The Blogs: OLA: another Hezbollah cell in Latin America

The almost 14,000 kilometres that separate Buenos Aires from Tehran have not prevented the birth in 2012 of an organisation founded by Shiite Argentines, which transposes the principles of the Islamic revolution and claims Hezbollah, the Lebanese group responsible for the murder of more than a hundred people in the Buenos Aires bombings of 1992 and 1994.

OLA is an Argentinean organisation that vindicates Qassem Soleimani and promotes Al Quds Day.
(Screenshot https://www.facebook.com/Olargentina/posts/pfbid02sj4tLErQnpu9aNfgPvT6zwDVNBrcRqMZzQxQNC4nMadtpq62VbiSdeUyWg8Li1B6l)

Ebrahim Raisi, Iran’s president, has begun a tour of the most important dictatorships in Latin America and the Caribbean: Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, the latter being a scenario of importance due to the intermediary role he has held since 2011 between the Argentine government and Iranian officials around an extremely sensitive issue such as the AMIA (Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina) bombing that ended the lives of 85 people after the explosion of a suicide vehicle. There has also been a shared history between Argentina and the Republic of Iran over the nuclear issue dating back to the 1970s.

The presence of Iranian officials on Argentine soil has always been a complex issue for the Argentine government of the day, since its Iranian counterparts in almost 30 years have only given complicit cover to the five citizens (including the current vice-president, Mohsen Rezai) accused by the Argentine justice system and wanted by INTERPOL for their involvement in the July 18, 1994 bombing.

The national prosecutor in the case, Alberto Natalio Nisman, first ruled in 2006 against the intellectual authorship of the Persian country and the executive role of Hezbollah, the armed wing of the Islamic revolution that today targets Israel’s northern border with more than 60,000 missiles. In 2015, Nisman was murdered hours before publicly presenting his accusation of cover-up against Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and her foreign minister, Héctor Timerman, before the Congress of the Nation, in order to achieve criminal collusion and end the accusations against Iran, a potentially strategic ally in energy matters for those years.

The Organisation for the Liberation of Argentina: marginal and dangerous supporter of Iran and Hezbollah.

OLA are the initials of the Organisation for the Liberation of Argentina, a group composed of mostly Shiite Argentines who promote the principles of Khamenei’s Islamic Revolution, which in 2022 executed more than 500 people and brutally repressed the protests that erupted after the murder of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the Moral Police.

Founded in 2012 and with a strong relationship with the At Tauhid Mosque in the Argentine capital, which for Argentine prosecutors has played a crucial role in carrying out a system of espionage and parallel intelligence, with the support of Mohsen Rabbani of the Iranian embassy in Buenos Aires, from 1980 onwards to carry out not only the 1992 terrorist attacks against the Israeli embassy (22 dead and more than 200 wounded) and the AMIA bombing in 1994 (85 dead and more than 300 wounded), but also to infiltrate Iranian agents in Latin America and the Caribbean.

One of the main drivers of the OLA is reportedly identified as A. E. P., who had moved to Jujuy, in northern Argentina, years ago and wears a T-shirt with the face of Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary general of Hezbollah. From December 2019 and December 2023 they have parliamentary representation in the Jujuy City Council under Agustín Andrés Flores, which allows the OLA access to the northern province’s treasury and its conduct as a “political party” in the Argentine system.

The images allude to Hezbollah and its Secretary, Hassan Nasrallah, the organisation that carried out the 1994 terrorist attack on AMIA in Buenos Aires.
(https://www.facebook.com/Olargentina/photos/2607605275991162)

It is as if someone in the United States wore a T-shirt with Osama Bin Laden’s face on it and founded an organisation that promotes the ideology of international terrorism. The OLA, among other things, is still active in its social networks with messages promoted by A. E. P. where it encourages the Israeli expulsion from “Palestine” through resistance, the euphemism that anti-Semitism uses for the terrorist acts that have accumulated unfortunate civilian deaths in Israel in recent years.

Also an admirer of Qassem Soleimani, the Quds Forces general killed in January 2020, A.E.P. is a promoter of hate speeches against Israel and the Jewish people in reference to the occupied Arab territories. It should not go unmentioned that the Quds Forces are the elite forces within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard and one of the main drivers of Iran’s revolutionary expansion that reaches, as we see, many, many miles away from Tehran.

Also using open source investigation, OSINT, it is once again clear that there is a proliferation of users on Facebook and Twitter who make up the OLA microclimate and who are united by their contemptuous treatment of Israel, the Jews and modern anti-Semitism dressed up in the Arab cause. One of them is M. P., a member of the OLA and also a member of the ARA San Juan Federal Investigation Network. On 24 January 2020 P. pointed to the Jews as “deposited” in Palestine, referring to Theodor Herzl as the beneficiary of a bribe paid by Adolf Hitler himself (comete is the colloquial way of calling bribery in Argentina) and ending the publication with a provocative question referring to the holocaust: “What do you mean holocaust?” ignoring the more than six million people who have been eliminated both physically and spiritually since the establishment of the Final Solution in 1942 in Nazi Germany.

“The Jews have been deposited in Palestine and Herzl has received a bribe from Adolf Hitler”.
(https://twitter.com/IslamBaires/status/1220536496098304011?t=JyUeiqYzxsmlveEww_7rvA&s=08)

Also in this pattern of behaviour is the Facebook account identified as Viva Palestina Libre which is reportedly based in Buenos Aires and is mainly composed of a user identified as D. The provocative post that identifies an orthodox Jew carrying a gun and as a military target sums up the scale of the problem: in Argentina there are groups that, in the guise of the Arab cause, are inciting anti-Semitism and providing ideological support for Hezbollah in a country that has already been attacked twice by Iranian terrorism.

An Orthodox Jew carrying a weapon and marked as a military target.
(https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=498316446967400&set=ecnf.100003671461072)

These groups, although already followed and denounced in the past, are still active today and have given their support to Daniel Scioli, one of the candidates of the Frente de Todos, the electoral platform that governs Argentina and whose vice-president is Cristina Kirchner, who was denounced by Prosecutor Nisman eight years ago.