Ronald Reagan helped to usher in a hopeful wave of democratization in Latin America. In one country after another, multi-party elections ended decades of single-party rule and military dictatorship. But today, that legacy is under threat — and so is our own homeland. The southern front in the War on Terror, which runs through Latin America’s institutions of state, is cracking under a combined assault of political revolution, Islamist terrorism, and the world’s most heavily armed drug cartels.
On Colombia’s frontiers, the radical “Bolivarian” governments of Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia have embraced Iran, and are in league both with revolutionary terrorist movements such as the FARC and with drug traffickers. In the Caribbean zone, states are drowning in a tidal wave of drug- and weapons-smuggling — and increased extremism among its Muslim immigrant communities. In Mexico, massive drug cartels compete for control of the drug trade, deploying dizzying numbers of heavily armed paramilitaries. The violence has begun to reach our own cities.
There may be no direct connection between recent kidnappings in Phoenix and high-profile visits by Hugo Chávez to Tehran. But connect the dots, and you will see a transnational extremist-terrorist wave challenging the institutions of liberal democracy in Latin America. If that wave begins to win in Latin America, we will soon be facing it here at home, with potentially grave consequences for our security and our way of life.
America’s “defense-in-depth” against this wave consists of Colombia, Central America, and Mexico. All three lines of defense are under assault and in danger of failing.
IRAN’S ALLIES TAKE ON COLOMBIA
In the Western Hemisphere, the most dangerous development of the last decade is perhaps the alliance between Venezuela and Iran, which has allowed the mullahs to expand dramatically their reach in Latin America. Hezbollah has long been present among the immigrant Syrian and Lebanese communities of the Tri-Border Area between Brazil and Argentina. Hezbollah has been linked to bombings of the Israeli Embassy in Argentina in 1992 and the Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires two years later, in which a total of 115 people were killed and 500 injured. Hezbollah’s illicit activities in this region of South America were arrestingly documented in a 2002 New Yorker article by Jeffrey Goldberg.