http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-border21dec21,1,4631461.
story?coll=la-headlines-world
Suspicions Gather Where 3 Nations Converge
Brazilian officials acknowledge they can't monitor the triple border, but
reject claims that the area is a caldron of support for terrorists.
By Henry Chu, Times Staff Writer
FOZ DO IGUACU, Brazil - Geraldo Pereira has heard the rumors before, the
whispers that cast a shadow on the reputation of this border town. So a bit
of exasperation tinges his tone when the questions surface again.
"There is no evidence of terrorism or the presence of terrorists in this
region," insisted Pereira, chief of the federal police's local outpost.
"This is folklore."
It is a cloud of suspicion that authorities here in southern Brazil have
fought to dispel with increasing frequency in recent years as fighting
terrorism has risen to the top of the global agenda.
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the area around Foz do Iguacu, a freewheeling
region where Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay converge, has been constantly
suspected of harboring terrorists or their sympathizers. Intelligence
experts often cite the rugged area with lax border controls, often
unpatrollable terrain and a sizable Muslim community as a prime breeding
ground for Islamic radicals.
Those concerns emerged again last month when Defense Secretary Donald H.
Rumsfeld, meeting with some of his Latin American counterparts in Ecuador,
warned of terrorists taking advantage of porous borders in the region to
regroup and organize. Last year, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of
Staff, Gen. Richard B. Myers, called the triple border area a focal point of
"Islamic terrorist-supported activities," although defense officials admit
they have no proof of any active plotting.
Brazil's press has fed the speculation, including a story last year by one
of the country's most influential newsmagazines claiming that Osama bin
Laden had visited a mosque in Foz do Iguacu in 1995. The report touched off
concern that Al Qaeda might have found a haven here, which authorities
categorically deny.
"There's no evidence so far of the existence of cells and training camps of
terrorist organizations in the region," Mauro Marcelo de Lima e Silva, the
head of Brazil's intelligence agency, told The Los Angeles Times. "There's
also no evidence of the presence of any member of Al Qaeda in the region."
He noted that a joint security group consisting of the U.S., Argentina,
Brazil and Paraguay had issued a statement last year saying, "No operational
activities linked to terrorism have been detected in the tri-border region
by radicalized groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas and Al Qaeda."
Mindful of Washington's keen interest in the area, "the Brazilian
authorities, the Paraguayan authorities, and the Argentine authorities are
all sniffing like crazy for that sort of thing," a U.S. security official in
the region said.
Yet the rumors of terrorist links persist, and it is not hard to see why.
Even Brazilian officials eager to quash accusations about extremist activity
acknowledge that the border between Foz do Iguacu and its sister city in
Paraguay, Ciudad del Este, is an unsupervised frontier traversed by
thousands of people every day, sometimes on multiple trips, without any
documents.
That has led to billions of dollars' worth in trade of contraband goods,
encompassing electronics, toys, cigarettes, drugs and weapons, often
delivered - no questions asked - by one of the many couriers-for-hire who
hang around the border.
Buying a gun in Ciudad del Este and bringing it back to Foz do Iguacu
requires only as much time and effort as it takes to cross the
traffic-choked Friendship Bridge that connects the two cities. Few vehicles
or pedestrians get stopped by anyone in uniform.
Factor in the 12,000 Arabs who live in the region - most of whom are
merchants - and the flow of contraband becomes a potential source of funding
for militant Muslim organizations, U.S. officials say.
The Arabs in the area, most of them Lebanese immigrants or their
descendants, say they're the victims of unfair racial profiling by the U.S.
They acknowledge sending millions of dollars back to the Middle East, but
say the money goes to support relatives in a country left in ruins by a
civil war the immigrants were lucky enough to escape.
"I have parents in Lebanon who are over 60 years old. In Lebanon, there are
no pensions," said Zaki Moussa, 40, a travel agent who came to Brazil 17
years ago. "I also have a sister who is separated with six children. Don't I
have the right to send them money to help out?"
To avoid bank fees as high as 20%, Moussa asks friends traveling back to
Lebanon to hand-carry the money, a hassle-free option because no customs
declarations are necessary for anyone leaving Brazil with less than 10,000
reais, or about $3,650.
Such remittances are hard to track, and have raised concerns that some of
the money coming out of the tri-border area is diverted to unsavory hands.
Washington believes that Hezbollah, the Lebanese-based militant group that
the U.S. considers a terrorist organization, is one of the main
beneficiaries. In June, the U.S. Treasury Department announced that Assad
Ahmad Barakat, a local businessman arrested by Brazil two years ago, was a
"key terrorist financier" with close ties to the Hezbollah leadership. The
U.S. alleges that Barakat engaged in counterfeiting and extortion to raise
funds for Hezbollah. He is now in a Paraguayan prison serving time for tax
evasion.
It is difficult to prove a link between money sent from the Foz do Iguacu
region and terrorist acts.
"Can anybody say that the dollar that was made off the chopped-up
PlayStation [and then sent to] Lebanon, did that finance bullets that killed
an Israeli?" the U.S. security official said. "That's a tough one.
"Right now the only thing that anybody can say is that just like in the
United States, [where] we have remittances that very naturally go back to
Mexico, in the tri-border area you have a huge Middle Eastern population .
and they naturally send their remittances back to their parents and Grandpa
and Grandma."
To complicate matters, Brazil regards Hezbollah as a legitimate political
party, and so donations to the group would not run afoul of the law here.
Other arrests in Foz do Iguacu have drawn unwanted attention to this corner
of South America. In April 2002, at Egypt's request, Brazil arrested
Mohammed Ibrahim Soliman, an alleged member of an Islamic terrorist group
blamed for the 1997 massacre of 58 tourists in the Egyptian resort of Luxor.
And a new lead suggests a possible connection between the triple border and
the 1994 bombing of a Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires, which killed
85 people. In the days leading up to the bombing, someone using a cellphone
registered in Foz do Iguacu made calls from the Argentine capital to numbers
in Lebanon, Iran, Germany, New York and the tri-border area.
An Argentine judge came to Foz do Iguacu recently to make follow-up
inquiries, which Pereira, the chief of the federal police here, said were
all answered without gleaning "anything positive about the presence of
terrorists here in the region."
Pereira leads an outpost of 14 officers and a cadre of field agents
responsible for many of the duties that in the U.S. get divided between such
bodies as the FBI, Border Patrol, Customs Service and the Drug Enforcement
Administration. He says he would need triple the staff to mount the kind of
border supervision he would like to see, and no one on his force speaks
Arabic. But Brazil's federal police are chronically underfunded.
Pereira also heads the Tripartite Command, a joint security effort by
Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay. Collaboration is hampered by territoriality
laws and by what one law-enforcement source described as a lack of trust
among the parties.
Pereira's top priority is suppressing contraband, not chasing what officials
insist is the phantom of terrorist activity in the area. The Islam preached
and practiced here is a moderate one, contrary to some assumptions, he and
residents say.
"Three or four months ago, a TV crew came to interview me, and they were
surprised I didn't have a beard or traditional clothes," said Moussa, the
immigrant from Lebanon.
"Our community has been here for over 50 years, and we have always condemned
the barbarity committed in other parts of the world, be it by Muslims or
not," he said. "At the mosque, our sheik makes daily speeches and reminds us
of our Muslim values, of a humble life. We don't see extremism here."
------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~-->
Make a clean sweep of pop-up ads. Yahoo! Companion Toolbar.
Now with Pop-Up Blocker. Get it for free!
http://us.click.yahoo.com/L5YrjA/eSIIAA/yQLSAA/TySplB/TM
--------------------------------------------------------------------~->
--------------------------
Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [EMAIL
PROTECTED]
--------------------------
Brooks Isoldi, editor
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.intellnet.org
Post message: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
*** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has
not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. OSINT, as a part of
The Intelligence Network, is making it available without profit to OSINT
YahooGroups members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of
intelligence and law enforcement organizations, their activities, methods,
techniques, human rights, civil liberties, social justice and other
intelligence related issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes
only. We believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material
as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use
this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,'
you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
For more information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/osint/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
