Chavez Orders Tanks to Colombia Border, Raises Risks - Bloomberg.com: Hugo Chavez’s orders to close his Bogota embassy and send tanks to the border raise tensions beyond his previous rhetoric and to the point where miscalculation could trigger a military clash. Chavez, who ordered 10 armored battalions to the border yesterday, said Colombia’s air strike March 1 on a rebel camp in Ecuadorean territory risks a regional war. He pledged to support Ecuador under any circumstances. The...

Along-standing fear of a linkup between drug traffickers and radical Islamists in Iran-influenced Latin America is closer to being realized, according to a statement by a top U.S. military official and reported by Agence France Presse. Adm. James Stavridis, commander of U.S. Southern Command, made the remarks at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on January 16. “I fear greatly that the connectivity between narco-terrorism and Islamic radical terrorism could be disastrous...

SAO PAULO (Reuters) - Islamic terrorist groups have networks in Latin America and the Caribbean and could use the region as a base to launch attacks on the United States, the senior U.S. military commander for the region says. “For sure, members, facilitators, and sympathizers of Islamic terrorist organizations are present in our hemisphere,” Adm. Jim Stavridis, head of the U.S. Southern Command, wrote in an article in the fall edition of Americas Quarterly journal, obtained by...

CIUDAD DEL ESTE, Paraguay - The Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia has taken root in South America, fostering a well-financed force of Islamist radicals boiling with hatred for the United States and ready to die to prove it, according to militia members, U.S. officials and police agencies across the continent. From its Western base in a remote region divided by the borders of Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina known as the Tri-border, or the Triple Frontier, Hezbollah has mined the frustrations of...

CIUDAD DEL ESTE, Paraguay -- For years, this region -- where the boundaries of Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina converge -- has been considered a teeming stew of globalization's more unseemly byproducts. Much of the trade that crosses the borders, officials say, is illegitimate. The region is full of smuggled goods and laundered money. Now U.S. officials are launching a broad series of new measures aimed at uncovering money-laundering rings that they believe are funding Hezbollah and other...

Tie groups with Al-Qaeda entered the country The first income were registered seven months ago; they would look for to recruit extremist futures Five groups of the fundamentalist movement Jamaat Tabligh, tie with the Al-Qaeda organization, entered Argentina in the last seven months with the possible objective to contact and to recruit Argentine citizens of the Muslim community to be trained in the outside in terrorist activities. The entrance of the groups, made up altogether of 26 people,...

Melissa Morales, a Latina born in Puerto Rico, was eating in a local Mexican restaurant recently when the waiter wanted to know why she covered her head in a long black scarf. "Eres monjita?" the Spanish-speaking waiter asked. Are you a nun? Her answer caught the waiter by surprise. No, she told him. Not a nun, a Muslim. Latinos and Islam may seem like a strange combination to most, primarily because Catholicism is so deeply embedded in Latino culture. But the combination is less...

As the administration of President George W. Bush weighs an attack against Saddam Hussein's Iraq, international terrorist groups are taking firm hold in South America - often referred to as "America's backyard" - according to recent testimony given to the U.S. House of Representatives. Both Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida and the Palestinian terrorist group Hezbollah are active in Latin America, with Hezbollah having "broader penetration in the Western Hemisphere than any other...