[For more on Operation Cazando Anguilas, see the August Homeland Security Today cover report, “Unholy Trinity.” ]

Latin America has long been home to a deeply rooted large and diverse Muslim population, and in recent years has had a steady stream of migration from the Middle East and South Asia, especially to free-trade zones like Colon, Panama.

According to authorities, Islam in Latin America is one of the fastest growing religions. By the late 1980s, the activities of fundamentalist Muslims and known Islamist terrorist organizations, especially Hezbollah, were beginning to be documented in the region by US intelligence agencies, according to numerous classified materials that provided to Homeland Security Today.

These materials show that Middle East terrorist organizations began to set up shop in Central and Latin America around 1988.

Some of these reports were dutifully transmitted by CIA operatives in Latin America and highlighted the intensifying efforts by Middle East terrorist groups at the time to establish operational and financial infrastructure in the region. These operations included setting up conduits for laundering money for both terrorists and narco-traffickers, and for the smuggling of members of these terrorist organizations into the United States.

US counterterror officials said these now-yellowed and largely forgotten intelligence reports highlighted the fact that terrorist groups were working to establish operational and financial infrastructure in the region more than 20 years ago.

“We shouldn’t have lost sight of what this intelligence was telling us,” one of the officials said.

Clearly, US counterterrorism intelligence officials—and federal law enforcement and Congress—have long been aware of the beachhead that Middle East terrorist organizations have established in South America.

Significant Developments

A November 1988 Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) “terrorism summary”  warned that “significant developments in terrorist-related activities throughout Latin America” involving “support networks for some Middle East-based terrorist movements has continued to surface” with ties to regional indigenous Bolivarian “leftist militant” organizations like Colombia’s Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and Salvador’s Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN)—both long entrenched Communist-socialist inspired movements that today are tied to fundamentalist terrorist organizations and their regional Muslim businessmen facilitators, Mexico’s narco-cartels and the two major Latino gangs that serve as their “enforcers” and provide “transportation security” for suspected terrorists being smuggled northward to the United States.

In a July Government Accountability Office report, US Counternarcotics Cooperation with Venezuela Has Declined , estimates that FARC is involved in trafficking 60 percent of the cocaine that’s produced in Colombia. Homeland Security Today reported in January that Mexico’s narco-cartels buy the majority of the cocaine that they peddle in the United States from the FARC.

One of the late 1988 DIA intelligence reports stated that “Fatah-related individuals”  were involved in “financing terrorist operations in Panama,”  and that “evidence continues to surface on the existence” of a terrorist “infrastructure in Latin America,” including “a probable financial support apparatus in various Latin American countries, especially in Colombia and Venezuela.” Additionally, the classified report noted that there was disturbing evidence of “the existence of recruitment efforts.”

At about the time of this DIA intelligence report, a highly controversial CIA-sourced Telegraphically Disseminated Foreign Intelligence Report (TDFIR) disclosed evidence of a disconcerting terrorist smuggling enterprise in Panama that CIA operatives reported was directly tied to the leader of Fatah’s Special Operations Group (FSOG), the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) security branch.

In October 1988, according to the TDFIR, the CIA learned that three “Lebanese Palestinian … operatives” of Abdallah Abd Al Hamid Labib, also known as “Col. Hawari,” the former leader of FSOG who now headed the 15 May terrorist group, were en route to “Panama to mount operations against US interests” via a terrorist smuggling network that had been established by PLO’s money-laundering enterprises in Panama operated by Muslim businessmen.

“Traveling on genuine, true name Lebanese passports,” the CIA reported the three “plan to travel to the US.”

Although no “attacks against US-registered ships in the Panama Canal” were carried out by Fatah, noted a secret, dismissive DIA cable, a heated debate nevertheless erupted between DIA and CIA analysts over the seriousness of the terrorist threat in the region, according to former intelligence officials who were privy to the dispute.

For its part, the CIA was gravely concerned about the threat posed by Hawari’s organization in Panama. By this time Hawari was running the deadly 15 May organization that had been created by KGB-trained master terrorist bomb-maker, Husayn Al Umari when he broke away from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) while living in Baghdad under the protection of Saddam Hussein.

For years, Al Umari controlled a network of lethal terrorists and had ties to Abu Walid Al Iraqi, aka Khalid Duhham Al Jawary, another master bombmaker linked to 15 May and, more directly, to its later leader, Col. Hawari.