Ron Chepesiuk, TNC Contributing Writer

To confirm that the War on Terrorism is global struggle, one has only to look at the South America's Tri-Border Area (TBA), a part of the world that the US intelligence officials have been monitoring for more than a decade out of concern that it has become a hotbed of Islamic terrorism. The TBA is a place of dense tropical forests that attracts tourists from all over, who come to see the cataracts of the Iguaza River, the world's greatest waterfall. A few miles away is the magnificent Parana River, the symbol of local prosperity and the source that provides millions of kilowatts of energy, thanks to the world's most powerful hydroelectric plant.

After the governments of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay successfully harnessed the Parana River's potential in the 1970s, they founded three border cities in the TBA: Foz do Iguaca in Brazil; Iguazu Port, Argentina; and Ciudad del Este, Paraguay. To promote regional trade, Brazil and Paraguay established a free trade zone in the rapidly growing boomtown of Cuidad del Este, and it became a popular destination for Argentineans and Brazilians who came to purchase cheap electronic products. In no time, it seemed, the TBA had half a million inhabitants and was a thriving corner of South America.

After the end of World War II, colonies of Middle Eastern Muslims from Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine migrated to the Tri-Border Area. After the civil war in Lebanon broke out in 1975, many Lebanese began looking for a safe place to escape the turmoil. Thousands flocked to the TBA, eventually making the area one of the most important Arab communities in South America. Today an estimated ninety percent of the Arab population in Ciudad del Este and Foz do Iguaca is of Lebanese descent.

The immigrants who came to the TBA, however, could not escape the raging civil war back home. In the 1980s, Hezbollah clerics and members of radical Islamic groups such as Hamas began sending agents to the TBA and recruiting sympathizers from the local population. By mid-2000, US intelligence officials estimated that at least 460 Hezbollah operatives were living and working there.

Brazilian intelligence officials also believed that Al Qaeda has been active in the TBA since the mid-1990s. Citing an anonymous high-ranking official of the Brazilian Intelligence Agency, Veja, a leading Brazilian newsweekly, reported that Osama Bin Laden had visited Foz do Iguaca in 1995. The source told the publication that his agency had obtained a 28-minute video of Bin Laden participating in meetings at a mosque during his visit. Al Qaeda's Khalid Sheik Mohammed is also believed to have visited the TBA in December 1995 and in 1998. In late December 2001, after the US-led coalition ousted the Taliban from power, a CNN reporter found a large tourist poster from the TBA at an Al Qaeda safe house in Kabul. Experts, however, say that the Al Qaeda-TBA connection has weekend since 9-11.

Still, even before 9-11 the violence and hatred from the volatile Middle East spread to South America. Buenos Aires, Argentina, became the scene of two major terrorist acts in the early 1990s -- one against the Israeli embassy on March 17, 1992, and the other against a Jewish Community Center on July 18, 1994. More than 120 people were killed in the two attacks. Hezbollah terrorists, using the TBA as a base, were believed responsible. In the 1992 incident, a Ford F-100 truck loaded with the high explosive Semtex was bought in Ciudad del Este with hundred dollar bills traced to a currency exchange house belonging to Morizer al-Kassar, a well-known arms dealer.

Al-Kassar is suspected of participating in several terrorist acts, including the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship, and he remained a fugitive. He has resided in Spain since 1984 and is currently detained by the Spanish government on, among other charges, aiding terrorism and money laundering. No one has ever been convicted for the crimes in the Buenos Aires atrocities, but Argentine authorities did indict Hezbollah security chief Imad Mughniyeh, believing him to be the mastermind behind both atrocities.

Since the late 1990s, the terrorists in the TBA have largely confined their activities to criminal fund raising and to plotting strategy for future terrorist attacks in the Western Hemisphere. As a lawless zone with few governmental regulations, terrorist groups in the TBA have thrived and grown. According to experts, with the help of organized crime and corrupt local officials, they are able to raise significant revenue to finance their plans for the destruction of the US and Israeli targets in the Western Hemisphere.
 
Even before 9/11 the US government expressed concern about the activities in the TBA. At a seminar in Asuncion, Paraguay on combating terrorism and organized crime in the TBA, Ambassador Francis X. Taylor, Coordinator for Counter Terrorism, US Department of State, complimented the TBA as a "busy, culturally diverse business center." He then talked about the Dr. Jekyll-like aspect of the TBA's development. "We are worried, however, not by the things we can see, but by the things we can't see -- the darker side of the commercial trade, clandestine networks of persons and money -- money that may act to support terrorist organizations in the Middle East."

In late 2006 the U.S. Treasury Department published a report that included a list of individuals living in the TBA it charged had funded Islamic extremism. Paraguay, however, rejected the report, claiming that of the nine individuals listed in the report, two are now in prison and the others have served jail sentences. At about the same time, the Brazilian government also insisted that there is no evidence terrorist activity or its financing going on in the TBA. But in May 2007, Telemundo and NBC News reported that they had conducted an investigation of an extensive Hezbollah run smuggling network that funnels large sources of money to militant leaders in the Middle East and finances training camps and propaganda operations in South America.

Experts monitoring the Tri-Border Area since 9-11 wonder when the US government and its allies are going to talk less and act more to clean up the local corruption and the terrorism haven to diminish its potential threat. "For me, the Tri-Border Area is the Hilton of Islamic Extremism," Magnus Ranstporp, director of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrew in Fife, Scotland, told Vanity Fair magazine in December 2002. "It's one of the most lucrative safe havens in the world. It's been on our radar screen since the early 90s, but no one has done anything about it."

There is evidence that a terrorism-organized crime-drug trafficking connection is taking shape in the TBA, a development that could make narco-terrorism a formidable global threat, according to intelligence analysts who monitor the area. Chechen gangs have been using Argentina as a transit country for shipments of Andean cocaine to Europe, and in return, they sell arms to crime syndicates in Brazil and Colombia. According to Bruce Bagley, a political scientist at the University of Miami and a leading expert on Latin American drug trafficking, "Argentine intelligence sources have detected contacts between Chechen rebels and Islamic terrorists in the TBA, and they suspect the Chechens are using these contacts to help smuggle arms."

Meanwhile, the Argentine intelligence service has reached a serious and disturbing conclusion. The service believes that because the US and its allies have had had some success in the War on Terrorism, terrorists from Afghanistan, Central Asia and the Middle East are now looking towards the Western hemisphere as a base of operation. Getting into the TBA is easy and from there terrorists will have no problem moving about the region and conducting terrorism. According to Argentine intelligence service, terrorist organizations such as Al Qaeda and Hezbollah are joining forces with local drug lords to develop a smuggling trail all the way to Mexico. The ultimate objective -- sneak across the border to get at Uncle Sam.

If this analysis is accurate, then it's likely that weapons of mass destruction -- a dirty bomb or perhaps a suitcase bomb, for instance -- could make their way along this drug smuggling trail. This is no hyperbole. US law enforcement officials have readily acknowledged that they stop only about ten percent of the illegal drugs entering the US. An explosion of one dirty bomb would be all it would take to throw the US economic and political system into chaos. It's conceivable that smuggling into the US of a weapon of mass destruction may already have happened. The security alert in the US for several weeks during December 2002 and early January 2003 was Code Orange, the second highest it can be. The reason? Authorities reportedly feared a terrorist act potentially bigger than 9/11.

As these developments are showing, the potential of a strong terrorism-drug trafficking connection in TBA could complicate the efforts of the US-led anti-terrorist coalition in the War on Terrorism. Not only would the US have to confront terrorism at the source in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Central Asia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, and other places around the world, but it would also have to guard against the narco-terrorist threat in its own backyard. It has not helped the war effort either that terrorists and their criminal allies are using the billions of dollars generated by narco-terrorism to corrupt the governments that are supposed to investigate and break the connection. The scourge of illegal drugs had created a kind of Axis of Evil -- terrorists, drug runners, and corrupt government officials -- that has brought a narcotic plague upon the global community and greatly complicates the War on Terrorism.

The U.S.’s declining influence in Latin America, no doubt, has weakened its response to the challenge the TBA poses. In the January-February 2006 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, Peter Hakim, President of the InterAmerican Dialogue, wrote that ‘Relations between the U.S. and Latin America today at their lowest point since the end of the Cold War.” Nothing has changed in the past two years. Much of Latin America has swung left and other countries, such as China, Russia, France and Sweden are moving confidently into Latin America. It will be up to the winner of this year’s 2008 election to reverse this trend and make Latin America, once again, an important part of its foreign policy agenda.

Contributing writer Ron Chepesiuk is and award winning freelance journalist, a Fulbright Scholar to Bangladesh and a consultant to the History Channel’s “Gangland” documentary series.  He is the author of Drug Lords (www.ronchepesiuk.com) and Black Gangsters of Chicago (www.blackgangstersofchicago.com), and Gangsters of Harlem (www.gangstersofharlem.com/, among other books.