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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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“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.
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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.
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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”.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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gNGOs are Governmental Non-Governmental Orgs. Fake NGO’s operated by the government.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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Hugo Chavez’s placement of individuals with known ties to terrorist groups in charge of his immigration and identification bureau have long been documented.
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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.
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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.
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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”.
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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…
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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.