Bad or good neighbourhood

A Newsweek file about how some suceeded - and others not - in expanding their political influence behind their borders.

Wild journey ends for Eduardo Flores, 'soldier and guerrilla'

The story is a mix between Cold War Third World stories and Latin America imagination. Latin America continues to be the land of choice of the militant left and some of the encouragement is set by the political leaders as well. In addition, the weak states make impossible a coherent policy, including at the regional level. Eduardo Rozsa Flores - a convert to Islam, as another individuals who died during the coup - had the profile of the fighter for fighting, with no clear ideology behind - according to the 90s Serbian media (one of the source is Politika, not a reliable source then, but the basic information is taken from international reports) and Reporters Sans Frontieres, he is accused of the murder of two journalists during the Croatian war. We are used to talk often about the fight against terrorism after September 11. The terrorism existed and made victims before September 11. But it wasn't agreed - as it is not today - a common definition of what terrorism mean. It is no justification and arguments for terrorism. They are only some states and individuals who, taking advantage of a relative lack of global political will, consider they could act unharmed.

Irish Times

April 20

Daniel McLaughlin in Budapest profiles the Bolivian-born but much-travelled Eduardo Rózsa Flores, claimed by authorities to be the plot leader

EDUARDO RÓZSA Flores came to the end of an extraordinary and often bizarre journey in a Bolivian hotel room.

According to his blog, he was born in Bolivia in 1960 to a leftist Hungarian painter father and a Spanish teacher mother, who moved to Chile and then fled to Sweden after right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet ousted socialist leader Salvador Allende from power in Santiago in a 1973 coup.

Two years later the family arrived in Hungary, where Flores went on to become the last leader of his university’s communist youth group before the Soviet bloc collapsed in 1989.

For his compulsory national service, Flores served as a border guard at Budapest airport and, according to friends and Hungarian media, acted as a translator for international terrorist Carlos the Jackal when he used Budapest as a base from around 1983 to 1985.

Former acquaintances in Budapest say Flores found work as a journalist and correspondent’s assistant for the BBC’s Spanish-language service and Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia , which took him to former Yugoslavia as it descended into war in the early 1990s.

At this point, Flores abandoned journalism and joined the fighting, helping to establish a foreign volunteers brigade based around the northern Croatian town of Osijek, and fought for Croatia’s independence from Belgrade’s rule.

“The Serbs detained Eduardo for three or four days, beat him up and accused him of being a spy. He was livid and told a Croatian journalist soon afterwards that he wanted to fight,” a close friend of Flores in Budapest told The Irish Times on condition of anonymity.

Flores claimed to have been wounded several times in Croatia, and to have been promoted to the rank of colonel and given Croatian citizenship by then-president Franjo Tudjman.

But the Balkan wars also cast a dark shadow on Flores’ reputation, and caused several old Budapest acquaintances to shun him, particularly as rumours swirled that he may have ordered the killing of a Swiss and a British journalist who went to Croatia to investigate his volunteers brigade.

After the war ended in 1995, Flores returned to Hungary and wrote poetry (www.poetasdelmundo.com/verInfo_europa.asp?ID=1067) but was seen less frequently in Budapest. On his page on YouTube (www.youtube.com/user/eduflores), he said he was living in the country village of Szurdokpuspoki and described himself as an “international war correspondent-turned-platoon-leader” and said he was working as a journalist and actor.

Flores did play himself in a film that was based on his adventures, called Chico , and many of the tributes in Croatian and Hungarian posted on his YouTube pages and his own blog (http://eduardorozsaflores.blogspot.com) refer to him by that nickname.

In recent years, Flores converted to Islam and continued to support a bewildering array of causes, including independence for the Santa Cruz region of Bolivia where he was killed, opposing the US war in Iraq and calling for a Palestinian state.

“He was an idealist who would attach himself to underdog causes and identified himself with oppressed people. He could speak at a communist rally in the morning and a far-right one in the afternoon, and not see any contradiction,” said his old friend in Budapest.

Zoltan Brady, editor of the Kapu magazine that Flores wrote for, said he had gone to Bolivia last spring “to fight against its communist government” and for the independence of the province of Santa Cruz.

“Eduardo was a guerrilla fighter and was living in the Bolivian jungle for some time, having guerrilla activities everyday with thousands of his fellow fighters. But it is not true that he wanted to assassinate the president or anyone else. He was a solder and a guerrilla,” said Brady, who claims to have last talked to Flores just two days before his death.

His friend in Budapest also found it impossible to believe that he was plotting to kill Evo Morales.

“I think he probably met this group of people, including the Irishman, and bragged about what he had done and where he had been. And with his profile and perhaps some weapons with him, he was seen as the perfect guy to set up. He was not a spotless guy, that’s for sure, but he was not a terrorist either.”

See also:

Ireland's request to find out more about the death of the Irish citizen

Tracing War Crimes

By Radoje Arsenic, “Politika”, Belgrade, January 4, 1996

Eduardo Flores arrived in Croatia in 1991 as a correspondent of a Spanish weekly. Soon, he joined the infamous Croat paramilitary unit Zenga and became the commander of the “International Brigade”. Now, “Reporters without Frontiers” accuse him of killing two foreign correspondents in Croatia, Swiss Christian Wurtemberg and British photographer Paul Janks.

Eduardo Rozsa Flores, a journalist of Spanish-Hungarian extraction and a citizen of Hungary and Croatia, recently requested accreditation in the U.N. headquarters in Zagreb but was refused. A civilian UN official said that he had been vetted and that it was established that the said journalist was suspected of having committed war crimes and two murders, and “persons suspected of having committed murders are not given press accreditation”.

After a long investigation, the international journalists’ association, “Reporters without Frontiers”, prepared a comprehensive material and forwarded it to the United Nations Security Council which the expert group in Geneva published within its resolution 780. The essence of the said material is that Flores, the correspondent of the Catalonian weekly “La Vanguardia” of Barcelona and the commander of the “International Brigade” within the Croat Zenga’s which operated in Eastern Slavonia [under the leadership of self-declared Ustasha and indicted war criminal Branimir Glavas] at the end of 1991 and in 1992, is directly responsible for the death of two foreign journalists, Swiss Christian Wurtemberg and British photographer Paul Janks, who worked for the German EPA news agency.

Croat Officials Pinned Flores’ Murders on Serbs

According to the findings of the “Reporters without Frontiers”, the Swiss journalist was brutally murdered in the region of Osijek on 12 January 1992. The autopsy carried out in the Osijek hospital showed that the death had been caused by a rifle bullet and subsequent strangulation with hands and a rope. However, the statement issued by Croat officials said that Wurtemberg, who was in the brigade for about two months, “had been ambushed and killed by the Chetniks while on patrol”.

War criminal Flores and the other two assassins driven away in body bags. Santa Cruz, Bolivia, April 17 2009

But the facts are quite different and show that Wurtemberg joined the “International Brigade” in mid-November 1991 using a false identity and hiding his face behind a mask. As established by the “Reporters without Frontiers”, he was trying to investigate and disclose the facts about the war crimes of the “International Brigade” and its connections with ultra-rightist organizations in West European countries whence most of its members were recruited. He was also investigating the routes of trade in arms and narcotics.

During the last week of 1991, Spanish journalist Julio Cesar Alonso came to the headquarters of the “International Brigade” where he ran into his old friend Wurtemberg. Wurtemberg confided in him that he had left the Brigade a few days before and that he intended to return to Switzerland. Several days later, Alonso met with two members of the Brigade — one of them was its commander Flores (rewarded for his merits with Croatian citizenship), in the Zagreb “International” hotel. According to his subsequent testimony, Flores said he had uncovered that a Swiss was “a mole” in the Brigade.

Since Alonso knew that the only Swiss in the Brigade was his friend Wurtemberg, he hurried to Osijek to warn him. In the Brigade headquarters he met Flores again who told him with a smile: “By the way, we solved the problem of Christian. There is no more the problem of the Swiss.”

Although Croat officials claimed Wurtemberg had been “ambushed and killed by the Chetniks”, it is interesting that his laptop disappeared, while his diary was saved and given to his parents, but without several pages which were torn out.

Immediately after the murder of the Swiss correspondent, British photographer Paul Janks came to Osijek after he was informed about Wurtemberg’s death by his colleague who had expressed doubt in the official version Croats issued about Wurtemberg’s death. Janks began to ask questions about the death of his Swiss colleague and four days later (17 January 1992) was killed himself. Again, Croat official version was that he had been “killed by a Serb sniper”, with an accurate shot between the eyes from about 900 metres in the vicinity of the village of Brijest at the outskirts of Osijek.

Image from Flores’ blog; allegedly, Flores converted to Islam after participating in the Yugoslav civil war on the side of Croat paramilitaries

However, according to the “Reporters without Frontiers” and their findings submitted to the UN Security Council, it was determined as a fact that, at the time of the murder, a strong wind with sleet was blowing, so that such an accurate shot from the said range, as stated in the police investigation, was impossible.

In May of the same year, two photo reporters, Carl Finch and Richie Bell, met Paolo Bandini in Zagreb who had previously left the “International Brigade” and who told them that he had killed Chris Wurtemberg. Moreover, he claimed that he had done it “upon the orders of commander Flores”, as he called him. These two journalists publicly reiterated this accusation in September 1992 in “The Observer Magazine” of Liverpool.

Flores left the Croatian army in July 1992, having been commander of the sabotage and reconnaissance squad for 11 months and then the commander of the “International Brigade” of the Croat paramilitary troops, after which Tudjman promoted him in the rank of a major of the Croatian army, whereafter he was granted Croatian citizenship. Nothing was heard of him for almost three years (allegedly he frequently traveled between Chicago, Budapest and Osijek). Beginning last year, he joined the Community of Croatian Hungarians headquartered in Osijek and, according to his own statements, he is a good friend with Croat fascists, Ustashe Tomislav Mercep, Branimir Glavas and Vladimir Seks.

It is rumoured that former commander Flores now even writes poetry, but the “Reporters without Frontiers” hope that this new image of his will not hinder the expert commission to put the murders of the two journalists on its list of war crimes and to bring those who ordered their commission and those who committed them to justice in The Hague.

An exclusive interview he made with the Hungarian Journalist Kepes Andras, before leaving for Bolivia (in Hungarian)

Central America: An Emerging Role in the Drug Trade

Stephen Meiners
Stratfor
March 26

As part of STRATFOR’s coverage of the security situation in Mexico, we have observed some significant developments in the drug trade in the Western Hemisphere over the past year. While the United States remains the top destination for South American-produced cocaine, and Mexico continues to serve as the primary transshipment route, the path between Mexico and South America is clearly changing.

These changes have been most pronounced in Central America, where Mexican drug-trafficking organizations have begun to rely increasingly on land-based smuggling routes as several countries in the region have stepped up monitoring and interdiction of airborne and maritime shipments transiting from South America to Mexico.

The results of these changes have been extraordinary. According to a December 2008 report from the U.S. National Drug Intelligence Center, less than 1 percent of the estimated 600 to 700 tons of cocaine that departed South America for the United States in 2007 transited Central America. The rest, for the most part, passed through the Caribbean Sea or Pacific Ocean en route to Mexico. Since then, land-based shipment of cocaine through Central America appears to have ballooned. Earlier this month, U.S. Ambassador to Guatemala Stephen McFarland estimated in an interview with a Guatemalan newspaper that cocaine now passes through that country at a rate of approximately 300 to 400 tons per year.

Notwithstanding the difficulty associated with estimating drug flows, it is clear that Central America has evolved into a significant transshipment route for drugs, and that the changes have taken place rapidly. These developments warrant a closer look at the mechanics of the drug trade in the region, the actors involved, and the implications for Central American governments — for whom drug-trafficking organizations represent a much more daunting threat than they do for Mexico.

Some Background

While the drug trade in the Western Hemisphere is multifaceted, it fundamentally revolves around the trafficking of South American-produced cocaine to the United States, the world’s largest market for the drug. Drug shipment routes between Peru and Colombia — where the vast majority of cocaine is cultivated and produced — and the United States historically have been flexible, evolving in response to interdiction efforts or changing markets. For example, Colombian drug traffickers used to control the bulk of the cocaine trade by managing shipping routes along the Caribbean smuggling corridor directly to the United States. By the 1990s, however, as the United States and other countries began to focus surveillance and interdiction efforts along this corridor, the flow of U.S.-bound drugs was forced into Mexico, which remains the main transshipment route for the overwhelming majority of cocaine entering the United States.

A similar situation has been occurring over the last two years in Central America. From the 1990s until as recently as 2007, traffickers in Mexico received multiton shipments of cocaine from South America. There was ample evidence of this, including occasional discoveries of bulk cocaine on everything from small propeller aircraft and Gulfstream jets to self-propelled semisubmersible vessels, fishing trawlers and cargo ships. These smuggling platforms had sufficient range and capacity to bypass Central America and ship bulk drugs directly to Mexico.

By early 2008, however, a series of developments in several Central American countries suggested that drug-trafficking organizations — Mexican cartels in particular — were increasingly trying to establish new land-based smuggling routes through Central America for cocaine shipments from South America to Mexico and eventual delivery to the United States. While small quantities of drugs had certainly transited the region in the past, the routes used presented an assortment of risks. A combination of poorly maintained highways, frequent border crossings, volatile security conditions and unpredictable local criminal organizations apparently presented such great logistical challenges that traffickers opted to send the majority of their shipments through well-established maritime and airborne platforms.

In response to this relatively unchecked international smuggling, several countries in the region began taking steps to increase the monitoring and interdiction of such shipments. The Colombian government, for one, stepped up monitoring of aircraft operating in its airspace. The Mexican government installed updated radar systems and reduced the number of airports authorized to receive flights originating in Central and South America. The Colombian government estimates that the aerial trafficking of cocaine from Colombia has decreased by as much as 90 percent since 2003.

Maritime trafficking also appears to have suffered over the past few years, most likely due to greater cooperation and information-sharing between Mexico and the United States. The United States has an immense capability to collect maritime technical intelligence, and an increasing degree of awareness regarding drug trafficking at sea. Two examples of this progress include the Mexican navy’s July 2008 capture — acting on intelligence provided by the United States — of a self-propelled semisubmersible vessel loaded with more than five tons of cocaine, and the U.S. Coast Guard’s February 2009 interdiction of a Mexico-flagged fishing boat loaded with some seven tons of cocaine about 700 miles off Mexico’s Pacific coast. Presumably as a result of successes such as these, the Mexican navy reported in 2008 that maritime trafficking had decreased by an estimated 60 percent over the last two years.

While it is impossible to independently corroborate the Mexican and Colombian governments’ estimates on the degree to which air- and seaborne drug trafficking has decreased over the last few years, developments in Central America over the past year certainly support their assessments. In particular, STRATFOR has observed that in order to make up for losses in maritime and aerial trafficking, land-based smuggling routes are increasingly being used — not by Colombian cocaine producers or even Central American drug gangs, but by the now much more powerful Mexican drug-trafficking organizations.

Mechanics of Central American Drug Trafficking

It is important to clarify that what we are defining as land-based trafficking is not limited to overland smuggling. The methods associated with land-based trafficking can be divided into three categories: overland smuggling, littoral maritime trafficking and short-range aerial trafficking.

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The most straightforward of these is simple overland smuggling. As a series of investigations in Panama, Costa Rica and Nicaragua demonstrated last year, overland smuggling operations use a wide variety of approaches. In one case, authorities pieced together a portion of a route being used by Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel in which small quantities of drugs entered Costa Rica from Panama via the international point of entry on the Pan-American Highway. The cocaine was often held for several days in a storage facility before being loaded onto another vehicle to be driven across the country on major highways. Upon approaching the Nicaraguan border, however, the traffickers opted to avoid the official port of entry and instead transferred the shipments into Nicaragua on foot or on horseback along a remote part of the border. Once across, the shipments were taken to the shores of the large inland Lake Nicaragua, where they were transferred onto boats to be taken north, at which point they would be loaded onto vehicles to be driven toward the Honduran border. In one case in Nicaragua, authorities uncovered another Sinaloa-linked route that passed through Managua and is believed to have followed the Pan-American Highway through Honduras and into El Salvador.

The second method associated with land-based trafficking involves littoral maritime operations. Whereas long-range maritime trafficking involves large cargo ships and self-propelled semisubmersible vessels capable of delivering multiton shipments of drugs from South America to Mexico without having to refuel, littoral trafficking tends to involve so-called “go-fast boats” that are used to carry smaller quantities of drugs at higher speeds over shorter distances. This method is useful to traffickers who might want to avoid, for whatever reason, a certain stretch of highway or perhaps even an entire country. According to Nicaraguan military officials, several go-fast boats are suspected of operating off the country’s coasts and of sailing outside Nicaraguan territorial waters in order to avoid authorities. While it is possible to make the entire trip from South America to Mexico using only this method — and making frequent refueling stops — it is believed that littoral trafficking is often combined with an overland network.

The third method associated with land-based drug smuggling involves short-range aerial operations. In these cases, clandestine planes make stops in Central America before either transferring their cargo to a land vehicle or making another short flight toward Mexico. Over the past year, several small planes loaded with drugs or cash have crashed or been seized in Honduras, Mexico and other countries in the region. In addition, authorities in Guatemala have uncovered several clandestine airstrips allegedly managed by the Mexican drug-trafficking organization Los Zetas. These examples suggest that even as overall aerial trafficking appears to have decreased dramatically, the practice continues in Central America. Indeed, there is little reason to expect that it would not continue, considering that many countries in the region lack the resources to adequately monitor their airspace.

While each of these three methods involves a different approach to drug smuggling, the methods share two important similarities. For one, the vehicles involved — be they speedboats, small aircraft or private vehicles — have limited cargo capacities, which means land-based trafficking generally involves cocaine shipments in quantities no greater than a few hundred pounds. While smaller quantities in more frequent shipments mean more handling, they also mean that less product is lost if a shipment is seized. More importantly, each of these land-based methods requires that a drug-trafficking organization maintain a presence inside Central America.

Actors Involved

There are a variety of drug-trafficking organizations operating inside Central America. In addition to some of the notorious local gangs — such as Calle 18 and MS-13 — there is also a healthy presence of foreign criminal organizations. Colombian drug traffickers, for example, historically have been no strangers to the region. However, as STRATFOR has observed over the past year, it is the more powerful Mexico-based drug-trafficking organizations that appear to be overwhelmingly responsible for the recent upticks in land-based narcotics smuggling in Central America.

Based on reports of arrests and drug seizures in the region over the past year, it is clear that no single Mexican cartel maintains a monopoly on land-based drug trafficking in Central America. Los Zetas, for example, are extremely active in several parts of Guatemala, where they engage in overland and short-range aerial trafficking. The Sinaloa cartel, which STRATFOR believes is the most capable Mexican trafficker of cocaine, has been detected operating a fairly extensive overland smuggling route from Panama to El Salvador. Some intelligence gaps remain regarding, for example, the precise route Sinaloa follows from El Salvador to Mexico or the route Los Zetas use between South America and Guatemala. It is certainly possible that these two Mexican cartels do not rely exclusively on any single route or method in the region. But the logistical challenges associated with establishing even one route across Central America make it likely that existing routes are maintained even after they have been detected — and are defended if necessary.

The operators of the Mexican cartel-managed routes also do not match a single profile. At times, Mexican cartel members themselves have been found to be operating in Central America. More common is the involvement of locals in various phases of smuggling operations. Nicaraguan and Salvadoran nationals, for example, have been arrested in northwestern Nicaragua for operating a Sinaloa-linked overland and littoral route into El Salvador. Authorities in Costa Rica have arrested Costa Rican nationals for their involvement in overland routes through that country. In that case, a related investigation in Panama led to the arrest of several Mexican nationals who reportedly had recently arrived in the area to more closely monitor the operation of their route.

One exception is Guatemala, where Mexican drug traffickers appear to operate much more extensively than in any other Central American country; this may be due, at least in part, to the relationship between Los Zetas and the Guatemalan Kaibiles. Beyond the apparently more-established Zeta smuggling operations there, several recent drug seizures — including an enormous 1,800-acre poppy plantation attributed to the Sinaloa cartel — make it clear that other Mexican drug-trafficking organizations are currently active inside Guatemala. Sinaloa was first suspected of increasing its presence in Guatemala in early 2008, when rumors surfaced that the cartel was attempting to recruit local criminal organizations to support its own drug-trafficking operations there. The ongoing Zeta-Sinaloa rivalry at that time triggered a series of deadly firefights in Guatemala, prompting fears that the bloody turf battles that had led to record levels of organized crime-related violence inside Mexico would extend into Central America.

Security Implications in Central America

Despite these concerns and the growing presence of Mexican traffickers in the region, there apparently have been no significant spikes in drug-related violence in Central America outside of Guatemala. Several factors may explain this relative lack of violence.

First, most governments in Central America have yet to launch large-scale counternarcotics campaigns. The seizures and arrests that have been reported so far have generally been the result of regular police work, as opposed to broad changes in policies or a significant commitment of resources to address the problem. More significantly, though, the quantities of drugs seized probably amount to just a drop in the bucket compared to the quantity of drugs that moves through the region on a regular basis. Because seizures have remained low, Mexican drug traffickers have yet to launch any significant reprisal attacks against government officials in any country outside Guatemala. In that country, even the president has received death threats and had his office bugged, allegedly by drug traffickers.

The second factor, which is related to the first, is that drug traffickers operating in Central America likely rely more heavily on bribes than on intimidation to secure the transit of drug shipments. This assessment follows from the region’s reputation for official corruption (especially in countries like Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama and Guatemala) and the economic disadvantage that many of these countries face compared to the Mexican cartels. For example, the gross domestic product of Honduras is $12 billion, while the estimated share of the drug trade controlled by the Mexican cartels is estimated to be $20 billion.

Finally, Mexican cartels currently have their hands full at home. Although Central America has undeniably become more strategically important for the flow of drugs from South America, the cartels in Mexico have simultaneously been engaged in a two-front war at home against the Mexican government and against rival criminal organizations. As long as this war continues at its present level, Mexican drug traffickers may be reluctant to divert significant resources too far from their home turf, which remains crucial in delivering drug shipments to the United States.

Looking Ahead

That said, there is no guarantee that Central America will continue to escape the wrath of Mexican drug traffickers. On the contrary, there is reason for concern that the region will increasingly become a battleground in the Mexican cartel war.

For one thing, the Merida Initiative, a U.S. anti-drug aid program that will put some $300 million into Mexico and about $100 million into Central America over the next year, could be perceived as a meaningful threat to drug-trafficking operations. If Central American governments choose to step up counternarcotics operations, either at the request of the United States or in order to qualify for more Merida money, they risk disrupting existing smuggling operations to the extent that cartels begin to retaliate.

Also, even though Mexican cartels may be reluctant to divert major resources from the more important war at home, it is important to recognize that a large-scale reassignment of cartel operatives or resources from Mexico to Central America might not be necessary to have a significant impact on the security situation in any given Central American country. Given the rampant corruption and relatively poor protective security programs in place for political leaders in the region, very few cartel operatives or resources would actually be needed if a Mexican drug-trafficking organization chose to, for example, conduct an assassination campaign against high-ranking government officials.

Governments are not the only potential threat to drug traffickers in Central America. The increases in land-based drug trafficking in the region could trigger intensified competition over trafficking routes. Such turf battles could occur either among the Mexican cartels or between the Mexicans and local criminal organizations, which might try to muscle their way into the lucrative smuggling routes or attempt to grab a larger percentage of the profits.

If the example of Mexico is any guide, the drug-related violence that could be unleashed in Central America would easily overwhelm the capabilities of the region’s governments. Last year, STRATFOR considered the possibility of Mexico becoming a failed state. But Mexico is a far stronger and richer country than its fragile southern neighbors, who simply do not have the resources to deal with the cartels on their own.

Retribution for Mughniyah: A Dish Served Cold?

Fred Burton and Scott Stewart
Stratfor.com
February 11

Feb. 12 will mark the one-year anniversary of the assassination of Imad Mughniyah, one of Hezbollah’s top military commanders. The anniversary certainly will be met with rejoicing in Tel Aviv and Washington — in addition to all the Israelis he killed, Mughniyah also had a significant amount of American blood on his hands. But the date will be met with anger and renewed cries for revenge from Hezbollah’s militants, many of whom were recruited, trained or inspired by Mughniyah.

Because of Hezbollah’s history of conducting retaliatory attacks after the assassination of its leaders, and the frequent and very vocal calls for retribution for the Mughniyah assassination, many observers (including Stratfor) have been waiting for Hezbollah to exact its revenge. While the attack has not yet happened, threats continue. For example, in a Jan. 29 news conference, Hezbollah General Secretary Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah left no doubt about the group’s intention. “The Israelis live in fear of our revenge,” he said. “The decision to respond to the killing is still on. We decide the time and the place.”

Initially, given the force of the anger and outcry over the assassination, we anticipated that the strike would come soon after the 30-day mourning period for Mughniyah had passed. Clearly, that did not happen. Now a year has passed since the killing, but the anger and outcry have not died down. Indeed, as reflected by Nasrallah’s recent statement, the leadership of Hezbollah remains under a considerable amount of internal pressure to retaliate. Because any retaliation would likely be tempered by concerns over provoking a full-on Israeli attack against Hezbollah infrastructure (similar to the attack in the summer of 2006), any Hezbollah strike would be conducted in a manner that could provide some degree of plausible deniability.

It is important to remember that Hezbollah retains a considerable capacity to conduct terrorist attacks abroad should it choose to do so. In fact, we believe that, due to its high degree of training, vast experience and close ties to the Iranian government, Hezbollah retains a more proficient and dangerous terrorism capability than al Qaeda.

Repeated calls for revenge and Hezbollah’s capabilities have combined to ensure that the Israeli government maintains a high state of awareness. Even though a year has passed, Israelis, too, are waiting for the other shoe to drop. On Feb. 1, Elkana Harnof of the Counterterrorism Bureau in the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office told The Jerusalem Post that, “Based on our information, we believe the organization is planning one large revenge attack close to the anniversary of [Mughniyah’s] death.” Harnof added, “All we can say publicly is that [Hezbollah] has gone to enormous effort to prepare various kinds of terror attacks, and the big one is likely going to take place soon.” Like Stratfor, the Israelis also believe that the attack will be directed against Israeli or Jewish targets outside of Israel.

Busy Bodies

There are a number of indications that Hezbollah has not been idle in the year since Mughniyah’s death. First, there has been a good deal of preoperational activity by Hezbollah militants in several countries, including the United States. This activity has included surveillance and other intelligence-gathering for targeting purposes. At one point last fall, the activity was so intense inside the United States that law enforcement officials believed a strike was imminent — but it never came. Additionally, there are credible reports that Hezbollah plots to strike Israeli targets in Azerbaijan and the Netherlands have been thwarted. (Although, from information we have received, it does not appear that either of these plots was at an advanced stage of the attack cycle.)

We have no reason to doubt the reports of Hezbollah preoperational activity. It is simply what they do and what they are. Even though the group has not conducted a successful attack overseas since 1994, it does maintain a robust network of operatives who stay busily engaged in operational activities. While many of these operatives are involved primarily in financial and logistical activities, we believe it is worth noting that Hezbollah has never conducted or attempted an attack in a country where it did not have such a support network in place. They use these networks to assist their militant activities in a number of ways, but perhaps the most significant way is in the conduct of preoperational surveillance.

Hezbollah, a creature of the Iranian Islamic Revolution, also has a long history of receiving aid from Iranian embassies in its overseas operations, including its terrorist strikes. Almost inevitably, Hezbollah’s overseas attack plans are found to have murky links of some sort to the Iranian embassy in the country where the attack was to occur, and to the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security or Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) officers stationed there.

Hezbollah utilizes an “off the shelf” method of planning its terrorist attacks. This is very similar to the way major national military commands operate, where they make contingency war plans against potential adversaries in advance and then work to keep those plans updated. This style of sophisticated, advance planning provides Hezbollah’s senior decision makers with a wide array of tactical options, and allows them to assess a number of attack plans in various parts of the world and quickly select and update a particular attack plan when they make the decision to launch it. When they do decide to pull the trigger, they can strike hard and fast.

This type of planning requires a great deal of intelligence-gathering, not only to produce the initial plans but also to keep them updated. Because it requires a lot of collection activity, this effort likely accounts for much of the operational activity that has been observed over the past year in the United States and elsewhere. These ongoing surveillance operations are not just useful for planning purposes, but they are also good for sowing confusion, creating distractions and causing complacency. If Hezbollah operatives have been seen periodically conducting surveillance around a facility and no attack has followed that activity, over time it becomes very easy for security personnel to write off all such activity as harmless — even when it might not be this time.

Not Crying Wolf

There are some who argue that the lack of an attack by Hezbollah since the Mughniyah assassination, combined with the fact that the group has not used its terrorist capability to conduct an attack for many years, signifies that Hezbollah has abandoned its terrorist ways and instead focused on developing its conventional warfare capability.

We do not buy this argument. First, it ignores the existence and purpose of Hezbollah’s Unit 1800, which, among other things, recruits Palestinians for anti-Israeli terror operations inside Israel and the occupied territories. Second, if Hezbollah had abandoned its terrorist arm, there would be no need for the preoperational planning activity noted previously, and in our opinion, reports of such surveillance activity are too frequent and too widespread to be discounted as false sightings. Granted, such activities do cause jitters and have some effectiveness as a psychological warfare tool, but we do not believe that those limited benefits justify the time and effort being put into Hezbollah’s intelligence-collection program. There is also that pesky problem of explaining the thwarted attack plots in Azerbaijan and the Netherlands. Because of this, we do not believe that the U.S. and Israeli governments (among others) are crying wolf when they provide warnings of pending Hezbollah attacks.

We continue to believe that if there is an attack by Hezbollah, it will likely come in a country where there is an existing Hezbollah support apparatus and an Iranian embassy. (Although, in a confined geographic area, operations could be supported in a third country that lacked one or both of those elements.) We also believe that such an attack is more likely in a country where there is ready access to weapons or explosives, and where there are poor law enforcement and intelligence capabilities. We wrote an analysis discussing this in some detail during the 2006 conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. In that piece, we provided a matrix of the places we believed were most likely to be the site of a Hezbollah attack against Israeli targets, and one of the important criteria we considered was the presence of both an Iranian embassy and a local Hezbollah support network. When we discuss these two elements, it is important to note that in past attacks, the attackers were brought in from the outside in order to provide plausible deniability — but they did receive important support and guidance from the network and embassy.

Since we wrote that analysis in July 2006, there has been a significant increase in Iranian influence in parts of Latin America, including Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia, and Hezbollah has not been far behind. In addition to claims by the U.S. Treasury Department that Venezuelan nationals and organizations are supporting Hezbollah financially, there have been persistent rumors of Hezbollah militants and IRGC officers conducting training at camps in the Venezuelan jungles.

These reports are especially noteworthy when combined with a recent rise in anti-Semitism in Venezuela and an outright hostility toward Jews demonstrated by pro-Chavez militia groups. A pro-Chavez militia is believed to have been involved in the vandalism of the main synagogue in Caracas on the night of Jan. 30-31, 2008. We are among many who don’t buy the government’s official explanation that the vandalism was motivated by robbery. To us, the fact that the intruders remained in the building for several hours, made the effort to scrawl anti-Israeli graffiti inside the building and stole databases containing personal information on congregational members seems very unusual for a simple burglary. Our suspicion is magnified by the extensive anti-Semitic statements made on the Web sites of some of the pro-Chavez militia leaders. All of this raises serious concerns that the Venezuelan government could turn a blind eye to Hezbollah efforts to conduct an attack on Israeli or Jewish interests in that country.

There are many who believe that the anti-Semitic attitudes of the Argentine government in the early 1990s helped embolden Mughniyah and his followers to attack Israeli and Jewish targets there. The anti-Semitic environment in Venezuela today is even more overt and hostile than it was in Argentina.

In keeping with Hezbollah’s history, if an attack is launched, we anticipate that it will have to be fairly spectacular, given the fact that Mughniyah was very important to Hezbollah and its Iranian sponsors — although the attack must not be so spectacular as to cause a full-on Israeli attack in Lebanon. Hezbollah can weather a few airstrikes, but it does not want to provoke an extended conflict — especially as Hezbollah’s political leadership is extremely focused on doing well in the upcoming elections in Lebanon.

Given Hezbollah’s proclivity toward using a hidden hand, we suspect the attack will be conducted by a stealthy and ambiguous cell or cells that will likely have no direct connection to the organization. For example, in July 1994, the group used Palestinian operatives to conduct attacks against the Israeli Embassy and a Jewish nongovernmental organization office in London. Also, as we have seen in prior attacks, if a hardened target such as an Israeli embassy or VIP is not vulnerable, a secondary soft target might be selected. The July 1994 bombing of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association in Buenos Aires is a prime example of this type of attack. It should serve as a warning to Jewish community centers and other non-Israeli government targets everywhere that even non-Israeli Jewish targets are considered fair game.

Views of Venezuela's Chavez Have Hardened in the Region -- and at Home

Pew Research Center
February 11


On February 15, Venezuelans will head to the polls to vote on a constitutional amendment that would eliminate term limits for the office of president, permitting current President Hugo Chavez to seek a third term.

Since he was first elected in 1999, Chavez has often portrayed himself as a regional leader, at the forefront of a new era of Latin American populism.

However, in many Latin American countries, Chavez fails to inspire much confidence.

In fact, polling by the Pew Research Center's Global Attitudes Project suggests that negative views of Chavez are on the rise in several key Latin American nations.


Read the full report: http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1114/chavez-venezuela-referendum-popularity-region