Moving away from the United States onto some older stuff I didn’t get the chance to comment on during Nov. and the first part of December.
Ayman Joumaa, a Lebanese citizen who has laundered millions of dollars for Hezbollah while assisting with cocaine-trafficking routes out of Colombia and Venezuela. It appears his focus was routes through Europe, but he has also moved drugs through Mexico in coordination with the Zetas.
Source: http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Americas/Latin-America-Monitor/2011/1215/Hezbollah-terrorist-financing-and-Venezuela-Don-t-panic.
As the CSM story indicated these have all the buzzwords that cause terrorism analysts sleepless nights and give fiction writers their latest bestsellers. But how realistic is the threat? Hezbollah has made a career of operations like the ones outlined above within Latin America, as explained in the recently published Black Market Billons:
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Market-Billions-Organized-Terrorists/dp/0132180243/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1325020167&sr=8-1
This does not automatically mean that Chavez and Hezbollah are in bed together. Further, it would make little sense for Chavez to allow any organized activity to take place on Venezuelan soil because it creates a Pakistan type problem where you train operatives for operations in a foreign land, but if your zone of action should dry up, there’s insurgent elements that may reek havoc on the homeland.
Surely, no government would be stupid enough to follow Pakistan’s example?
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