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It has conducted a large narco terror operation for decades especially along the Tri Border Area and in Maicao, [[Colombia]].
It has conducted a large narco terror operation for decades especially along the Tri Border Area and in Maicao, [[Colombia]].
Hugo Chavez has provided Iranian Islamists operatives with Venezuelan passports
Hugo Chavez has provided Iranian Islamists operatives with Venezuelan passports.
Venezuelan Vice–President Tareck El Aissami, a strong candidate to be the future leader of his country, facilitated the issue of hundreds of Venezuelan passports to suspected Hezbollah members.<ref name=swj-2020>[https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/irans-strategic-penetration-latin-america-consequences-us-foreign-policy-and-national Iran’s Strategic Penetration of Latin America: Consequences for U.S. Foreign Policy and National Security]. By Magdalena Defort and William Preston McLaughlin. SWJ, Jan 20, 2020.
<blockquote>
The Contemporary Islamic Threat
Two centuries later, history has come full circle. In 2017, Senator Marco Rubio spoke to the U.S. Senate about the threat to national and regional security posed by the extra–hemispheric power called the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI). According to Rubio, between 2008 and 2012, fraudulent passports, national IDs and birth certificates were issued by the Venezuelan Embassy in Baghdad to foreign nationals with ties to terrorist group, including 173 people from Iran, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan. The individual who uncovered this information was Misael López Soto (lawyer and legal attaché in the Venezuelan Embassy in Baghdad), a Venezuelan national assigned to the Venezuelan Embassy in Iraq in 2015. Soto became a whistleblower and revealed the identity of several of these potential terrorists. He also discovered that Venezuelan Vice–President Tareck El Aissami, a strong candidate to be the future leader of his country, facilitated the issue of hundreds of Venezuelan passports to suspected Hezbollah members.
Despite the fact that these activities were revealed in a CNN documentary and a handful of Iranians using the fraudulent passports were arrested, there is no substantial evidence that the Venezuelan government intended to stop its Baghdad embassy’s wrongdoing. Senator Rubio’s exposure of how a Latin American country could facilitate the movement of terrorist groups throughout the Middle East and Latin America, and how these groups have allegedly interfered in Venezuela’s democratic process by influencing its elections, show how effectively Iran and its proxy forces have gained the cooperation of some Latin America governments.
Although the Middle East presence in Latin America dates back to the early 1900s, the 1979 Iranian revolution that brought the Ayatollah Khomeini to power firmly established the Islamic Republic’s presence in the region. Since then, Iran has used every agency within its borders to help extend Iranian tentacles into the political, cultural, economic, and military life of Latin America. Iranian operatives have even infiltrated existing Latin American criminal networks and now operate freely within them. All of this activity follows the “Pattern of Penetration” model put forth by Ilan Berman and Joseph M. Humire.</blockquote></ref>
[[Venezuela]]'s dictator Nicolas Maduro's chief dirty money man, Arab Hezbollah guy, Alex Saab was finally arrested in 2021.
[[Venezuela]]'s dictator Nicolas Maduro's chief dirty money man, Arab Hezbollah guy, Alex Saab was finally arrested in 2021.