Islamic leaders are allying with South American indigenous groups, because they see this impoverished, illiterate population, as the ideal environment for starting an extremist revolution and converting them to Islam. The process may take hundreds of years, but time means nothing to the fundamentalist. After all Allah is immortal and if Muslims waited 1300 years before invading Europe again, they can wait to convert Christians, animists and pagans. In 711 C.E. Muslims crossed the Straight of...

Iran's growing commercial ties with Venezuela are bringing with it Iranian intelligence operatives and Hezbollah members seeking to expand Islamic radical operations in South America. Hezbollah has long had a foothold in several local Arab immigrant communities in South America. But Venezuela gives them a secure local base of operations. It is feared that Hezbollah and Iran will seek to carry out terror attacks against Israeli and Jewish targets in South America, using these new Venezuelan...

Marcelo Garcia / AFP/Getty Images: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, left, greets his Iranian counterpart, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, last year. BOGOTA, COLOMBIA -- Western anti-terrorism officials are increasingly concerned that Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based Shiite Muslim militia that Washington has labeled a terrorist group, is using Venezuela as a base for operations. Linked to deadly attacks on Jewish targets in Argentina in the early 1990s, Hezbollah...

Since the September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, U.S. attention to terrorism in Latin America has intensified, with an increase in bilateral and regional cooperation. In its April 2008 Country Reports on Terrorism, the State Department highlighted threats in Colombia and the tri-border area of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. Cuba has remained on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism since 1982, which triggers a number of economic sanctions. In...

Muslims came to Peru with the coming of the Spaniards. Many Muslims, then called "Moros", or Moors by the Spaniards, arrived fleeing persecution in Spain. They settled in many places in Latin America, especially Peru, where they had a strong influence on the local way of life including, dress, food, architecture, and the social and political systems. Many of them had very important positions in society, and the women until recently used to wear hijab and were known as "Las...

The purpose of this conference is to provide a balanced and dispassionate overview of Iran's relations with Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, put in the context of the foreign policy objectives and strategies of those Latin American nations as well as the strategic objectives of the Iranian government. In addition, we aim to explore what has been alleged about Iranian involvement in the bombings of the Jewish community center (AMIA) and the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires. Farideh...

For more heartening coverage of the hostage rescue in Colombia, see from Saturday's Wall Street Journal and this opinion article, from Saturday's Washington Post. Schumacher-Matos usefully takes on Human Rights Watch for overstating Colombia's human rights problems; this organization seems interested only in proving that "right-wing" regimes are terrible and seems entirely willing to overlook the depredations of "left-wing" narco-guerrillas. It seems to be a prisoner of the...

Numerous evidence suggests that Muslims from Spain and West Africa arrived in the Americas at least five centuries before Co1umbus. It is recorded, for example that in the mid-tenth century during the rule of the Umayed Caliph Abdul-Rahman III (929-961), Muslims of African origin sailed westward from the Spanish port of Delba (Palos) into the “Ocean of darkness an fog.” They returned after a long absence with much booty from a “strange and curious land.” It is evident...

While the world is focused on the war in the Middle East and countering Islamic terrorist group activities there and in South Asia and to a lesser extent the US and Europe, there is only periodic focus on other regions vulnerable to Islamic terrorist activity; Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa. This article focuses on the first two areas and describes a consistent pattern of Islamic extremist activity over the past twenty years that ranges from revenue generation and logistic support to...

San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, MEXICO --Forget the Inquisition, the bloody conquest of the New World, and the expulsion of Moors from Spain 510 years ago. In a volatile corner of southern Mexico, history is being turned on its head. Muslims settlers from Spain are running a madrassa -- or traditional Koranic school-- on the outskirts of a pretty colonial town in Chiapas state, where they are determined to bring renegade Maya indians to Allah. The Spaniards hope eventually to circulate...