The Blogs: Iran promotes possible terrorist attacks in Latin America

Through the Bolivia Agreement, Iran could be preparing the ground for terrorist attacks across the region.

The might of the Ayatollahs, the Shiite clerics who took power in Iranian society after Khomeini’s return in 1979, continues to be erected under the iron fist of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard (declared a terrorist organisation by more and more countries around the world) and seeping into Iranian society through the many elite groups such as the Morality Police, the repressive body that ended the life of young Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini in September 2022, the repressive body that took the life of young Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini in September 2022, and who patrol the strictness of the extreme interpretation of the Koran and Islamic law in civil society. Since 1979, the population of Iran has been under the repression and suffocation of a system that disturbs the stability not only of the Middle East, but of the entire world.

Argentina is the country of no answers: there are no answers about the bombing of the Israeli embassy in 1992; there are no answers about the bombing of the AMIA in 1994; there are no answers about the murder of prosecutor Alberto Natalio Nisman in January 2015; there are no answers about why the Foreign Ministry shared a meeting with Mohsen Rezai, one of the Iranians accused by the Argentine justice system; there are no answers about why an Iranian plane piloted by the Quds Forces landed on national territory after spending two days in Ciudad del Este, the criminal hub of the Triple Border Area. In a country where there are no answers, threats enter much more easily because impunity allows time to pass and the passage of time leads to oblivion.

Since Hezbollah was declared a terrorist organisation in 2019 by the government of Mauricio Macri, carrying insignia or mobilising references to that organisation is a crime considered as promoting terrorism and must be denounced.

Terrorism can strike anytime and anywhere, but it is true that it can strike most comfortably in countries where security is minimal. The successful fight against terrorism is also an ideological fight: to reduce the chances of an attack almost to a minimum, it is necessary to fight resolutely against radicalisation and against the spectres of radicalisation that flourish in all corners of society and are evident in social networks. Today in Argentina both the ideological and the operational fight are being defeated: the ideological one because there are pro-Iranian and pro-Hezbollah groups in the country that are at the service of a call in the best style of lone wolves, those wolves that act outside the pack. Since Hezbollah was declared a terrorist organisation in 2019 by the government of Mauricio Macri, carrying insignia or mobilising references to that organisation is a crime considered as promoting terrorism and must be denounced.

Today there are people whose social networks display banners and images in favour of the Lebanese terrorist organisation that is the armed wing of Iran and who are united by a deeply violent, anti-Semitic and irritable narrative. In this sense, what is the purpose of a group of people who frequent the At Tauhid mosque in Buenos Aires being connected to individuals whose social networks promote terrorism? Social networks are precisely cyber spaces where wills meet and where operability becomes possible.

Faced with the silence of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the government and the judiciary, the Islamic Republic of Iran has promoted the signing of an agreement with Bolivia, amplifying that ideological base that in recent years has united 21st Century Socialism and Iranian Islamism, two poles that are presumed to be opposites, but which since the Hugo Chávez years have been robust enough for it to be said that Venezuela should actually be called the Islamic Republic of Venezuela or Tehran’s backyard.

venezuelan foreign minister jorge arreaza and his Iranian counterpart in Tehran, Iran, in 2020. Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Venezuela%E2%80%99s_Top_Diplomat_Visits_Iran-7.jpg

A defence and security agreement between Iran and Bolivia would replicate a penetration very similar to that of the 1980s, when Tehran promoted a clandestine intelligence network through Mohsen Rabbani to produce terrorist intelligence in order to carry out the attacks on the Israeli embassy in 1992 and the AMIA in 1994.

Hasn’t too much happened for Iranian meddling no longer to be a matter of hemispheric security? The Ayatollahs are encouraged to become the conductors of an orchestra whose scores are heavily influenced by anti-American, anti-Israeli and of course pronounced anti-Semitic sentiment in the Latin American and Caribbean world.

Iran’s ideological base in the region is robust enough to reach deep enough to present itself as part of the concert of nations trying to sweep under the carpet the fact that there are five Iranian citizens (one of them a very senior member of the current government) who must be brought to justice for the murder of over a hundred people and 500 surviving victims.

The idea of a pact or memorandum in Bolivia is reminiscent of 2013 when, through clandestine diplomacy, the government of Cristina Kirchner formulated an agreement with the Iranians that would later be denounced by the dead prosecutor Nisman in 2015. Nisman, as is well known, was murdered hours before he was due to make his accusation in front of the National Congress in January of that year.

At the same time that Iran will be promoting outreach and agreements with the South American country, in a kind of revival of the agreements between Iran and Argentina a decade ago, Luis D’elía (one of those accused by prosecutor Nisman of being one of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nexuses to obtain impunity and now a candidate for governor for the party led by Guillermo Moreno) will travel to Tehran to promote a rapprochement in the export of urea to Mercosur and thus try to alleviate a shortage that affects the rural sector in Argentina and Brazil.

Needless to say, Luis D’elía, who not only has a shady record, has no authority whatsoever to negotiate anything on behalf of the organisation, let alone Argentina, which, through its Foreign Ministry, has decided to disassociate itself from the piquetero’s trip.

Luis D’elía’s trip to Tehran indicates that the ties that Nisman spoke of in 2015 are still alive and that the link with the Persian country is still alive despite the terrorist chapters that impacted Buenos Aires and about which Iran refuses to cooperate judicially. The most worrying thing is that the piquetero’s expedition is to obtain urea, an element used in fertilisers and which can be used for explosives when mixed with hypochlorite materials. There are reports of seizures from the FARC, a Colombian narco-terrorist organisation, as well as a history of urea nitrate in explosives that attacked the World Trade Center in February 1993.

Iran since the 1980s has built a structure that today is not dormant, but continues to operate to export Tehran’s interests far beyond its immediate neighbourhood in the Middle East. If the Ayatollahs today have a way to attack Israel outside the region, it is through Latin America, a terrain they know and which continues to suffer from their meddling today.