Ties with Iran,” Financial Times Information Service, July 15, 2010.
  35. Manwaring.
  36. These typologies were developed and discussed more completely, including the national security implications of their growth, in Richard Shultz, Douglas Farah, and Itamara V. Lo- chard, “Armed Groups: A Tier-One Security Priority,” USAF Academy, CO: USAF Institute for National Security Studies, Occasional Paper 57, September 2004.
  37. Louise I. Shelley, John T. Picarelli et al., Methods and Mo- tives: Exploring Links between Transnational Organized Crime and International Terrorism, Washington, DC: Department of Justice, September 2005.
  38. Ibid., p. 5.
  39. While much of Operation TITAN remains classified, there has been significant open source reporting, in part because the Colombian government announced the most important arrests. For the most complete look at the case, see Jo Becker, “Investi- gation into bank reveals links to major South American cartels,” International Herald Tribune, December 15, 2011. See also Chris Kraul and Sebastian Rotella, “Colombian Cocaine Ring Linked to Hezbollah,” Los Angeles Times, October 22, 2008; and “Por Lavar Activos de Narcos y Paramilitares, Capturados Integrantes de Or- ganización Internatcional” (“Members of an International Orga- nization Captured for Laundering Money for Narcos and Parami- litaries”), Fiscalía General de la Republica (Colombia) (Attorney General’s Office of Colombia), October 21, 2008.
  40. Among the reasons for the increase in cocaine trafficking to Western Europe is the price. While the cost of a kilo of cocaine averages about $17,000 in the United States, it is $37,000 in the EU. Shipping via Africa is relatively inexpensive and relatively attractive, given the enhanced interdiction efforts in Mexico and the Caribbean. See Antonio Mazzitelli, “The Drug Trade: Africa’s Expanding Role,” United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, presentation at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, May 28, 2009.
  41. Benjamin Weiser and William K. Rashbaum, “Liberian Of- ficials Worked with U.S. Agency to Block Drug Traffic,” New York Times, June 2, 2010.
  42. For a history of AQIM, see “Algerian Group Backs al Qaeda,” BBC News, October 23, 2003, available from news.bbc. co.uk/2/hi/africa/3207363.stm. For an understanding of the relation- ship among the different ethnic groups, particularly the Tuareg, and AQIM, see Terrorism Monitor, “Tuareg Rebels Joining Fight Against AQIM?” Jamestown Foundation, Vol. 8, Issue 40, November 4, 2010.
  43. Evan Perez, “U.S. Accuses Iran in Plot: Two Charged in Alleged Conspiracy to Enlist Drug Cartel to Kill Saudi Ambas- sador,” The Wall Street Journal, October 12, 2011.
  44. “La Amenaza Iraní” (“The Iranian Threat”), Univision Documentales, aired December 8, 2011.
  45. Sebastian Rotella, “Government says Hezbollah Profits From U.S. Cocaine Market via Link to Mexican Cartel,” ProPubli- ca, December 11, 2011.
  46. For an examination of the “cultures of contraband” and their implications in the region, see Rebecca B. Galemba, “Cultures of Contraband: Contesting the Illegality at the Mexico-Guatemala Border,” Ph.D. dissertation, Brown University Department of An- thropology, May 2009. For a look at the use of traditional smug- gling routes in TOC structures in Central America, see Doug- las Farah, “Mapping Transnational Crime in El Salvador: New Trends and Lessons From Colombia,” North Miami, FL: Western Hemisphere Security Analysis Center, Florida International Uni- versity, August 2011.
  47. For a more complete look at that conflict and other con- flicts over plazas, see Samuel Logan and John P. Sullivan, “The Gulf-Zeta Split and the Praetroian Revolt,” International Relations and Security Network, April 7, 2010, available from www.isn.ethz. ch/isn/Security-Watch/Articles/Detail/?ots591=4888caa0-b3db-1461- 98b9-e20e7b9c13d4&lng=en&id=114551.
  48. Mazzitelli.
  49. “Drug Trafficking as a Security Threat in West Africa,” New York: UN Office on Drugs and Crime, October 2008.
  50. For a look at the chaos in Guinea Bissau, see “Guinea- Bissau president shot dead,” BBC News, March 2, 2009, available from news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7918061.stm.
  51. Patrick.
    52. See, for example, Robert I. Rotberg, “Failed States, Collapsed States, Weak States: Causes and Indicators,” Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror, Washington, DC: Brookings In- stitution, January 2003.
  52. Rotberg.
  53. Rem Korteweg and David Ehrhardt, “Terrorist Black Holes: A Study into Terrorist Sanctuaries and Governmental Weakness,” The Hague, The Netherlands: Clingendael Centre for Strategic Studies, November 2005, p. 26.
  54. “The Failed States Index 2009,” Foreign Policy Magazine, July/August 2009, pp. 80-93, available from www.foreignpolicy.com/ articles/2009/06/22/2009_failed_states_index_interactive_map_and_ rankings.
  55. Julio A. Cirino et al., “Latin America’s Lawless Areas and Failed States,” in Paul D. Taylor, ed., Latin American Security Chal- lenges: A Collaborative Inquiry from North and South, Newport, RI: Naval War College, Newport Papers 21, 2004. Commercial insur- gencies are defined as engaging in “for-profit organized crime without a predominate political agenda,” leaving unclear how that differs from groups defined as organized criminal organiza- tions.
  56. For details of Taylor’s activities, see Douglas Farah, Blood From Stones: The Secret Financial Network of Terror, New York: Broadway Books, 2004.
  57. Hannah Stone, “The Comeback of Suriname’s ‘Narco- President’,” Insightcrime.org, Mar 4, 2011, available from insight- crime.org/insight-latest-news/item/865-the-comeback-of-surinames- narco-president.
  58. Simon Romero, “Returned to Power, a Leader Celebrates a Checkered Past,” The New York Times, May 2, 2011.
  59. “Wikileaks: Chávez funded Bouterse,” The Nation (Barba- dos), February 2, 2011.
  60. Harmen Boerboom, “Absence of Chávez a blessing for Su- riname,” Radio Netherlands Worldwide, August 12, 2010.
  61. For a look at the Zetas in Guatemala, see Steven Dudley, “The Zetas in Guatemala,” InSight Crime, September 8, 2011. For a look at Los Perrones in El Salvador, see Douglas Farah, “Organized Crime in El Salvador: Homegrown and Transnational Dimen- sions,” Organized Crime in Central America: The Northern Triangle, Woodrow Wilson Center Reports on the Americas #29, Wash- ington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, November 2011, pp. 104-139, available from www.wilsoncenter.org/ sites/default/files/LAP_single_page.pdf.
  62. Louise Shelley, “The Unholy Trinity: Transnational Crime, Corruption and Terrorism,” Brown Journal of World Affairs, Vol. XI, Issue 2, Winter/Spring 2005, p. 101.
  63. See Bill Lahneman and Matt Lewis, “Summary of Proceed- ings: Organized Crime and the Corruption of State Institutions,” College Park, MD: University of Maryland, November 18, 2002, available from www.cissm.umd.edu/papers/files/organizedcrime.pdf.
  64. Author interviews with Drug Enforcement Administra- tion and National Security Council officials; for example, two aircraft carrying more than 500 kgs of cocaine were stopped in Guinea Bissau after arriving from Venezuela. See “Bissau Police Seize Venezuelan cocaine smuggling planes,” Agence France Presse, July 19, 2008.
  65. “FARC Terrorist Indicted for 2003 Grenade Attack on Americans in Colombia,” Department of Justice Press Re- lease, September 7, 2004. available from www.usdoj.gov/opa/ pr/2004/September/04_crm_599.htm; and Official Journal of the European Union, Council Decision of December 21, 2005, available from eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/site/en/oj/2005/l_340/l_ 34020051223en00640066.pdf.
  66. “The FARC Files: Venezuela, Ecuador and the Secret Ar- chives of ‘Raúl Reyes’,” Washington, DC: International Institute for Strategic Studies,” May 2011.
  67. The strongest documentary evidence of Chávez’s support for the FARC comes from the Reyes documents, which contained the internal communications of senior FARC commanders with senior Venezuelan officials. These documents discuss everything from security arrangements in hostage exchanges to the possibil- ity of joint training exercises and the purchasing of weapons. For full details of these documents and their interpretation, see Ibid.
  68. “Treasury Targets Venezuelan Government Officials Sup- port of the FARC,” Washington, DC: U.S. Treasury Department, Office of Public Affairs, September 12, 2008. The designations came on the heels of the decision of the Bolivian government of Evo Morales to expel the U.S. ambassador, allegedly for support- ing armed movements against the Morales government. In soli- darity, Chávez then expelled the U.S. ambassador to Venezuela. In addition to the citations of the Venezuelan officials, the United States also expelled the Venezuelan and Bolivian ambassadors to Washington.
  69. “Chávez Shores up Military Support,” Stratfor, November 12, 2010.
  70. “Venezuela: Asume Nuevo Ministro De Defensa Acusado de Narco por EEUU” (“Venezuela: New Minister Accused by the United States of Drug Trafficking Takes Office”), Agence France Presse, January 17, 2012.
  71. Robert M. Morgenthau, “The Link Between Iran and Ven- ezuela: A Crisis in the Making,” speech at the Brookings Institu- tion, Washington, DC, September 8, 2009.
  72. Colombia, Venezuela: Another Round of Diplomatic Fu- ror,” Strafor, July 29, 2010.
  73. The FARC Files: Venezuela, Ecuador and the Secret Ar- chives of ‘Raúl Reyes’.”
  74. The Colombian decision to extradite Makled to Venezu- ela rather than the United States caused significant tension be- tween the two countries and probably means that the bulk of the evidence he claims to possess will never see the light of day. Among the documents he presented in prison were his checks cashed by senior generals and government officials and videos of what appear to be senior government officials in his home dis- cussing cash transactions. For details of the case, see José de Cór- doba and Darcy Crowe, “U.S. Losing Big Drug Catch,” The Wall Street Journal, April 1, 2011; “Manhattan U.S. Attorney Announces Indictment of one of World’s Most Significant Narcotics Kingpins,” United States Attorney, Southern District of New York, November 4, 2010.
  75. “Makled: Tengo suficientes pruebas sobre corrupción y narcotráfico para que intervengan a Venezuela” (“Makled: I have Enough Evidence of Corruption and Drug Trafficking to justify an invasion of Venezuela”), NTN24 TV (Colombia), April 11, 2011.
  76. For a more comprehensive look at the history of the FARC; its relations with Bolivia, Venezuela, and Ecuador; and its involvement in drug trafficking, see “The FARC Files: Ven- ezuela, Ecuador and the Secret Archives of ‘Raúl Reyes’”; Doug- las Farah, “Into the Abyss: Bolivia Under Evo Morales and the MAS,” Alexandria, VA: International Assessment and Strategy Center, June 2009; Douglas Farah and Glenn Simpson, “Ecuador at Risk: Drugs, Thugs, Guerrillas and the ‘Citizens’ Revolution,” Alexandria, VA: International Assessment and Strategy Center, January 2010.
  77. Farah, “Into the Abyss: Bolivia Under Evo Morales and the MAS.”
  78. Martin Arostegui, “Smuggling Scandal Shakes Bolivia,” The Wall Street Journal, March 3, 2011.
  79. Farah, “Into the Abyss: Bolivia Under Evo Morales and the MAS.”
  80. “The FARC Files: Venezuela, Ecuador, and the Secret Ar- chives of ‘Raul Reyes’’’; Farah and Simpson; and Francisco Huer- ta Montalvo et al., “Informe Comisión de Transparencia y Verdad: Caso Angostura” (“Report of the Commission on Transparency and Truth: The Angostura Case”), December 10, 2009, available from www.scribd.com/doc/24329223/informe-angostura.
  81. Farah and Simpson.
  82. For details of the relationships among these officials the president’s sister, and the Ostaiza brothers, see Farah and Simpson.
  83. “The FARC Files: Venezuela, Ecuador and the Secret Ar- chives of ‘Raúl Reyes’.”
  84. See, for example, Farah and Simpson; Huerta Montalvo; Arturo Torres, Juego del Camaleón: Los secretos de Angostura (The Chameleon’s Game: The Secrets of Angostura), 2009.
  85. “The FARC Files: Venezuela, Ecuador and the Secret Ar- chives of ‘Raúl Reyes’.”
  86. Farah, “Into the Abyss.”
  87. Eugene Roxas, “Spiritual Guide who gave Evo Baton caught with 350 kilos of liquid cocaine,” The Achacachi Post (Bo- livia), July 28, 2010.
  88. “Panama arrests Bolivia ex-drugs police chief Sanabria,” BBC News, February 26, 2011.
  89. “Las FARC Buscaron el Respaldo de Boliva Para Lograr Su Expansión” (“The FARC Looked for Bolivian Support in Order to Expand”).
  90. The MAS is the coalition of indigenous and coca growing organizations that propelled Morales to his electoral victory. The movement, closely aligned with Chávez and funded by the Ven- ezuelan government, has defined itself as Marxist, socialist, and anti-imperilist.
  91. It is interesting to note that Peredo’s brothers Roberto (aka Coco) and Guido (aka Inti) were the Bolivian contacts of Che Gue- vara, and died in combat with him. The two are buried with Gue- vara in Santa Clara, Cuba.
  92. A copy of the founding manifesto of the EMP and its adherents is available from bibliotecavirtual.clacso.org.ar/ar/libros/osal/ osal10/documentos.pdf.
  93. Prensa Latina, “President Boliviano Anunica Creación de Estado Mayor Popular” (“Bolivian President Announces the For- mation of a People’s High Command”), February 2, 2006.
  94. “Estado Mayor del Pueblo Convoca a Defender Al Gobi- erno de Evo” (“People’s High Command Calls for the Defense of Evo’s Government”), Agencia Boliviana de Informacion, April 17, 2006, available from www.bolpress.com/art.php?Cod=2006041721.
  95. The situation has changed dramatically with the election of Juan Manuel Santos as President of Colombia in 2010. Despite serving as Uribe’s defense minister during the most successful operations against the FARC and developing a deeply antagonis- tic relationship with Chávez in that capacity, relations between Santos and the Bolivarian heads of state have been surprisingly cordial since he took office. This is due in part to Santos’ agreeing to turn over copies of the Reyes hard drives to Correa, and his ex- pressed desire to normalize relations with Chávez. A particularly sensitive concession was allowing the extradition of Walid Mak- led, a designated drug kingpin by the United States, to be extra- dited to Venezuela rather than to stand trial in the United States.
  96. “The FARC Files: Venezuela, Ecuador and the Secret Ar- chives of ‘Raúl Reyes’.”
  97. March 11, 2005, e-mail from Iván Ríos to Raúl Reyes, pro- vided by Colombia officials, in possession of the author.
  98. April 1, 2006, e-mail from Raúl Reyes to Aleyda, provided by Colombia officials, in possession of the author.
  99. Following Ortega’s disputed electoral triumph in No- vember 2011, the FARC published a congratulatory communiqué lauding Ortega and recalling their historically close relationship. “In this moment of triumph how can we fail to recall that memo- rable scene in Caguán when you gave the Augusto Cesar San- dino medal to our unforgettable leader Manuel Marulanda. We have always carried pride in our chests for that deep honor which speaks to us of the broad vision of a man who considers himself to be a spiritual son of Bolivar.” Available from anncol.info/index. php?option=com_content&view=article&id=695:saludo-a-daniel-orteg a&catid=71:movies&Itemid=589.
  100. Reyes was killed a few days after the CCB assembly when the Colombian military bombed his camp, which was in Ec- uadoran territory. The bombing of La Angostura caused a severe diplomatic rift between Colombia and Ecuador, but the raid also yielded several hundred gigabytes of data from the computers Reyes kept in the camp, where he lived in a hardened structure and had been stationary for several months.
  101. Farah and Simpson.
  102. “U.S. Counternarcotics Cooperation with Venezuela Has Declined,” Washington, DC: Government Accountability Office, July 2009, GAO-09-806.
  103. Ibid., p. 12.
  104. For a more detailed look at this debate, see Iran in Latin America: Threat or Axis of Annoyance? in which the author has a chapter arguing for the view that Iran is a significant threat.
  105. “‘Jackal’ book praises bin Laden,” BBC News, June 26, 2003.
  106. See, for example, Associated Press, “Chávez: ‘Carlos the Jackal’ a ‘Good Friend’,” June 3, 2006.
  107. Raúl Reyes (trans.) and Hugo Chávez, “My Struggle,” from a March 23, 1999, letter to Illich Ramirez Sánchez, the Venezuelan terrorist known as “Carlos the Jackal,” from Ven- ezuelan president Hugo Chávez, in response to a previous let- ter from Ramirez, who is serving a life sentence in France for murder. Harper’s, October 1999, available from harpers.org/ archive/1999/10/0060674.
  108. In addition to Operation TITAN, there have been numer- ous incidents in the past 18 months in which operatives being directly linked to Hezbollah have been identified or arrested in Venezuela, Colombia, Guatemala, Aruba, and elsewhere in Latin America.
  109. Verstrynge, born in Morocco to Belgian and Spanish parents, began his political career on the far right of the Spanish political spectrum as a disciple of Manuel Fraga, and served in a national and several senior party posts with the Alianza Popular. By his own admission he then migrated to the Socialist Party, but never rose through the ranks. He is widely associated with radical anti-globalization views and anti-U.S. rhetoric, repeatedly stating that the United States is creating a new global empire and must be defeated. Although he has no military training or experience, he has written extensively on asymmetrical warfare.
  110. Verstrynge., pp. 56-57.
  111. Bartolomé. See also John Sweeny, “Jorge Verstrynge: The Guru of Bolivarian Asymmetric Warfare,” September 9, 2005 available from www.vcrisis.com; and “Troops Get Provocative Book,” Miami Herald, November 11, 2005.
  112. “Turkey holds suspicious Iran-Venezuela shipment,” Associated Press, June 1, 2009, available from www.ynetnews.com/ articles/0,7340,L-3651706,00.html.
  113. For a fuller examination of the use of websites, see Doug- las Farah, “Islamist Cyber Networks in Spanish-Speaking Latin America,” North Miami, FL: Western Hemisphere Security Anal- ysis Center, Florida International University, September 2011.
  114. “Hispan TV begins with ‘Saint Mary’,” Tehran Times, December 23, 2011, available from www.tehrantimes.com/arts-and- culture/93793-hispan-tv-begins-with-saint-mary.
  115. For a more complete look at Iran’s presence in Latin America, see Douglas Farah, “Iran in Latin America: An Over- view,” Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Summer 2009 (to be published as a chapter in Iran in Latin America: Threat or Axis of Annoyance? Cynthia J. Arnson et al., eds., 2010. For a look at the anomalies in the economic relations, see also Farah and Simpson.
  116. “Treasury Targets Hizbullah in Venezuela,” Washing- ton, DC: United States Department of Treasury Press Center, June 18, 2008, available from www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releas- es/Pages/hp1036.aspx.
  117. Orlando Cuales, “17 arrested in Curacao on suspicion of drug trafficking links with Hezbollah,” Associated Press, April 29, 2009.
  118. United States District Court, Southern District of New York, The United States of America v Jamal Yousef, Indictment, July 6, 2009.
  119. For a look at how the Ecuadoran and Venezuelan banks function as proxies for Iran, particularly the Economic Devel- opment Bank of Iran, sanctioned for its illegal support of Iran’s nuclear program, and the Banco Internacional de Desarrollo, see Farah and Simpson.
  120. Office of the Spokesman, “Seven Companies Sanctioned Under Amended Iran Sanctions Act,” Washington, DC: U.S. De- partment of State, May 24, 2011, available from www.state.gov/r/ pa/prs/ps/2011/05/164132.htm.
  121. Russia Izvestia Information, September 30, 2008, and Agence France Presse, “Venezuela Wants to Work With Russia on Nuclear Energy: Chávez,” September 29, 2008.
  122. Simon Romero, “Venezuela Says Iran is Helping it Look for Uranium,” New York Times, September 25, 2009.
  123. Nikolai Spassky, “Russia, Ecuador strike deal on nuclear power cooperation,” RIA Novosti, August 21, 2009.
  124. José R. Cárdenas, “Iran’s Man in Ecuador,” Foreign Pol- icy, February 15, 2011, available from shadow.foreignpolicy.com/ posts/2011/02/15/irans_man_in_ecuador.
  125. The primary problem has been the inability of the Colom- bian government to deliver promised services and infrastructure after the military has cleared the area. See John Otis, “Decades of Work but No Land Titles to Show for It,” GlobalPost, Novem- ber 30, 2009. For a more complete look at the challenges posed by the reemergence and adaptability of armed groups, see Fundación Arco Iris, Informe 2009: El Declive de la Seguridad Democratica? (Re- port 2009: The Decline of Democratic Security?), available from www. nuevoarcoiris.org.co/sac/?q=node/605.

Notes from Networking Futures: The Movements against Corporate Globalization

Networking Futures: The Movements against Corporate Globalization by Jeffrey S. Juris

 

Barcelona has emerged as a critical node, as Catalans have played key roles within the anarchist ­inspired Peoples’ Global Action (PGA) and the World Social Forum (WSF) process, both of which unite diverse movements in opposition to corporate globaliza­tion. Anti–corporate globalization movements involve an increasing conflu­ence among network technologies, organizational forms, and political norms, mediated by concrete networking practices and micropolitical struggles. Activists are thus not only responding to growing poverty, inequality, and environmental devastation; they are also generating social laboratories for the production of alternative democratic values, discourses, and practices.

Computer ­supported networks, including activist media projects, Listservs, and websites, were mobilizing hundreds of thousands of protesters, constituting “transnational counterpublics” (Olesen 2005) for the diffusion of alternative information. Indeed, media activism and digital networking more generally had become critical features of a transna­tional network of movements against corporate globalization, involving what Peter Waterman (1998) calls a “communications internationalism.” Moreover, emerging networking logics were changing how grassroots movements orga­nize, and were inspiring new utopian imaginaries involving directly demo­cratic models of social, economic, and political organization coordinated at local, regional, and global scales.

 

Jeff : How is PGA going?
Laurent: It’s the most interesting political process I’ve ever been a part of, but it’s kind of ambiguous.

Jeff : What do you mean?
Laurent: Well, you never really know who is involved.
Jeff : How can that be?
Laurent: It’s hard to pin down because no one can speak for PGA, and the ones who are most involved sometimes don’t even think they are part of it!

 

 

I really wanted to study the networks behind these demonstrations during their visible and “submerged” phases (Melucci 1989). It seemed that if activists wanted to create sustainable movements, it was important to learn how newly emerging digitally powered networks operate and how periodic mass actions might lead to long­ term social transformation. After several days, I finally realized what should have been apparent all along: my focus was not really a specific network, but rather the concrete practices through which such networks are constituted. Indeed, contemporary activist networks are fluid processes, not rigid structures. I would thus conduct an ethnographic study of transnational networking prac tices and the broader cultural logics, shaped by ongoing interactions with new digital technologies, that generate them.

To answer these questions, I turned to the traditional craft of the anthropologist: long­ term participant observation within and among activist networks themselves.

“Anti-globalization” is not a particularly apt label for a movement that is in­ternationalist in perspective, organizes through global communication net­ works, and whose participants travel widely to attend protests and gatherings. Moreover, most activists do not oppose globalization per se, but rather corpo­rate globalization, understood as the extension of corporate power around the world, undermining local communities, democracy, and the environment.

they [anti-globalization activists] are specifically challenging a concrete political and eco­ nomic project and a discourse that denies the possibility of an alternative (Weiss 1998). In examining anti–corporate globalization movements, it is thus impor­tant to consider how globalization operates along several distinct registers.

At the broadest level, globalization refers to a radical reconfiguration of time and space. It is thus a multidimensional process encompassing economic, so­cial, cultural, and political domains.8 With respect to the economic sphere, the current phase of globalization features several defining characteristics.9 First, there has been an unprecedented rise in the scope and magnitude of global fi­nance capital facilitated by digital technologies and market deregulation. Second, economic production and distribution are increasingly organized around decentralized global networks, leading to high ­volume, flexible, and custom commercialization. Finally, the global economy now has the capability to op­erate as a single unit in real time. More generally, contemporary globalization generates complex spatial patterns as flows of capital, goods, and people have come unbound, even as they are reinscribed within concrete locales.

globalization also provides a concrete enemy and symbolic framework, generating metonymic links among diverse struggles. In this sense, anti–corporate globalization networks such as PGA or the WSF help forge a global frame of reference. As the PGA slogan de­clares: “May the struggle be as transnational as capital!”

Neo­ liberal projects have facilitated the penetration of corporate capitalism across space, bringing new areas into global production, consumption, and labor circuits while commodifying healthcare, education, the environment, and even life itself.

 

At least since the Zapatista uprising against the Mexican government on January 1, 1994, the day the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect, activists have forged an alter­ native project of “grassroots globalization” (Appadurai 2000), combining placed ­based resistance and transnational networking (cf. Escobar 2001). Anti–corporate globalization movements have mounted a highly effective symbolic challenge to the legitimacy of neoliberalism. As the former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz (2002) suggests: “Until protesters came along there was little hope for change and no outlets for complaint. . . . It is the trade unionists, students, and environmentalists—ordinary citizens— marching in the streets of Prague, Seattle, Washington, and Genoa who have put the need for reform on the agenda of the developed world” (9).

Stiglitz is not alone among global elites in supporting activist demands. The international financier George Soros has consistently denounced “market fundamentalism” while the Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs has been a vocal critic of the Bretton Woods institutions. Moreover, leftist political parties in France, Spain, Italy, Brazil, and elsewhere have embraced the popular slogan of the World Social Forum: “Another World Is Possible.”

this book is not about the politics of globalization. Rather, it ex­plores emerging forms of organization among anti–corporate globalization movements, particularly in light of recent social, economic, and technological transformations. Although the activists explored in this book seek to influence contemporary political debates, they are also experimenting with new organi­zational and technological practices.

The rise of new digital technologies has profoundly altered the social movement landscape. Activists can now link up directly with one another, communicating through global communications networks without the need for a central bureaucracy. In what follows, I examine how activists are building local, regional, and global networks that are both instru­mental and prefigurative, facilitating concrete political interventions while reflecting activists’ emerging utopian ideals.1

the world and regional social forums and other grassroots networking processes have increasingly come to the fore. Although not as spectacular as direct actions, these projects have provided relatively sustainable platforms for generating alternative ideas, discourses, and practices, allowing activists to pursue their strategic and prefigurative goals in more lasting ways.

Technology, Norm, and form

Shortly after the Bolshevik revolution, the Russian anarchist Voline outlined a bold vision for an alternative, directly democratic society: “Of course . . . society must be organized. . . . the new organization . . . must be established freely, socially, and, above all, from below. The principle of organization must not issue from a center created in advance to capture the whole and impose it­ self upon it but on the contrary, it must come from all sides to create nodes of coordination, natural centers to serve all these points.” What strikes today’s reader about this passage is its resonance with the contemporary discourse of activist networking. Although the top­ down Leninist model of organization won out in the Soviet Union, consolidating a revolutionary paradigm that would be exported around the world, the past few decades have witnessed a resurgence of decentralized, networked organization and utopian visions of autonomy and grassroots counterpower. As we will see, these emerging network forms and imaginaries have been greatly facilitated by the rise of new digital technologies. Shaped by the networking logic of the Internet and broader dynamics associated with late capitalism, social movements are in­creasingly organized around flexible, distributed network forms (Castells 1997; cf. Bennett 2003; Hardt and Negri 2004). Observers have pointed to the rise of “social netwars” (Arquilla and Ronfeldt 2001) or an “electronic fabric of struggle” (Cleaver 1995), but such abstract depictions tell us little about con­crete networking practices.

This book outlines a practice­ based approach to the study of networks, linking structure and practice to larger social, economic, and technological forces.20 I employ the term “cultural logic of networking” as a way to conceive the broad guiding principles, shaped by the logic of informational capitalism, that are internalized by activists and generate concrete networking practices.21 Networking logics specifically entail an embedded and embodied set of social and cultural dispositions that orient actors toward (1) the building of hori­zontal ties and connections among diverse autonomous elements, (2) the free and open circulation of information, (3) collaboration through decentralized coordination and consensus­ based decision making, and (4) self-directed networking. At the same time, networking logics represent an ideal type. As we shall see, they are unevenly distributed in practice and always exist in dy­namic tension with other competing logics, generating a complex “cultural politics of networking” within particular spheres.

In what follows, I argue that anti–corporate globalization movements involve a growing confluence among networks as computer­ supported infrastructure (technology), networks as organizational structure (form), and networks as political model (norm), mediated by concrete activist practice. Computer networks provide the technological infrastructure for the emer­gence of transnational social movements, constituting arenas for the produc­tion and dissemination of activist discourses and practices. These networks are in turn produced and transformed by the discourses and practices circu­lating through them.24 Such communication flows follow distinct trajectories, reproducing existing networks or generating new formations. Contemporary social movement networks are thus “self­-reflexive” (Giddens 1991), constructed through communicative practice and struggle. Beyond social morphology, the network has also become a powerful cultural ideal, particularly among more radical activists, a guiding logic that provides a model of, and model for, emerging forms of directly democratic politics.

contemporary norms and forms are shaped by technological change and, further, how they reflect emerging utopian imaginaries.

Computer-Supported Social Movements

Although the wide­ spread proliferation of individualized, loosely bounded, and fragmentary social networks predates cyberspace, computer­ mediated communication has reinforced such trends, allowing communities to sustain interactions across vast distances. The Internet is also being incorporated into more routine aspects of daily social life as virtual and physical activities are increas­ingly integrated. The Internet thus facilitates global connectedness even as it strengthens local ties.

Build­ing on the pioneering use of digital technologies by the Zapatistas, as well as early free trade campaigns, anti–corporate globalization activists have used computer networks to organize actions and mobilizations, share information and resources, and coordinate campaigns by communicating at a distance.

Computer ­mediated communication is thus most effective when it is moderated, clearly focused, and used together with traditional modes of communication. Accordingly, activists generally use e­mail to stay informed about activities and perform concrete logistical tasks, while complex planning, political discussions, and relationship building occur within physical settings.

Network-Based organizational Forms

Beyond providing a technological medium, the Internet’s reticulate struc­ture reinforces network-­based organizational forms.

Networking logics have given rise to what many activists in Spain and Catalonia refer to as a “new way of doing politics.” By this they mean a mode of organizing involving horizontal coordination among autonomous groups, grassroots participation, consensus decision making, and the free and open exchange of information, although, as we shall see, this ideal is not always conformed to in practice. While the command-oriented logic of traditional parties and unions involves recruiting new members, developing unified strat­egies, pursuing political hegemony, and organizing through representative structures, network politics revolve around the creation of broad umbrella spaces, where diverse collectives, organizations, and networks converge around a few common principles while preserving their autonomy and identity­ based specificity. The objective becomes enhanced “connectivity” and horizon­tal expansion by articulating diverse movements within flexible, decentralized information structures that facilitate transnational coordination and com­munication. Key “activist­ hackers” (Nelson 1999) operate as relayers and exchangers, receiving, interpreting, and routing information to diverse net­ work nodes. Like computer hackers, activist ­hackers combine and recombine cultural codes—in this case political signifiers, sharing information about projects, mobilizations, strategies, and tactics within global communication networks.33

At the same time, discourses of open networking often conceal other forms of exclusion based on unequal access to information or technology. As a grassroots activist from India suggested to me at the 2002 WSF in Porto Alegre, “It’s not enough to talk about networks; we also have to talk about democracy and the distribution of power within them.”

what many observers view as a single, unified anti– corporate globalization movement is actually a congeries of competing yet sometimes overlapping social movement networks that differ according to is­ sue addressed, political subjectivity, ideological framework, political culture, and organizational logic.

Social movements are complex fields shot through with internal differen­tiation (Burdick 1995). Struggles within and among specific movement net­ works shape how they are produced, how they develop, and how they relate to one another within broader movement fields. Cultural struggles involv­ing ideology (anti-globalization versus anticapitalism), strategies (summit hopping versus sustained organizing), tactics (violence versus nonviolence), organizational form (structure versus non-structure), and decision making (consensus versus voting), or what I refer to as the cultural politics of network­ing, are enduring features of anti–corporate globalization landscapes. In the following chapters, I thus emphasize culture, power, and internal conflict.34 As we shall see, discrepant organizational logics often lead to heated struggles within broad “convergence spaces” (Routledge 2003), including the “unitary” campaigns against the World Bank and EU in Barcelona or the World Social Forum process more generally.

Networks as Emerging Ideal

Expanding and diversifying networks is more than a concrete organizational objective; it is also a highly valued political goal. The self­-produced, self-developed, and self­-managed network becomes a widespread cultural ideal, providing not only an effective model of political organizing but also a model for reorganizing society as a whole.

The dominant spirit behind this emerging political praxis can broadly be defined as anarchist, or what ac­tivists in Barcelona refer to as libertarian.35 Classic anarchist principles such as autonomy, self­ management, federation, direct action, and direct democracy are among the most important values for today’s radicals, who increasingly identify as anticapitalist, anti­authoritarian, or left ­libertarian.

 

These emerging political subjectivities are not necessarily identical to anar­chism in the strict ideological sense. Rather, they share specific cultural affini­ties revolving around the values associated with the network as an emerging political and cultural ideal: open access, the free circulation of information, self­-management, and coordination based on diversity and autonomy.

In a similar vein, Arturo Escobar (2004) has drawn on complexity theory to argue that anti–corporate globalization movements are emergent in that “the actions of multiple agents interacting dynamically and following local rules rather than top­ down commands result in visible macro­behavior or structures” (222).36 This is a compelling depiction of how anti–corporate globalization networks operate from a distance, but a slightly different perspective emerges when we engage in activist networking firsthand. Transnational networking requires a great deal of communicative work and struggle. Complexity theory provides a useful metaphor, but given its emphasis on abstract self -organizing systems, it tends to obscure micropolitical practices.

activists increasingly express their emerging utopian imaginaries di­rectly through concrete organizational and technological practice. As Geert Lovink (2002) suggests, “Ideas that matter are hardwired into software and network architectures” (34). This helps to explain why ideological debates are often coded as conflicts over organizational process and form.

Networks are not inherently demo­cratic or egalitarian, and they may be used for divergent ends. The network technologies and forms explored in this book were initially developed as a strategy for enhancing coordination, scale, and efficiency in the context of post-­Fordist capital accumulation. As we are reminded nearly every day, ter­ror and crime outfits increasingly operate through global networks as well.

while networks more generally are not necessarily democratic or egalitarian, their distributed structure does suggest a potential affinity with egalitarian values—including flat hierarchies, horizontal relations, and decen­ tralized coordination—which activists project back onto network technolo­ gies and forms.

What many activists now call “horizontalism” is best understood as a guiding vision, not an empirical depiction

Multiscalar ethnography

I specifically employ two tracking strategies: fol­ lowing activists to mobilizations and gatherings, and monitoring discourses and debates through electronic networks.

During my time in the field, I employed diverse ethnographic methods. First, I conducted participant observation among activists at mass mobili­zations, actions, and gatherings; meetings and organizing sessions; and in­ formal social settings. Second, I made extensive use of the Internet, which allowed me to participate in and follow planning, coordinating, and political discussions within Catalan, Spanish, and English­ language Listservs based in Europe, Latin America, and North America. Third, I conducted seventy qual­ itative interviews with Barcelona ­based activists from diverse backgrounds. Fourth, I collected and examined movement ­related documents produced for education, publicity, and outreach, including flyers, brochures, reports, and posters. Finally, I also collected articles and texts within mainstream and alternative media.

Practicing Militant ethnography

The ethnographic methodology developed here, which I call “militant eth­nography,” is meant to address what Wacquant (1992) calls the “intellectual bias”: how our position as outside observer “entices us to construe the world as a spectacle, as a set of significations to be interpreted rather than as concrete problems to be solved practically” (39). The tendency to position oneself at a distance and treat social life as an object to decode rather than entering the flow and rhythm of ongoing social interaction hinders our ability to understand social practice.45 To grasp the concrete logic generating specific practices, one has to become an active participant. With respect to social movements, this means organizing actions and workshops, facilitating meetings, weighing in during strategic and tactical debates, staking out political positions, and put­ ting one’s body on the line during direct actions. Simply taking on the role of “circumstantial activist” (Marcus 1995) is not sufficient; one has to build long­ term relationships of commitment and trust, become entangled with complex relations of power, and live the emotions associated with direct­action orga­nizing and transnational networking. Militant ethnography thus refers to ethnographic research that is not only politically engaged but also collaborative, thus breaking down the divide between researcher and object.46

Furthermore, militant ethnography also generates embodied and affec­tive understanding. As anyone who has participated in mass direct actions or demonstrations can attest, such events produce powerful emotions, involving alternating sensations of anticipation, tension, anxiety, fear, terror, solidar­ity, celebration, and joy. These affective dynamics are not incidental; they are central to sustained processes of movement building and activist networking. In this sense, I use my body as a research tool, particularly during moments of intense passion and excitement, to generate what Deidre Sklar (1994) calls “kinesthetic empathy.”47

militant ethnography can provide tools for activist (self­) reflection and decision making while remaining pertinent for broader aca­ demic audiences. I thus hope to contribute to strategic debates, but always from the partial and situated position of the militant ethnographer.

Practicing militant ethnography can thus help activists carry out their own ethnographic research.

For Burdick, this involves supporting movements in their efforts to reach out to a wider audience. But it might also mean helping activists analyze di­ verse movement sectors, understand how they operate, and learn how to most effectively work together.

Militant ethnography thus includes three interrelated modes: (1) collective reflection and visioning about movement practices, logics, and emerging cul­tural and political models; (2) collective analysis of broader social processes and power relations that affect strategic and tactical decision making; and (3) collective ethnographic reflection about diverse movement networks, how they interact, and how they might better relate to broader constituencies. Each of these levels involves engaged, practice­ based, and politically committed re­ search carried out in horizontal collaboration with social movements.

those of us within the academy can use writing and publishing as a form of resistance, working within the system to generate alternative politically en­gaged accounts.

The Book ahead

the genealogy of diverse processes that converged there, including grassroots struggles in the Global South, student­based anticorporate activism, campaigns against struc­tural adjustment and free trade, anarchist ­inspired direct action, and global Zapatista solidarity networks. I then go on to trace the growth and expansion of anti–corporate globalization movements after Seattle, before concluding with an analysis of their major defining characteristics.

The conflict between networking and traditional command logics forms part of a broader series of struggles involving competing visions, ideologies, and practices, leading to a complex pattern of shifting alliances driven by networking politics at local, regional, and global scales.

Notes from The War of All the People: The Nexus of Latin American Radicalism and Middle Eastern Terrorism

The War of All the People: The Nexus of Latin American Radicalism and Middle Eastern Terrorism

 

by Jon B. Perdue, Stephen Johnson

Jon B. Perdue is the author of The War of All the People: The Nexus of Latin American Radicalism and Middle Eastern Terrorism, published by Potomac Books in August 2012. Mr. Perdue was also the editor and wrote the foreword to the book Rethinking the Reset Button: Understanding Contemporary Russian Foreign Policy by former Soviet Central Committee member and defector Evgeni Novikov. He also contributed a chapter to the book Iran’s Strategic Penetration of Latin America (Lexington Books, 2014).

Perdue also serves as an instructor and lecturer on peripheral asymmetric warfare, strategic communication and counterterrorism strategy. He is credited with coining the term “preclusionary engagement,” a strategy of counterterrorism that focuses on combined, small-unit operations that can be conducted with a much smaller footprint prior to or in the early stages of conflict against a threatening enemy, in order to preclude the necessity of much larger operations, which are far more difficult in terms of costs and casualties, once the conflict has escalated due to the lack of a forceful resistance.

Mr. Perdue’s articles have been published in the Washington Times, Investor’s Business Daily, the Miami Herald, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and a number of newspapers in Latin America. Perdue served as an international election observer in the historic elections in Honduras in 2009 and as an expert witness in a precedent-setting human rights trial in Miami-Dade Circuit Court in 2010. He has served as a security analyst for NTN24, a Latin America-based satellite news channel, and CCTV, a 24-hour English-language news channel based in China.

For most of the past decade Mr. Perdue has served as the Director of Latin America programs for the Fund for American Studies in Washington, DC, and as a Senior Fellow for the Center for a Secure Free Society. He also serves on the boards of the Americas Forum in Washington, DC and the Fundación Democracia y Mercado in Santiago, Chile. He has worked unofficially on three presidential campaigns, contributing foreign policy and counterterrorism policy advice.

Preface

As Edward Gibbon hypothesized despite its greatness and the quantum leap in human achievement and prosperity that it wrought, Rome fell after being pushed – but it requires little force to topple what had already been hollowed from within. Rome fell when Romans lost the desire and the ability to defend it.

The American republic has survived the buffeting winds of war and governmental caprice to stand as the sole remaining superpower. Its principal threat is no longer from rival nation-states but from a multitude of smaller subversions.

As the military strategist Bernard Brodie noted, “good strategy presumes good anthropology and sociology. Some of the greatest military blinders of all time have resulted from juvenile evaluations in this department.

What still challenges the United States today is the pervasive lack of seriousness that prevents those agencies tasked with defending the homeland from being able to even name the enemy that we face. It illustrates a failure of will to claim the legitimacy that we have sacrificed so much to attain and an infections self-consciousness that has no basis in realpolitik.

More than any failed strategy or improper foreign policy, it is this American self-consciousness that is the topsoil for the growth of anti-American terrorism worldwide.

It is foolhardy to allow our enemies to paralyze our will to fight by defining American foreign policy as some new form of imperialism or hegemony. The desire for human freedom, lamentably, is not an expansionist impulse.

Introduction

“The War of All the People” is the doctrine of asymmetrical and political warfare that has been declared against the United States, Western civilization, and most of the generally accepted tenants of modernity. At its helm today are Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran – two self-described “revolutionary” leaders hell-bent on the destruction of capitalism and what they call “U.S. hegemony” throughout the world.

In October 2007 the two announced the creation of a “global progressive front” in the first of a series of joint projects designed to showcase “the ideological kinship of the left and revolutionary Islam.” Ahmadinejad would promote the theme on state visits to Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia, highlighting what he called “the divine aspect of revolutionary war”.

Declaring his own war against “imperialism,” Chavez aims to supplant U.S. dominance in the hemisphere with so-called 21st Century Socialism.

(2)

The Castro regime adopted the War of All the People doctrine from Viet Minh general Vo Nguyen Giap, who began publishing the military theories of Ho Chi Ming along with his own (much of it adapted from the theories of Mao Zedong) in the 1960s.

Giap’s most thorough examination of the tenets of a “people’s war” was put forth in his book To Arm the Revolutionary Masses: To Build the People’s Army, published in 1975.

(8)

What makes the current threat different is its stealthy, asymmetrical nature. The doctrine has been adapted to avoid the missteps made during the days of Soviet expansionism and has instead focused on the asymmetrical advantages that unfree states enjoy over free ones. While the United States enjoys a free press, it has no equivalent to the now-globalized state-run propaganda operations that unfree states utilize to attack the legitimacy of free ones.

…oil-rich states like Venezuela and Libya have been able to leverage their petrodollars to buy influence in those organizations and by corrupting weaker states to do their bidding on the world stage. These regimes have also formed new alliances around “revolutionary” and “anti-imperialist” ideology in order to coordinate their efforts against the ideals of the West.

(10)

Peripheral warfare conducted by Chavez also includes the use of “ALBA houses,” ostensible medical offices for the poor that serve as recruitment and indoctrination centers for his supporters in neighboring countries… ALBA houses are modeled on Cuba’s Barrio Adentro program, which it has utilized for years to infiltrate spies and agitators into neighboring countries under the guise of doctors, coaches and advisers to help the poor… What is given up by ignoring a tyrant’s provocations is the ability to actively prevent the incremental destruction of democratic institutions that solidify his power.

(16)

There exists a mistakenly view of the interactions between disparate extremist organizations and terrorist groups internationally. This “burqa-bikini paradox” – the premise that culturally or ideologically distinct actors couldn’t possibly be cooperating to any significant degree – has frequently been the default position of journalists, the diplomatic community, and even some in the intelligence community.

Douglas Farah, a former Latin America correspondent for the Washington Post and now a senior fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center, challenged this premise at a December 2008 Capitol Hill briefing titled “Venezuela and the threat it Poses to U.S. and Hemispheric Security”:

These lines that we think exist where these groups like Iran – well they’re a theocracy, or Hezbollah, they’re religiously motivated, they won’t deal with anyone else – bullshit! They will deal with whoever they need to deal with at any given time to acquire what they want…. And the idea that someone won’t deal with Hezbollah because they don’t like their theology is essentially horseshit. You can document across numerous times and numerous continents where people of opposing views will do business together regardless of ideology or theology.

(17)

It is no stretch of logic to surmise that terrorist groups are the natural allies of authoritarian regimes. But throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, there was a battle in Washington between those who believed that the Soviet Union was complicit in terrorism and those who maintained that the Soviets eschewed it as a tactic. The official policy of the Soviets during the Cold War was to declare its opposition to terrorism while unofficially supporting and supplying proxy terrorist groups. But in 1970 Moscow had grown bold enough to train terrorists to overthrow the Mexican government and set up a satellite totalitarian state just across the U.S. Border.

(20)

Carlos (the Jackal) “was given a staff of 75 to plot further deaths and provided with guns, explosives and an archive of forged papers” by the East Germans. He was provided with safe houses and East German experts to ensure that his phones were not bugged, and even his cars were repaired by the Stasi.

(21)

The recovery of Stasi files had proven that the extent of Soviet bloc involvement in terrorism was far greater than even the CIA and other security agencies had considered. Throughout the Cold War, much of the conventional media and the foreign policy establishment often dismissed reports that the Soviets were sponsoring international terrorism or that the Marxist terrorists of Europe might be intermingling with Maoists in Latin America.

Some analysts and scholars referred to the writing of Karl Marx and Lenin to shot that the, and hence the Soviets, were ideologically opposed to terrorism… This and other tenants of Marxist-Leninist theory were often used to claim an ideological aversion to Soviet terror sponsorship.

(22)

In 1916 Lenin wrote to Franz Koritschoner, one of the founders of Austria’s Communist Party, telling him that the Bolsheviks “are not at all opposed to political killing… but as revolutionary tactics individual attacks are inexpedient and harmful. Only the mass movement can be considered genuine political struggle. Only in direct immediate connection with the mass movement can and must individual terrorist acts be of value.

(24-25)

Soviet Use of Communist Party Front Groups in the United Nations

The CPSU’s International Department was tasked with controlling the policy of the world communist movement. From 1955 to 1986, Boris Ponomarev was the chief of this department, which became the premier Soviet agency for fomenting and supporting international terrorism.

Under Ponomarev, the CPSU founded the Lenin Institute, which trained communist from Western and Third World countries in psychological warfare and propaganda and in guerilla warfare. Seeing the potential of “liberation movements” and “anti-imperialist” movements as proxy forces against the West, the CPSU also founded in 1960 the Peoples’ Friendship University (renamed Patrice Lumumba University in 1961) to train “freedom fighters” from the Third World who were no Communist Party members.

The International Department was also in charge of setting up front groups and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that could advocate by proxy for Soviet aims at the United Nations (UN) and other international governments. According to a U.S. House of Representative Subcommittee on Oversight report on February 6, 1980, Soviet subsidies to international front organizations exceeded $63 million in 1979 alone.

The report noted that the KGB and the Central Committee “actively promote” the UN imprimatur of the NGO front groups. The international Department controlled the NGOs and held coordinated meetings twice a year, and an official of the Soviet journal Problems of Peace and Socialism (also known as World Marxist Review) would always attend.

According to the report, Anatoly Mkrtchyan, the Soviet director of the External Relations Division of Public Information, was in charge of the NGO section.

Source: At the U.N., Soviet Fronts Pose as Nongovernmental Organizations Juliana Geran Pilon

https://www.heritage.org/global-politics/report/the-un-soviet-fronts-pose-nongovernmental-organizations

(32)

After Arafat started the First Intifada in 1987, both the Soviet Union and Cuba increased military support to the Palestinians, often portraying U.S. and Israeli actions in the Middle East as hegemonic aggression against unarmed Palestinian victims.

In 1990 Havana sent assistance to Iran following an earthquake, and Iran started buying biotechnology products from Cuba. In the last 1990s Castro made a number of bilateral agreements with Iran, and several high-level delegations from Iran made trips to Cuba.

(33)

In 1962, the CPSU helped to establish the Paris-based Solidarite terrorist support network that was masterminded by Henri Curiel. Curial was an Egyptian communist born to an Italian Jewish family who ran a highly successful clandestine organization providing everything from arms to safe houses to actionable intelligence for terrorist group from Brazil to South Africa.

In 1982 a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate stated that Curiel’s Solidarite “has provided support to a wide variety of Third World leftist revolutionary organizations,” including “false documents, financial aid, and safehaven before and after operations, as well as some illegal training in France in weapons and explosives.”

Besides the direct support and training of terrorists, the Soviets made ample use of front groups that posed as religious organizations, academic institutions, or human rights advocates. A 1980 CIA report titled Soviet Covert Action and Propaganda stated:

At a meeting in February 1979 of World Peace Council (WPC) officials, a resolution was adopted to provide “uninterrupted support for the just struggle of the people of Chile, Guatemala, Uruguay, Haiti, Paraguay, El Salvador, Argentina and Brazil.” Without resort to classified information, from this one my logically conclude that the named countries are targets for Soviet subversion and national liberation struggles on a continuing basis. One might interpret “uninterrupted support for the just struggle” to mean continuing financial and logistic support to insurrection movements.

(34)

A former senior GRU officer confirmed this when he made the following statement:

…” If I give you millions of dollars’ worth of weapons, or cash, I have a small right to expect you to help me. I won’t tell you where to place the next bomb, but I do expect to have a little influence on your spheres of action. And if someone later arrests an Irishman, he can honestly say that he never trained in the Soviet Union. And he still believes he is fighting for himself.”

(38)

The point that Colby and Sterling were making was that the Soviets supported terrorist groups as proxy forces, specifically to retain the appearance of distance from their activities. The more important point was that international terrorist groups would have been far less prodigious, and far less deadly, without the support that they received from the Soviet Union and its satellite states…. The Soviet aspect could be seen as giving these groups a “do-it-yourself kit for terrorist warfare.”

(41)

According to [Former Secretary of Defense Robert] Gates, “We would learn a decade later that [CIA analysis] had been too cautious. After the communist governments in Eastern Europe collapsed, we found out that the Easter Europeans (especially the East Germans) indeed not only had provided sanctuary for West European ‘nihilist’ terrorists, but had trained, armed and funded many of them.

(49)

She (Leila Khaled) has also been a regularly scheduled speaker at the World Social Forum.

On May 26, 1971, Khaled told the Turkish newspaper Hurryet that:

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) sends instructors to Turkey in order to train Turkish youth in urban guerrilla fighting, kidnapping, plan hijackings, and other matters… In view of the fact that it is more difficult than in the past for Turks to go and train in PFLP camps, the PFLP is instructing the Turks in the same way as it trains Ethiopians and revolutionaries from underdeveloped countries. The PFLP has trained most of the detained Turkish underground members.

Within ten years, terrorist attacks in Turkey would be killing an average of nine to ten people per day.

Source: Sterling, Terror Network

(52)

The Baath Party’s founders were educated at the Sorbonne in Paris, where, incidentally, an inordinate number of the world’s former dictators were schooled. Commenting on this phenomenon, Egyptian journalist Issandr Elamsani said that Arab intellectuals still see the world through a 1960s lens: “They are all ex-Sorbonne, old Marxists, who look at everything through a postcolonial prism.”

The Sorbonne in the 1960s was one of the intellectual centers of radial political science. In the tradition of the Jacobins, it offered a pseudo-intellectual foundation for end-justifies-means terrorism, which many of its graduates – among them Cambodian dictator Pol Pot, Peruvian terrorist leader Abimeal Guzman, intellectual arbiter of the Iranian revolution Ali Shariati, and Syrian Baathist Michel Aflaq – would use to justify mass murder.

(60-61)

Aleida Guevara, the daughter of Che, made a trip to Lebanon in 2010 to lay a wreath on the tomb of former Hezbollah leader Abbas al-Musawi. At the ceremony, she echoed [Daniel] Ortega’s sentiments, saying, “I think that as long as [the martyr’s] memory remains within us, we will have more strength, and that strength will grow and develop, until we make great achievements and complete our journey to certain victory.”. Guevara later told supporters while visiting Baalbek, “If we do not conduct resistance, we will disappear from the face of the earth.” To make sure that the international press understood the subtext, Hezbollah’s official in the Bekaa Valley said, “We are conducting resistance for the sake of liberty and justice, and to liberate our land and people from Zionist occupation, which receives all the aid it needs from the U.S. administration.

Though Guevara was parroting what has become standard rhetoric among revolutionaries in all parts of the world, her visit had the potential to become controversial. Just three years earlier, in 2007, she and her brother Camilo had visited Tehran for a conference that was intended to emphasize the “common goals” of Marxism and Islamist radicalism.

Titled “Che Like Chamran,” the conference was a memorial to the fortieth anniversary of Che Guevara’s death, which happened to coincide with the twenty0sizzth anniversary of the death of Mostafa Chamran. Chamran, a radical Khomeinist who founded the Amal terrorist group in Lebanon, went to Iran in 1979 to help the mullahs take over and died in 1981 in the Iran-Iraq War (or, according to some, in a car accident.

Speaker Mortaza Firuzabadi, a Khomeinist radical, told the crowd that the mission of both leftist and Islamist revolutionaries was to fight America “everywhere and all of the time,” adding, “Our duty is to the whole of humanity. We seek unity with revolutionary movements everywhere. This is why we have invited the children of Che Guevara.”

…He ended his speech with an entreaty to all anti-American revolutionaries in the world to accept the leadership of Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his revolutionary regime.

Qassemi returned once again to the podium at this point. “The Soviet Union is gone,” Qassemi declared. “The leadership of the downtrodden has passed to our Islamic Republic. Those who wish to destroy America must understand the reality.

Though it has been treated as a rarity by much of the Western media, collaboration between radical groups that might appear to have little in common have included joint operations of far-right, fascist, and neo-Nazi groups with far-left, Marxist and Islamist groups. These collaborations go back well before World War II.

The widespread misconception that a philosophical or religious wall of separation exists between the extremist ideological movements of the world is not only demonstrable false, it is highly detrimental to a proper analysis of the terrorist threat and to the public’s understanding of counterterrorism efforts. This myth has served well the forces of subversion.

The small subset of the population that is drawn to extremist movements is not limited to those who process the same or a similar ideology but instead includes those who tend to seek personal fulfilment from extremism itself. Ideology can be quite malleable when militants see an opportunity to take advantage of the popularity of a more militant group, regardless of any ideological differences between them. In fact, these groups have often found common cause soon after seeing a rival group begin to dominate international headlines.

(64-65)

One of the principal objectives of a terrorist attack that is often overlooked is the expected overreaction of the state in response to the threat.

Feltrinelli’s thesis, like those of many terrorist theorists before and after, was that this would bring “an advanced phase of the struggle” by forcing “an authoritarian turn to the right”.

Feltrinelli is emblematic of the ideologically itinerant radicals who wreaked havoc in the 1960s and 1970s in Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. He was a close friend of Fidel Castro’s, attended the Tricontinental Conference in 1966, and published its official magazine, Tricontinental, in Europe after the event… (he) began wearing a Tupamaros uniform on his return to Italy. There Feltrinelli built his own publishing empire, flying to Moscow to secure the publishing rights to Boris Pasternack’s Dr. Zhivago and publishing Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa’s bestseller The Leopard, … The profit from these blockbusters allowed him to fill bookstores throughout Italy with radical manifestos and terrorist literature.

On March 15, 1972, the police found Feltrinelli’s body in pieces at the foot of a high-voltage power line pylon. He had been placing explosives on the pylon with a group of fellow terrorists when one of his own explosives detonated accidentally.

(71)

According to the Aryan Nations’ website, the premise that could bridge the ideological gap between these ostensibly disparate worldviews that Muslims are of the same “Aryan” lineage. This view was not hard to concoct. Adolph Hitler’s minister of economics, Hjalmar Schacht, had professed a similar theory which was one promoted by King Darius the Great: the Persian bloodline was of Aryan lineage. This, Schacht argued it made the Persians – and therefor, somehow, all Muslims – the natural allies of Hitler’s vision of a superior Aryan race that should rule the world.

(72-73)

The rise of the Third Reich became a rallying point for many Muslim leaders, who fostered a bit of Muslim mythmaking by claiming that both Hitler and Mussolini were closet Muslims. One rumor had it that Hitler had secretly converted to Islam and that his Muslim name was Hayder, translated as “the Brave One”.” Mussolini, the rumors told, was really an Egyptian Muslim name Musa Nili, which translated into “Moses of the Nile.”

As far back as 1933, Arab nationalists in Syria and Iraq were supporting Nazism.

Arab support for Hitler was widespread by the time he rose to power. And when the Nazis announced the Nuremburg Laws in 1935 to legalize the confiscation of Jewish property, “telegrams of congratulations were sent to the fuhrer from all over the Arab and Islamic world.”

It was Germany’s war against the British Empire that motivated much of the early support for the Nazi regime. Hitler was, after all, fighting the three shared enemies of Germany and the Arab world at the same time: Zionism, communism, and the British Empire.

After World War II, many German officers and Nazi Party officials were given asylum in the Middle East, mostly in Syria and Egypt, where they were utilized to help set up clandestine services throughout the region – this time in support of many of the anticolonialist forces fighting the British and French.

(74)

Ronald Newton, a Canadian academic who wrote The Nazi Menace in Argentina, 1931-1947… thesis was that the tales of Nazi-fascist settlement in Argentina was the result of British disinformation, designed to thwart postwar market capture of Argentina by the United States. The theory was refuted in 1998 after Argentina president Carlos Menem put together a commission to study the issue.

(85)

The stated aim of right-wing extremist groups had always been to bring down the leftist democratic state model and bring about a national socialist or fascist state. But that ideology began to devolve in the 1980s as neo-Nazi groups started to see the dame and legitimacy that was afforded to left-wing terrorist groups that were committing far more violent acts and seemed to be rewarded proportionately.

Two years after Palestinian terrorists killed eleven Israeli team members at the Munich Olympics in 1972, PLO chairman Yasser Arafat was invited by the United Nations to address its General Assembly, and the PLO was awarded UN observer status shortly after that. Moreover, by the 1980s the PLO had been accorded diplomatic relations with more countries than Israel had.

(91)

In 1969, Qaddafi became the chief financier of terrorism of every stripe throughout the world. And though he became known as the principal donor to worldwide leftist groups, he began his terrorist franchise with those of the extreme right.

(93)

In his book Revolutionary Islam, Carlos tried to join the two strongest currents of revolutionary terror, declaring that “only a coalition of Marxists and Islamists can destroy the United States.”

Carlos’s book would be little noticed until Hugo Chavez, speaking to a gathering of worldwide socialist politicians in November 2009, called him an important revolutionary fighter who supported the Palestinian cause. Chavez said during his televised speech that Carlos had been unfairly convicted and added, “They accuse him of being a terrorist, but Carlos really was a revolutionary fighter.”

(97)

“There is a revolution going on in Venezuela, a revolution of an unusual kind – it is a slow-motion revolution.” Thus, declared Richard Gott in an interview with Socialist Worker on February 12, 2005. Gott, a British author and ubiquitous spokesman for all things Chavez and Castro, is not the first to note the nineteenth-century pedigree of Chavez’s 21stCentury Socialism.

The incremental implementation of socialism was the dream of the Fabian Society, a small but highly influential political organization founded in London in 1884… The logo of the Fabian Society, a tortoise, represented the group’s predilection for a slow, imperceptible transition to socialism, while its coat of arms, a “wolf in sheep’s clothing,” represented its preferred methodology for achieving its goal.

(98)

In a 1947 article in Partisan Review, [Arthur] Schlesinger Jr. stated, “there seems to be no inherent obstacle to the gradual advance of socialism in the United States through a series of New Deals.”

Gradualism has always been considered “anti-revolutionary” in communist and socialist circles. But pragmatism has taken the place of idealism after the events of 9/11 increased international scrutiny on radical groups, forcing revolutionists like Chavez and Ahmadinejad to use the Fabian strategy as a “soft subversion” tactic with which to undermine their enemies. In the past decade, Chavez and his allies in Lain America have all embraced Ahmadinejad’s regime, and all have developed their strategic relationship based on mutual support for this incremental subversion.

(99-100)

Castro has had a lot of practice in the art of subversion. Within a short time after he came to power in Cuba, he began trying to subvert other governments in Latin America and the Caribbean. On may 10, 1967 Castro sent an invasion force to Machurucuto, Venezuela, to link up with Venezuelan guerillas to try and overthrow the democratic and popular government of President Raul Leoni.

Led by Arnaldo Ochoa Sanchez, the invasion force was quickly vanished, and the Venezuelan armed forces, with the help of peasant farmers leery of the guerillas, pacified the remaining guerrilla elements before the end of the year. Then the Venezuelan government issues a general amnesty to try and quell any violence from the remaining guerrilla holdouts. But the PRV, Red Flag and the Socialist League continued to operate clandestinely. Douglas Bravo, the Venezuelan terrorist who inspired Carlos the Jackal, remained the intransigent leader of the PRV. One of Bravo’s lieutenants was Adan Chavez, Hugo’s older brother, who would serve as Hugo’s liaison to the radical elements throughout for years to come.

After suffering calamitous defeats at the hand of the Venezuelan armed forces, the PRV decided the best way to continue the revolution would be to infiltrate the “system” and subvert it from within. In 1970, they would first make a move to infiltrate the armed forces. Bravo first contacted Lt. William Izarra in 1920. A year later, Chavez entered military school and started to recruit leftist military members to what became a clandestine fifth-column groups, the Revolutionary Bolivarian Movements. The failed 1992 coup that launched Hugo Chavez’s political career would be planned and executed jointly by the MBR, PRV, Socialist League and Red Flag.

After his release in 1994, Chavez spent six months in Colombia receiving guerrilla training, establishing contacts with both the FARC and the ELN of Colombia, and even adopting a nom de Guerra, Comandante Centeno.

Once he was elected president four years later, he would repay the Colombian guerrillas with a $300 million “donation” and thank Castro with a subsidized oil deal.

Though Chavez would denounce Plan Avila often, it would be his own decision to order its activation in 2002 that would provoke his own military to remove him from power.

Chavez seemed to take the near-death experience as a sign from divine providence of his right to rule and began a purge of the military and the government of anyone who might later threaten his power. Chavez then began radicalizing the remainder of the Venezuelan military by replacing its historical training regimen with a doctrine of asymmetric warfare that involved all sectors of society. He would call his new doctrine la guerra de todo el pueblo – “the war of all the people”.

(101-104)

The Revolutionary Brotherhood Plan

While Chavez calls his hemispheric governing plan “21st Century Socialism,” his critics have given it another name – democradura.

Democradura is a Spanish neologism that has come to define the budding autocracies in Lain America that have incrementally concentrated power in the executive branch under the guise of constitutional reform.

A Socialist think tank in Spain, the CEPTS foundation, part of the Center for Political and Social Studies, was founded in Valencia in 1993 by left-wing academics supporting Spain’s socialist Party as well as the FARC and ELN terrorist groups in Colombia. It put together a team of Marxist constitutional scholars to write the new constitutions of Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, turning them into “socialist constitutions” but with variations applicable to each particular country.

(105)

Where Bolivia’s indigenous president Evo Morales used race to marginalize his opposition, Correa used the rhetoric of environmental radicalism to demonize the mining, oil and gas sectors in Ecuador. Anyone who opposed the anthropocentric environmental language in the (new) constitution was called a “lackey” or multinational corporations and oligarchs. This stance also allowed Correa to eventually break the contracts with these companies in order to demand higher government revenues from their operations, which was then used to support government-funded projects in government-friendly provinces.

The process of Marxist constitution making first caught the attention of the revolutionary left during Colombia’s constitutional change in 1991. The Colombian constitution had been in place since 1886, a long time for regional constitutions, and was only able to be changed with some political machination and legal subterfuge.

As M-19 guerrillas began demobilization talks with a weak Colombian government in the late 1980s, the group took advantage of its position to transition from an armed insurgency to a political party. By 1991 M-19 was able to get one of its leaders, Antonio Navarro, included as one of the three copresidents of the constituent assembly that drew up the new constitution.

Navarro was able to negotiate a prohibition against any attempts by the state to organize the population against the armed guerrilla groups. Not only would this provision end up escalating violence in Colombia, but it would inspire other terrorist groups throughout the America to seek both an armed and a “political wing” which would be utilized skillfully to prolong their longevity as insurgents.

After witnessing the ease with which the Colombian constitution was changed, “constitutional subversion” became standard operation procedure for those countries headed by Chavez’s allies.

The former Venezuelan ambassador to the United Kingdom, Jorge Olavarria, assessed the situation with a bit more apprehension and foresight: “The constituent assembly is nothing more than a camouflage to make the world think that the coming dictatorship is the product of a democratic process.

Where most Latin American constitutions contained between 100 and 200 articles, the new Venezuelan constitution had 350, or 98 more than its predecessor. According to Professor Carlos Sabino of Francisco Marroquin University in Guatemala, the essence of the new constitution was “too many rules, no system to enforce them.” (it) “would consolidate an authoritarian government with a legal disguise, necessary in today’s globalized world where the respect for democratic values is the key to good international relations.

(108)

The Defense of Political Sovereignty and National Self-Determination Law would prohibit organizations, as well as individuals, that advocate for the political rights of Venezuelans from accepting funds from any foreign entity. It also prohibited them from having any representation from foreigners and even sponsoring or hosting any foreigner who expresses opinions that “offend the institution of the state.” This law was included with the International Cooperation Law, which would force all NGOs to reregister with the government and include a declared action plan on their future activities, along with a list of any financing that they expected to receive.

(109)

gNGOs are Governmental Non-Governmental Orgs. Fake NGO’s operated by the government.

(110)

The Sandinista government in Nicaragua has been even more aggressive against civil society groups, raiding the offices of long-established NGOs and launching what it called Operation No More lies, a crackdown against those that it accuses of money laundering, embezzlement and subversion.

(111)

At the end of March 2011, former president Jimmy Carter made a trip to Cuba to meet with members of the regime. About the time he arrived, Cuban state television aired a series in which it portrayed independent NGOs as subversive organizations that sought to “erode the order of civil society” in Cuba. The report claimed that “via the visits to the country of some of its representatives and behind the backs of Cuban authorities, these NGOs have the mission of carrying out the evaluations of the Cuban political situation and instructing, organizing, and supplying the counter-revolution.” It accused the organizations of hiding “their subversive essence [behind] alleged humanitarian aid.” The series featured Dr. Jose Manuel Collera, who was revealed as “Agent Gerardo,” a Cuban spy who had infiltrated the NGOs in the United States “to monitor their work and representatives.”

Along with thwarting the oversight power of NGOs in Venezuela, Chavez also included a number of “economic” laws designed to put the stamp of legitimacy on his new “communal” economic system that had caused shortages throughout the country… These laws made communes the basis of the Venezuelan economy and established “People’s Power” as the basis of local governance. It is codified as being responsible to the “revolutionary Leadership,” which is Chavez himself. This effectively supplanted the municipalities and regional governments.

(117) 

Managing the Media

Speaking in September 2010 at a Washington event to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors Walter Issacson, warned, “We can’t allow ourselves to be out-communicated by our enemies. There’s that Freedom House report that reveals that today’s autocratic leaders are investing billions of dollars in media resources to influences the Global opinion… You’ve got Russia Today, Iran’s Press TV, Venezuela’s TeleSUR…”

Their techniques are similar: hire young, inexperienced correspondents who will toe the party line as TV reporters, and put strong sympathizers, especially Americans, as hosts of “debate” shows.

Where normal media outlets will film only the speakers at such an event, these state-sponsored media units will often turn the cameras toward the audience in order to capture on film those in the audience who may be government critics. Their purpose for this is twofold – to later screen the video to see who might be attending such a conference and to intimidate exiles from attending such events.

(118)

TeleSUR’s president, Andres Izarra, is a professional journalist who formerly worked for CNN en Espanol. He also serves as Chavez’s minister of communications and information. Izarra said of TeleSUR’s launch: “TeleSUR is an initiative against cultural imperialism. We launch TeleSUR with a clear goal to break this communication regime.”

In a 1954 letter to a comrade, Fidel Castro wrote, “We cannot for a second abandon propaganda. Propaganda is vital – propaganda is the heart of our struggle.

“We have to win the war inside the United States, said Hector Oqueli, one of the Rebel leaders. And after the Sandinistas first took power in Nicaragua in the 1980s, the late Tomas Borge, who served as the interior minister and head of state security for the Sandinista regime, told Newsweek, “The battle for Nicaragua is not being waged in Nicaragua. It is being fought in the United States.

It had not been difficult for the revolutionary left in Latin America to find willing allies in the United States to help with its propaganda effort. An illustrative example is William Blum, the author of several anti-American books that have called U.S. foreign engagements “holocausts”. Blum has described his life’s mission as “slowing down the American Empire… injuring the Beast.” Blum’s treatment of U.S. involvement in Latin America is noteworthy, because it is emblematic of what often passes as scholarship on the subject and because it gets repeated in many universities where he is often invited to speak to students… In January 2006, Blum’s Rogue State got an endorsement by Osama bin Laden, who recommended the book in an audiotape and agreed with Blum’s idea that the way the United States could prevent terrorist attacks was to “apologize to the victims of American Imperialism.”

Examples of bad scholarship follow…

Blum’s book is typical of a genre that has long eschewed scholarship for sensationalized anti-Americanism. At the summit of the Americas in April 2009, Chavez handed President Obama a copy of Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano, about which Michael Reid, the Americas editor at The Economist, wrote, [Galeano’s history is that of the propagandist, a potent mix of selective truths, exaggeration and falsehood, caricature and conspiracy. Called the “Idiots Bible” by Latin American scholars, Galeano’s 1971 tome was translated to English by Cedric Belfrage, a British journalist and expatriate to the United States who was also a Communist Party member and an agent for the KGB.

The Artillery of Ideas

Another Chavez propaganda effort designed to reach English-speaking audiences is the state funded newspaper Correo del Orinoco, named for a newspaper started by Simon Bolivar in 1818.

(121)

Un April 2010 Chavez held a celebration on the eight anniversary of the coup that earlier had removed him from office for two days. He named the celebration “Day of the Bolivarian Militias, the Armed People and the April Revolution” and held a swearing in ceremony for 35,000 new members of his civilian militia. As part of the festivities, Chavez also had a swearing in ceremony for a hundred young community media activists, calling them “communicational guerrillas.” This was done, according to Chavez, to raise awareness among young people about the “media lies” and to combat the anti-revolution campaign of the opposition-controlled private media.

(122)

The most notorious propaganda and coverup operation to date has been that of the Puente Llaguno shooting in 2002, in which nineteen people were killed and sixty injured as Chavez’s henchmen were videotaped shooting into a crowd of marchers from a bridge overhead.

(124)

According to Nelson (the author of The Silence and the Scorpion) the reason that Chavez felt the need to go after the Metropolitan Police was because they were the largest group in the country, aside from the army. This, feared Chavez, made them a potential threat for another coup against his regime. After he was briefly ousted from office in 2002, Chavez skillfully utilized the canard that the Metropolitan police had fired the first shots at the Bolivarian Circles as an excuse to take away much of their firepower and equipment, leaving them only with their .38 caliber pistols. And one a Chavez loyalist took over as mayor of Caracas, the Metropolitan Police were completely purged. According to Nelson, loyalty to Chavez’s political party became much more important than expertise or experience on the police force.

In January 2007, the President of TeleSUR, Andres Izarra, revealed the thinking behind Chavez’s campaign against the media: “We have to elaborate a new plan, and the one that we propose is the communication and informational hegemony of the state.”

(131)

A report done for the United Nations by the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders said that verbal attacks against anyone “who dared to criticize the policies of President Ortega or his government… were systematically and continuously taken up by the official or pro-Government media.” The reports, issued in June 2009, stated:

President Ortega’s government tried to silence dissident voices and criticisms of Government policies through members of the government who verbally assaulted demonstrators and human rights defenders as well as the Citizens Council (Consejos de Poder Ciudadno – CPC) who hampered the NGOs’ activities and physically assaulted defenders. In this context, 2008 saw numerous attacks against human rights defenders and attempts to obstruct their activity…

These Citizens’ Councils were taken directly from the “Revolutionary Brotherhood” plan and are close facsimiles of groups like the Bolivarian Circles in Venezuela. Ortega claimed in July 2007 that “more than 6,000 [CPCs] has been formed,” and “around 500,000 people participated in CPCs.”

(142)

Managing the Military

Daniel Patrick Moynihan: More and more the United Nations seems only to know of violations of human rights in countries where it is still possible to protest such violations… our suspicions are that there could be a design to use the issue of human rights to undermine the legitimacy of precisely those nations which still overserve human rights, imperfect as that observance may be.” (871)

The Department of State Bulletin. (1975). United States: Office of Public Communication, Bureau of Public Affairs.

The southern Connections was a coordinated effort by far-left supporters of the Castro regime and other leftist governments in Latin America to end the Monroe Doctrine or at least to deter Washington’s policy of intervention against communist expansion in the hemisphere.

(144)

EL Salvador’s civil war, from 1979 until 1992, was emblematic of the Cuba-instigated wars in Latin America. It was Fidel Castro who convinced the various left-wing guerilla groups operating in El Salvador consolidate under the banner of the DRU, officially formed in May 1980. The DRU manifesto stated, “There will be only one leadership, only one military plan and only one command, only one political line.” Fidel Castro had facilitated a meeting in Havana in December 1979 that brought these groups together – a feat that has not been repeated since, as the historic tendency of most leftist terrorist groups in the region have been of splintering after fights over egos and ideological differences.

It was a Salvadoran of Palestinian descent, Schafik Handal, who helped found the Communist Party of El Salvador and who would serve as Castro’s partner in the Central American wars of the era.

(145)

Stealth NGOs

One of the most effective asymmetrical tactics has been the use of dummy NGOs as front groups in Latin America. A number of nongovernmental organizations operating in the region that claim to advocate for human rights actually receive funding from radical leftist groups sympathetic to revolutionary movements in the hemisphere. Many of these groups derive much of their legitimacy from unwitting representative of the European Union, the United Nations and even the U.S. Department of State who often designate them as “special rapporteurs” for human rights reporting.

(146)

Both Cristian Fernandez de Kirchner, the current president, and her husband the late President Nestor Kirchner, were far left radicals in the 1960s and 1970s and filled both of their administrations with ex-terrorists and radicals… Many have accused the Kirchner’s and their allies of blatant double standards on human rights issues – especially in the prosecution of former military members who served during Argentina’s Dirty War from 1976 to 1983.

Since 2003, when Nestor Kirchner took office, the successive Kirchner administrations have aggressively prosecuted hundreds of ex-soldiers, many of who served prior to the beginning of the Dirty War. The double standard arises because not one of the ex-terrorists, who started the Dirty War in the first place, has been prosecuted. The Kirchners, along with far-left judicial activists in the region, have relied on a blatantly unjust tenant of “international human rights law” that says crimes against humanity only apply to representatives of the state, a group that includes military and policy but excludes the terrorists who ignited the guerillas wars.

(148)

Since the late 1990s, the NGO practice of dragging the military into court on allegations of human rights violations has destroyed the careers of some of [Colombia’s] finest officers, even though most of these men were found innocent after years of proceedings.”

According to O’Grady, the enabling legislation that makes this judicial warfare possible is what’s been termed the “Leahy Law,” after its sponsor, Sen Patrick Leahy (D-VT). Under this law, American Military aid can be withdrawn if military offenses are brought against them, even when the credibility of the charges is dubious. O’Grady noted, “The NGOs knew that they only had to point fingers to get rid of an effective leader and demoralize the ranks.”

The legislation that became the Leahy Law was first introduced in 1997 in the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act, and similar language was inserted into the 2001 Foreign Operations Appropriations Act. It has since been used repeatedly against Colombia, which has been a target ever since it became serious about taking on the FARC and took funding from the United States to Implement Plan Colombia, an anti-drug smuggling and counter-insurgency initiative.

(149)

The publicity about Reyes’s death put the spotlight on the situation in Colombia and led researchers to uncover the fact that many of the so-called trade unionists in Colombia were moonlighting as FARC terrorists.

Raul Reyes was the prime example, having begun his career at age sixteen when he joined the Colombian Communist Youth (JUCO), which led him to become a trade unionist at a Nestle plant in his hometown of Caquetá. His position as a Nestle “trade unionist” was a front for his real job, which was influencing, recruiting, and radicalizing fellow workers at a plant for the Colombian Communist Party… Since the beginning of the FARC, and its collaboration and later split with the party, a number of Colombian trade unions have served as way stations for FARC members as they moved from union posts to the ranks of the FARC.

(150)

Uribe was able to turn the tide…. By strategically transitioning from the largely fruitless supply-control methods of Plan Colombia to the population centric counterinsurgency (PC-COIN) methods of Plan Patriota, a later iteration of the original plan that put focus on counterinsurgency.

Where the previous policy had granted a vast demilitarized zone to the FARC in exchange for a proposed peace treaty, Plan Patriota utilized a counter-insurgency strategy that attacked terrorists with physical force. But more importantly, it attached their legitimacy by placing security personnel in remote areas where there had been no state presence before. What this accomplished, more successfully than any of the Colombian military’s previous operational tactics, was to change the populations’ perception of the forty-year insurgency. What had been seen as a conflict between rival political parties was now looked upon as the battle of a legitimate, elected government against illegitimate narco-terrorists.

Revolutionizing the Military

In 2001 the Venezuelan daily Tal Cual published a leaked document from the Directorate of Military Intelligence (DIM) which spelled out a plan to politicize the military. According to the document top military officers were to be divided into “revolutionists” who supported Chavez, “institutionalists” who were considered to be neutral, and “dissidents” who were opposed to the regime. It also advocated for catequesis (Spanish for catechism) to proselytize these officers to accept Chavez’s socialist governing program.

(152-153)

During the Hungarian Uprising in 1956, Andropov “had watched in horror from the windows of his embassy as officers of the hated Hungarian security service were strung up from lampposts” It is said that Andropov was “haunted for the rest of his life by the speed with which an apparently all-powerful Communist one-party state had begun to topple” and was thereafter “obsessed with the need to stamp out ‘ideological sabotage’ where it reared its head within the Soviet bloc.” This obsession made the Soviets much more eager to send in troops whenever other communist regimes were in jeopardy.

…both Castro and Chavez, would develop a Hungarian complex as well, leading to a clampdown on ‘ideological sabotage’ within their respective countries. In 1988 Castro stated, when speaking of the Sandinistas’ use of civilian militias to defend their revolution in Nicaragua, that both Cuba and Nicaragua needed a “committed… people’s armed defense that is sufficient in size, training and readiness, “adding that Salvador Allende hadn’t had a big enough force to prevent the coup that drove him from power in Chile in 1973. It was a rare moment of candor, as the militia is usually touted as the last bastion against a U.S. invasion. But in reality, it is a tool designed to accomplish the prime objective of an aspiring autocrat – to ensure the longevity of the regime. Max Manwaring, writing on Chavez’s use of these civilian militias, stated:

All these institutions are outside the traditional control of the regular armed forced, and each organization is responsible directly to the leader (President Chavez). This institutional separation is intended to ensure the no military or paramilitary organization can control another, but the centralization of these institutions guarantees the leader absolute control of security and social harmony in Venezuela.

Perpetuating the Regime

Started as a jobless protest in 1996, the piquiteros have transformed into what are, according to The Economist, “government rent-a-mobs” consisting of “unemployed protestors receiving state welfare payments.” The piquiteros were co-opted by Nestor Kirchner’s government, through some have splintered since his wife succeeded him.

(154)

In February 2011 the gravity of the effort to militarize Morales’s civilian supporters became far clearer. According to ABC, a Paraguayan daily, Iran was providing the financing for the militia training facility. Called the Military Academy of ALBA, it is located in Warnes, thirty miles north of Santa Cruz. ABC reported that the facility would train both military personnel and civilian militia members from all of the ALBA countries.

(156)

Shortly after Castro’s guerrillas took power in Havana, Cuban embassies in Latin America became recruitment centers and incubators for radical groups and terrorist subversives throughout the hemisphere. Organizing subversive student movements became a priority for Cuban “diplomats,” and the autonomy of the campuses provided easy access and impunity.

A comparison of the student vote to that of the general population at the time provides an illustration of the radicalization of the student body. During the 1960s in Venezuela, students at the Central University typically voted 50 to 60 percent for candidates from the Communist Party of Venezuela and the radical Castroite MIR, while these candidates never broke 10 percent among the general population.

A Venezuela MIR guerrilla noted that their near total domination of the liceos (secondary schools) and the universities led them wrongly to believe that this level of acceptance could be extrapolated to the general population. But in reality, noted the guerrilla, “there was absolutely no mass solidarity with the idea of insurrection.” One MIR cofounder, Domingo Alberto Rangel, noted after renouncing the group’s support for terrorism that “the Left enjoys support among students, but it is unknown among working-class youth, or the youth of the barrios.”

In Colombia, the Industrial University of Santander in Bucaramanga was a haven for that country’s ELN terrorists. In 1965 in Peru, the ELN based itself in the San Cristobal of Huamange National University in Ayacucho, and at the National University in Lima a number of leftist political parties set up operations for MIR terrorists.

Just over twenty years later, after Shining Path and Tupac Amaru terrorists had gained control over a majority of the rural area of Peru and had begun to threaten the capital, the (first) government of President Alan Garcia reluctantly decided to raid the University of San Marcos, the National University of Engineering, and a teacher’s college – three schools that had long been known as terrorist havens.

This kind of autonomy without accountability is a policy that invited terrorist infiltration among impressionable young people.

(159)

Like guerrilla groups in many countries in Latin America, Mexico’s also have a cadre of supporters in NGOs who purport to be human rights advocates. After the bombing of the FARC camp in Ecuador, instead of denouncing the FARC for hosting Mexican students in a war zone, one Mexican human rights NGO called the operation an “unjustified massacre” and announced that it was planning to sue the Colombian government.

(161)

According to The Miami Herald, [Tareck] El Aissami was born in Venezuela to Syrian parents, and his father, Carlos, was the president of the Venezuelan branch of the Baath Party and was an ardent supporter of Saddam Hussein. El Aissamni’s uncle, Shibili el-Aissami, whose whereabouts are unknown, was a top-ranking Baath Party official in Iraq.

(164)

The extent of Cuban subversion was investigated and reported to Congress as early as 1963, when the Senate Judiciary Committee released a report detailing the activities of Cuban operatives in the hemisphere. The report concluded: “A war of liberation” or ‘popular uprising’ is really hidden aggression: subversion… the design of Communist expansion finds in subversion the least costly way of acquiring peoples and territories without exaggerated risk.” The report elaborated on the goal of Cuban subversion:

Its aim is to replace the political, economic, and social order existing in a country by a new order, which presupposes the complete physical and moral control of the people… That control is achieved by progressively gaining possession of bodies and minds, using appropriate techniques of subversion that combine psychological, political, social, and economic actions, and even military operations, if this is necessary.

(166)

It was reported by a defector that all Sandinista military plans were sent first to Havana to be vetted by Raul Castro and a Soviet handler before any action was taken against the contras.

A State Department background paper also reported that besides the influx of thousands of Cuban “advisers,” nearly all of the members of the new state police organization, the General Directorate of Sandinista State Security, were trained by the Cubans.

Alfonso Robelo, one of the original members of Nicaragua’s five-man junta, told reporters, “this is something that you have to understand, Nicaragua is an occupied country. We have 8,000 Cubans plus several thousand East Bloc people, East Germans, PLO, Bulgarians, Libyans, North Koreans, etc. The national decisions, the crucial ones, are not in the hands of the Nicaraguans, but in the hands of the Cubans… And, really, in the end, it is not the Cubans, but the Soviets.”

While many foreign policy experts and officials in the Carter administration scoffed at the idea of either Soviet of Cuban steering of the Sandinistas, numerous defectors later confirmed it. Victor Tirado, one of the original Sandinistas, wrote in 1991 that “we allowed ourselves to be guided by the ideas of the Cubans and the Soviets.” Alvaro Baldizon, a chief investigator of the Sandinista Ministry of the Interior, said after defecting, “The ones who give the orders are the Cubans…. Every program, every operation is always under the supervision of Cuban advisors.”

Since the Barrio Adentro program began in Venezuela in October 2000, the number of Cubans in the country has grown to somewhere between forty thousand and sixty-five thousand, depending on the source.

(169)

One of the programs instituted by the Cubans that has driven out many of the professional officers is a new system that allows sergeants to be promoted to the rank of colonel simply by what they call “technical merit” – which most officers define as a high level of fealty to the Chavez political program.

(170)

Prior to the 2006 presidential election in Peru, Hugo Chavez set his sights on the country to try to bring it into the ALBA orbit. Besides sending letters of invitation to mayors near the border areas of his allies, Chavez underwrote a number of ALBA houses in rural areas of Peru. The Peruvian government became concerned enough about the ALBA houses that a congressional committee investigated them and issues a report in March 2009 recommending they be shut down. The committee report concluded that Chavez was trying to influence Peruvian politics via the ALBA houses, which had been established without any government-to-government agreement.

A June 2009 incident in the Amazon city of Badua ended the détente. The incident, called the Baguazo, ended in a bloodbath when members and supporters of a radicalized “indigenous rights” group slit the throats of police officers who had been sent to end the group’s roadblock that had closed the city’s only highway for over a month. Leaders of the Interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest were revealed to have ties to Chavez and Morales and had previously traveled to Caracas to participate in a meeting of radical indigenous groups.

(171 – 172)

Like Soviet communism, Chavez’s 21st Century Socialism can only survive by spreading and enveloping its neighbors, lest too much of a distinction be shown in economic outcomes by its nonsocialist neighbors.

In a July 2008 hearing of the Western Hemispheric Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Dr. Norman Bailey, a former official of the National Security Council whose specialty was monitoring terrorism by tracking finances, testified that Chavez had spent “$33 billion on regional influence.” Bailey further stated that corruption in the Chavez regime was “nothing less than monumental, with literally billions of dollars having been stolen by government officials and their allies in the private sector over the past nine years.” Bailey also testified that a Chavez government official had his bank accounts closed by HSBC Bank in London, which had deposits of $1.5 billion.”

A large portion of the income derived from both the narco-trafficking and money laundering is funneled to Venezuelan entities and officials and “is facilitated by the Venezuelan financial system, including both public and private institutions.”

* Bailey testimony before the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee

(174)

A Wikileaks cable released in December 2010 revealed that Ortega had been given “suitcases full of cash” in Caracas. “We have firsthand reports that GON [Government of Venezuela] officials receive suitcases full of cash from Venezuelan officials during official trips to Caracas,” a 2008 diplomatic cable written by Ambassador Paul Trivelli stated. The embassy cables also said that Ortega was believed to have used drug money to underwrite a massive election fraud.

The accusations of suitcases of Venezuelan money going to Nicaragua match very closely with an August 2007 case in which a Venezuelan American businessman, Antonini Wilson, was cause at the Ezeiza Airport just outside Buenos Aires with a suitcase packed with $800,000 in cash. According to U.S. prosecutors who ended up in charge of the case, the money was intended for Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, who was campaigning for (and eventually won) the presidency of Argentina… when Wilson flew home to Key Biscayne immediately after he incident, he reported it to the FBI, fearing (rightly) being set up as the “fall guy,” according to his court testimony. Wilson agreed to wear a wire during his subsequent meetings with Venezuelan officials and to record his phone calls. Three of the officials involved were indicted in the United States and pleaded guilty. Another fled and is still at large.

(179)

Nicaraguan defectors had long reported the drug-trafficking habits of the Sandinista government. Antonio Farach, a defector who had worked as a Sandinista minister in Nicaragua’s embassies in Honduras and Venezuela, told U.S. officials in 1983 that Humberto Ortega, brother of the president and then Nicaragua’s minister of defense, was “directly involved” in drug trafficking.

Farach repeated an oft-reported rationale used by Marxists who moonlight in the drug trade as a sideline to revolution. He states that Sandinista officials believed their trafficking in drugs was a “political weapon” that would help to destroy “the youth of our enemies.” According to Farach, the Sandinistas declared, “We want to provided food to our people with the suffering and death of the youth of the United States.”

(190)

As of 2008, nineteen of the forty-three groups that are officially designated “foreign terrorist organizations” were all linked to the international drug trade, and as much as 60 percent of all terrorist organizations were believed to be linked to the drug trade.

From fiscal years 1999 through March 2010, 329 Iranian nationals have been caught by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

In March 2005 FBI director Robert Mueller testified before the House Appropriations Committee that “there are individuals from countries with known Al Qaeda connection who are changing their Islamic surnames to Hispanic-sounding names and obtaining false Hispanic identities, learning to speak Spanish and pretending to be Hispanic.

In 2010 the Department of Homeland Security had thousands of what are called “OTMs” – Other Than Mexicans – incarcerated for illegally crossing the southern border. The OTMs consisted of individuals from Afghanistan, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and elsewhere.

(199)

Hugo Chavez’s placement of individuals with known ties to terrorist groups in charge of his immigration and identification bureau have long been documented.

(204)

Influenced by Chavez and radical leftist groups in the region, Lopez Obrador staged a populist sit-in in the central square of Mexico City for nearly two months, claiming to be the “legitimate president”.

Rep Jim Kolbe (R-AZ) told several Mexican legislators at the time that he had received intelligence reports that Chavez had been funding AMLO’s Party of the Democratic Revolution. Had Lopez Obrador won, the nefarious influences of Chavez and Ahmadinejad would have moved to America’s doorstep, and the nexus of drug trafficking and terrorism that were already on the border would be an order of magnitude greater.

(207)

In September 2011, El Universal reported that a Spanish court had prosecuted five members of Askapena, the international wing of ETA. Court documents showed that Askapena had been instructed to set up an international relations network by organizing seminar and creating “solidarity committees” in Europe and North and South America.

(208)

The New York Times reported on January 28, 1996 that during the last two months that the Sandinistas were in power, they had granted Nicaraguan citizenship and documentation to over nine hundred foreigners, including terrorists from ETA and Italy’s Red Brigades, three dozen Arabs and Iranians from Islamic terrorist groups, and terrorists from “virtually every guerrilla organization in Lain America”.

(209)

As far back as May 2008, Jackson Diehl, deputy editorial page editor and foreign policy writer for the Washington Post, wrote that Chavez belonged on the State Department’s list of State Sponsors of Terror.

His reported actions are, first of all, a violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1373, passed in September 2001, which prohibits all states from providing financing or havens to terrorist organizations. More directly, the Colombian evidence would be more than enough to justify a State Department decision to cite Venezuela as a state sponsor of terrorism. Once cited, Venezuela would be subject to a number of automatic sanctions, some of which would complicate its continuing export of oil to the United States…

(221)

It is this irrational reluctance to properly describe the threat we face from declared enemies that validates those enemies contrived grievances. Almost inversely proportional to our increased prowess in kinetic warfare, we have continually ceded the ideological war that has become the only battlefield on which our enemies are able to make an impact. As Max Manwaring and others have stated, today’s battles are fights for legitimacy. To allow political correctness or misplaced deference to alter the terminology of war is to cede our most valuable territory. To our enemies, deference equals weakness, not civil accommodation.

Another tenet shared by political Islam in the Middle East and 21st Century Socialism in Latin America is that its adherents have declared war not only on the United States and the West in general but on capitalism and free societies as well. TO most of us in the West, this is equivalent to declaring war on gravity, as free exchange and free enterprise are the bases of life and the engines of progress throughout the world.

We enjoy the advantage that our enemies are not only fighting against us but are also fighting against the trajectory of human progress. Our duty is to decide whether we are going to continue to accommodate their superstitions or whether we will confront them before further carnage provides them with false validation.

 

Bolivarians Speak: Documents from the PCC, PSUV, FARC-EP & Allies Irregular War Against the United States

Bolivarians Speak: Documents from the PCC, PSUV, FARC-EP & Allies Irregular War Against the United States

Now available on Amazon.

The leaders of United Socialist Party of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez and Nicolas Maduro, and their partners in the Cuban Communist Party, the FARC-EP, the ELN and the Sao Paulo Forum have a geopolitical vision for a multi-polar New World Order. This vision is one that transforms all of the current governments and constitutional traditions of Latin America and the Caribbean, by hook and by crook, into Castroist-type Authoritarian dictatorships to be united into a single governing body. Those that struggle to make this Pan-Latin American League of Nations come into being call themselves Bolivarians.

The following selection of translations illustrates how these Communist Parties and transnational criminal networks sought to make this happen though the subversion of politics, democratic norms and institutions in the United States of America via the promotion of illegal immigration, informational warfare, and ideologically-driven economic conflict.

Selections from Linda Sarsour’s “We Are Not Here to Be Bystanders”

Linda Sarsour’s “We Are Not Here to Be Bystanders” provides a first person account of activist Linda Sarsour along with a forward by Harry Belafonte, who once lead a delegation to Venezuela to visit Hugo Chavez and is a long time admirer of Fidel Castro.

“Purpose and Grace” forward by Harry Belafonte

“I have been aware of this tremendous young woman for several years now. I find her to be bold and brilliant and unexpected—a combination of qualities that inspire me. When Linda first crossed my threshold, brought into my midst by Carmen Perez, who runs my social justice organization the Gathering for Justice, I was immediately drawn to her. Quite the spitfire she was, unapologetic and strong. I saw in her a burning fire, and she drew me in. I watched her and her comrades shift the ground and make waves and stop the machine. I delighted in their tenacity, their bold vision for Black and brown liberation, and their radical approach to movement work.”

 Excerpts Linda Sarsour

“What happened next is contested: Officer Wilson says Brown punched him in the cruiser and then ran when Wilson pulled his firearm and started shooting. Witnesses say Brown did not assault the officer, but ran from the cruiser when the cop started firing, then turned and put his hands in the air and yelled, “Don’t shoot!” Yet Officer Wilson kept squeezing the trigger, twelve shots in all. Six bullets entered Michael Brown’s body, one through the top of his head. The noonday execution of this unarmed Black man was shocking enough, but Brown was then left on the street for four hours in the August sun”

“upon hearing about the death of Michael Brown, I picked up the phone and called Mustafa Abdullah, a friend and fellow activist who served as the lead organizer of the ACLU of Missouri. “What are you doing about Michael Brown?” I asked him. “Where are the Muslims on this? We need to stand up.”

The next week I got myself on a plane and flew to Ferguson. I wanted to bear witness in person to what had transpired there. It felt right for me, an American Muslim woman in a hijab, to stand in solidarity with protesters from around the country, marching for the sanctity of Black lives. ”

“As the case against Michael Brown’s killer wound its way through the criminal justice system, Mustafa and I, along with Imam Dawud Walid, an African American religious leader from Detroit, and Muhammad Malik, a South 

“Asian American labor and community organizer from Miami, cofounded Muslims for Ferguson. We wanted to encourage Muslim Americans to embrace the fight against police brutality as a top priority, so we put out a call for Muslims to attend Ferguson October, an event planned by local activists in advance of a critical grand jury hearing on whether Officer Darren Wilson would be indicted. ”

“We also arranged for Black Lives Matter organizers to meet with South Asian and Arab business owners in the St. Louis area to foster solidarity between our communities.

Despite our efforts, in late November 2014, a Missouri grand jury declined to indict Michael Brown’s killer, saying he had broken no law. A week later, a grand jury in New York reached a similar conclusion in the case of the man who had choked Eric Garner to death. People of conscience were heartbroken and enraged. On college campuses, students lay on the ground to stage “die-ins” in protest of the grand jury decisions. In New York City, Tamika, Carmen, and I helped to organize rallies to close down highways, while protestors poured into Macy’s department store and laid themselves down in the aisles. ”

“Marvin Bing is one of the most creative community organizers I know. A conceptual designer and producer of cultural events, he’d been a foster kid growing up, and had done time in juvie in his native Philadelphia. The experience had left him with a lifelong mission to defend youth who are unable to defend themselves. Marvin brought an artist’s imagination to all his social justice activations, and an abiding belief in Kingian nonviolence, which urges us to confront the institutions and structures that perpetuate injustice, rather than the individuals who act in their name.”

“Now Marvin had a new idea, and he wanted me to be a part of it. Before I even knew what he had in mind I was on board, because I trusted him and appreciated that he always made sure Muslims were present around any table at which he sat. That is how I came to be in a meeting on the ground floor of the 1199 Service Employees International Union (SEIU) building in midtown Manhattan, along with nine of the city’s boldest and most influential activists and politicos.

Carmen Perez was cohosting the meeting along with Marvin. Also present were people like Angelo Pinto, leader of the Raise the Age campaign to improve juvenile justice outcomes; and Cherrell Brown, a criminal justice organizer working to repeal the death penalty.”

“Justice League NYC would go on to engage numerous critical battles on behalf of the oppressed and disenfranchised. Other civil rights groups, labor movements, and police reform advocates would soon join with our initiative, including Tamika Mallory. Tamika, Carmen, and I were now officially working in common cause, and together we pulled off a number of high-profile protests. There was the time when Prince William and Kate Middleton were courtside at a Cavaliers-Nets game at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center. We knew a lot of press would cover the royals’ attendance at that game, so we staged a mass protest outside the arena to demand that all the cops involved in Garner’s death be held accountable. We dubbed the action a “Royal Shutdown.” Some of us even wore plastic crowns as a statement on the absurdity of the press being preoccupied with a royal visit when people were being killed in the streets.

It was a cold night in December 2014. Outside the arena, hundreds of us chanted, “I can’t breathe,” and “All I want for Christmas is to live,” and “How do you spell racist? N-Y-P-D!” Thirty minutes later, everyone became quiet and lay down…

“For half an hour the only sounds that could be heard around us were the crackle of police scanners, the hum of street traffic, and camera shutters going off as press photographers and ordinary citizens recorded our protest. Meanwhile, inside the arena at halftime, the Cavaliers’ big man LeBron James pulled on a black T-shirt with the words I CAN’T BREATHE across the front, and several other players joined him. Justice League NYC had created those T-shirts, which had been hand-delivered to the players by hip-hop producer and part owner of the Nets, Jay-Z, one of our allies.”

“There was no other choice but to keep going,” Mr. Belafonte told us. “Defeat is never an option.” He looked around the room, seeming to hold each person in his gaze at the same time. “All of you here have inherited the mantle from the ones who marched then, and we are all counting on you. For that entire meeting, I hung on his every word, feeling the great privilege of his belief in. “us to carry on the struggle. I was in awe of his commitment, which fifty years later was undimmed. Defeat is not an option, he had said, and with all my heart I believed him. That night, his grace, authority, and humanity felt like an infinite font of love, pouring sustenance into us all. A month later the same group was once again gathered inside the same building in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, where Mr. Belafonte kept a suite of offices.”

“in addition to the Gathering for Justice, Mr. Belafonte had founded Sankofa, an organization to connect artists with grassroots organizing and social justice campaigns.

The Gathering for Justice was headquartered inside Mr. Belafonte’s suite, as was our own group, Justice League NYC. Our meetings there often lasted well into the night. No one ever wanted to leave. We relished being in rooms that were imbued with Mr. Belafonte’s warrior spirit. It reminded us that our efforts were never in vain. ”

“By the end of March, almost one hundred people had registered, including many 1199 union members. The head of the union, George Gresham, and Mr. Belafonte had agreed to be honorary cochairs of the march. They helped us with fund-raising and sponsorships, and Mr. Gresham even secured two RVs manned by nurses and EMTs and equipped with medical supplies to accompany us along the route. If people got blisters on their feet, they’d provide salve and a place to rest. If people’s knees or ankles ached, they’d tape us up so we could keep going. “Two hundred and fifty miles will wear on your bodies,” Mr. Belafonte had said when Carmen, Tamika, and I first met with him to tell him of our plan. “The logistics alone are crazy. But I’m on board. I don’t know what it is about you three, but I will follow you anywhere.”

“His words fortified us for the road ahead. Determined that our effort be seen as more than a publicity stunt, Carmen, Tamika, and I, as lead organizers, took pains to establish concrete goals that would yield a quantifiable result.”

“Our youngest marcher, Skylar Shafer, a white sixteen-year-old from Litchfield, Connecticut, had signed on to march because she was interested in advocating for children of war. Our oldest marcher, sixty-four-year-old Bruce Richard, was an 1199 union member and former Black Panther.”

“On Monday evening, April 20, as the Union Temple Baptist Church in Washington, DC, came into view, a chorus of sobs broke from the marchers. We had made it.”

“My own organization, the Arab American Association of New York, had sent a busload of supporters from Brooklyn, and the 1199 union had sent a couple of busloads as well. Our honorary cochairs and a lineup of actors and musicians were also with us on that last day, as were gun violence survivors; immigrant rights advocates; women’s groups; Black Lives Matter activists; LGBTQ, Latinx, and Asian American organizations; and hundreds upon hundreds of everyday American citizens.”

“I want to give a shout-out to Bernie Sanders, the Jewish senator from Vermont, and the transformative effect of his campaign on my Muslim community—and on me.

I was a surrogate for the Sanders campaign, and my inside view of that operation left me with a profound respect and affection for the candidate I came to call Uncle Bernie.”

“My first clue to the tenacious idealism that animated Bernie Sanders’s political ideology came when I was introduced to Winnie Wong, cofounder of People for Bernie and mother of the #FeeltheBern hashtag. Through her, I met senior-level staffers who asked me to be an official national surrogate for Bernie Sanders. ”

“Another issue was the fact that the planning team was loose and decentralized, with members spread across the country and communicating mostly online. We all knew that the effort had to be headquartered somewhere, and New York seemed a logical choice. After speaking with Mr. Belafonte, Carmen offered the offices of the Gathering for Justice. With the Gathering’s direct action experience and strong ties to social justice and artistic communities, she knew it was the right move.”

“Over the next few weeks, Mr. Belafonte, Gloria Steinem, Angela Davis, LaDonna Harris, and Dolores Huerta also signed on as honorary cochairs, giving us instant street cred with their various constituencies and making it easier to bring high-profile cultural influencers like Toshi Reagon, Alicia Keys, America Ferrera, and so many others on board. Indeed, almost everyone we approached to take part in the event agreed at once, and helped spread the word to their social media followings. We were starting to understand that this thing was going to be huge—as many as a quarter of a million people might show up. We thought we were dreaming big.”

“When all was arranged, decided, and done, we would pay out more than $2 million so that women and our allies could stand shoulder to shoulder in opposition to tyranny and in solidarity with women’s rights everywhere. In the process, the self-care mandate that is rule number one in any activism handbook was sorely neglected by practically everyone involved in the planning. The pace of our days left us physically exhausted and emotionally depleted, all the more so because during those nine weeks of nonstop emails, fund-raising and sponsorship meetings, permit coordination, and daily conference calls, we hardly ever saw our families.”

“Of course, my unrepentant stance only further inflamed my critics. It didn’t help matters that I had dared to link the liberation of Palestine to the women’s movement in an interview with The Nation magazine. “You can’t be a feminist in the United States and stand up for the rights of the American woman and then say that you don’t want to stand up for the rights of Palestinian women in Palestine,” I said. “It’s all connected. Whether you’re talking about Palestinian women, Mexican women, women in Brazil, China, or women in Saudi Arabia—this feminist movement is an international global movement. The editors had titled the piece “Can You Be a Zionist Feminist? Linda Sarsour Says No.” ”

“This is my life now—keeping my voice loud and showing up for social justice causes that might need a hopeful spirit and tireless feet. And so I was once again in Washington, DC, participating in an act of civil disobedience outside Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s office, demanding that he meet with us to hear the concerns of undocumented people. We were there to protest the Trump administration’s call for an end to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that former president Barack Obama had put in place to confer temporary legal status on some seven hundred thousand undocumented immigrants brought to America as children. Demonstrations were happening across the country in the run-up to the March 5, 2018, expiration of DACA protections, as announced by Trump. Ultimately, the Supreme Court would delay the shutdown of the program by up to a year to allow Congress to take action on the DREAM Act, a bill that would grant a pathway to permanent legal status for DACA recipients. I’m convinced that our direct action campaigns, like the one outside Speaker Ryan’s office, helped to bring about that outcome.”

“At Auburn Seminary, we coached one another in the organizational skills and spiritual resilience needed to lead communities in making change. My seminary group had been a lifeline. Time and again these thoughtful faith leaders had helped me to rise above the vitriol that came at me by the hour.

I was glad to be at the retreat on the day the news broke about the bombs. I’d felt grounded by the company of dedicated movement builders like the Rev. Dr. William Barber II, founder of the Poor People’s Campaign; Stosh Cotler of Bend the Arc, a movement for justice and equity in the Jewish community; the Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis, an advocate of racial reconciliation, LGBTQ rights, and economic justice; Imam Dawud Walid, director of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations; Rev. Peter Heltzel, a progressive Evangelical pastor in New York City; and the Rev. Dr. Katharine Henderson, president of Auburn Seminary, author, and interfaith bridge-builder. These warriors for justice helped me to stay centered when we learned that a series of pipe bombs had been mailed to fourteen prominent critics of the current commander in chief, including to former presidents Obama and Clinton and their first ladies, and the offices of CNN, which Trump had decried as “fake news” and the “enemy of the people.”

“As I’ve traveled the country to raise awareness of social injustices and to organize, my gratitude goes to my MPower Change family for holding down the fort and helping me build the largest grassroots, Muslim-led movement in the country. The Rev. Dr. Jacqueline Lewis and the Rev. Dr. William Barber II, you have been my spiritual center, always a phone call or a text away. ”

“As attack after attack was levied against me, I remained steadfast knowing that Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and Jewish Voice for Peace would stand boldly in my defense. Your organizations are the embodiment of allyship, and I will never be able to repay you. ”

Below are Excerpts from: Linda Sarsour’s “We Are Not Here to Be Bystanders” Afterward

“Rashida Tlaib, you were the activist organizer I strived to emulate as a young person. You showed me how powerful it was to be unapologetically Palestinian American and encouraged me to never tone down my Brooklyn attitude. Thank you, Zahra Billoo and Imraan Siddiqi, for checking in on me and strategizing with me when I felt as if I knew the destination but didn’t know how to get there.

To the senior fellows at Auburn Seminary, thank you for your constant prayers and for committing yourselves to a faith-rooted movement for justice. ”

“Winnie Wong, Ana María Archila, and Ady Barkan, you are my movement warriors. You always go where you are needed and you take me with you. When I thought I was too exhausted to get out of bed, your battle cries for justice were all I needed. Eric Ward, you are brilliance personified. You invested in me, you believed in me, and you are available to me in a way I don’t always feel I deserve. Maria Mottola, my neighbor and dear friend, you saw my nonprofit leadership before I realized it was my path.”

“Imam Omar Suleiman, Imam Zaid Shakir, Imam Talib Abdur-Rashid: Thank you for showing up to the front lines when called and for demonstrating the beauty of our faith. You have come to the aid of the most pained and hurt in our society in the path laid by our beloved Prophet Muhammad (may peace and blessings be upon him).”

“There are so many other friends who stepped up for me over the years: Patrisse Cullors, Sarab Al-Jijakli, Imam Khalid Latif, Tahanie Aboushi, Manar Waheed, Alicia Garza, Nadia Firozvi, Shaun King, Sunny Alawlaqi, Mohammad Khan, Rama Issa-Ibrahim, Kayla Santosuosso, Ashleigh Zimmerman, Said Durrah, Chris Rominger, Jennie Goldstein, Shahana Masum, Rasha Mubarak, Ahmad Abuznaid, Philip Agnew, Fatima Salman, Steve Choi, Jumaane Williams, Brad Lander, Carlos Menchaca, Aliya Latif, Ali Najmi, Father Khader El-Yateem, Zeinab Bader, Aber Kawas, Dalia Mogahed, Mark Thompson, Julianne Hoffenberg, Brea Baker, Jennifer Epps-Addison, Cassady Fendlay, Mysonne Linen, Kirsten John Foy, Habib Joudeh, Nadia Tonova, Maha Freij, Sarah Sophie Flicker, Abed Ayoub, Sophie Ellman-Golan, Paola Mendoza, Rafael Shimunov, Jose Antonio Vargas, Alida Gardia, Nihad Awad, Cathy Albisa, Zein Rimawi, Rinku Sen, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, Dove Kent, Somia Elrowmeim, Amardeep Singh, and many, many more.

To the institutions that have held me up: Arab American Association of New York, MPower Change, Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), Muslim American Society (MAS), and the Muslim Legal Fund of America—I’m so grateful for all that you do for our communities.”

Lecture on The Challenge of Counterintelligence Cultures

Propaganda and Deception Lecture:

About the Speaker:

Dr. Jack Dziak is co-founder and President of Dziak Group, Inc., a consulting firm in the fields of intelligence, counterintelligence, counter-deception, national security affairs, and technology transfer and an Adjunct Professor at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, DC. He has served over five decades as a company President and as a senior intelligence officer and senior executive in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and in the Defense Intelligence Agency, with long experience in counterintelligence, hostile deception, counter-deception, strategic intelligence, weapons proliferation intelligence, and intelligence education. Dr. Dziak received his honors Ph.D. in Russian history from Georgetown University, is a graduate of the National War College, and is a recipient of numerous defense and intelligence awards and citations. He was the co-developer and co-director of the Masters Degree Program in Strategic Intelligence at the Defense Intelligence School, the original predecessor to the current National Intelligence University. He has taught graduate courses at the Institute of World Politics, the National War College, Georgetown University, and The George Washington University; and lectures on intelligence, military affairs, and security issues throughout the US and abroad. Dr. Dziak is the author of the award-winning Chekisty: A History of the KGB, numerous other books, articles, and monographs, including The Military Relationship Between China and Russia, and Soviet Perceptions of Military Power. He currently is preparing a book on foreign counterintelligence systems, as well as other works on intelligence and national security issues.

About the Lecture:

The Challenge of Counterintelligence Cultures: The Counterintelligence State from Tsarist Russia and the USSR, to Putin’s Russia, the PRC, Cuba & Venezuela, and Resurgent Militant Islam About the Lecture: This presentation will begin with the counterintelligence cum provocational style of the Tsarist Okhrana’s near classic penetration operations against its indigenous Marxist revolutionary terrorists; proceed through the long, ugly Soviet secret police period (originally annealed in struggling with Okhrana provocations); and explore the counterintelligence continuities and refinements of former KGB Lt. Col. and now Russian President Putin. Yesteryear’s Okhrana/KGB are today’s siloviki. We will then briefly probe the PRC counterintelligence state, whose pedigree long antedates that of Russia; then highlight client counterintelligence state systems such as Cuba and Venezuela; and close with a look at the unsurprising similarities between resurgent militant Islam and the Soviet/Russian counterintelligence state paradigm.