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Nov. 17, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
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Debbie D'Souza here, filling in for Dinesh, and in this special episode, I'll explore Islamic Jihad, specifically describing Hezbollah in Latin America and the West, And warning about Iran's endgame, not just destroying Israel, but also the United States of America.
My guest is national security expert Joseph Humeyer, who specializes in the analysis of trans-regional threat networks in the Western Hemisphere.
If you're watching on Rumble or YouTube, or listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to Dinesh's channel.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
He's been a little busy this week.
We just came back from D.C. We did a D.C. screening of Police State.
For those of you that haven't seen Police State, just go to our website, the Police State website, and that's policestatefilm.net.
You will get, you know, all kinds of information.
You can order the DVD, you can do the streaming, all of that.
So just, you know, go to that website.
And, you know, Dinesh is, as you know, Dinesh does a lot of media to promote police state.
And so his voice is just a little bit, not weak, because he's doing interviews today.
But I was like, hey, honey, why don't I just fill in for you?
Can you believe this? It's been, what, three years now I produce the podcast and I have never done a single episode for Dinesh.
We come on the podcast together every Friday, but I've never actually done it alone.
So this is my first.
And really excited because I decided to pick a topic that doesn't get covered enough in the mainstream media.
I mean, you're hearing a lot about Hamas and Israel and all of that, but what you don't hear a whole lot about is the infiltration of Hezbollah in our western hemisphere, specifically Latin America, Central America, and Mexico.
I wanted to touch on that because we are very focused right now on the horrific things that have happened in Israel.
I actually belong to an Israel real-time WhatsApp group.
Where I get on-the-ground coverage kind of hour by hour, as well as photos and videos of atrocities that happened on October 7th via a Telegram group that I was invited to join.
So Dinesh doesn't see a lot of this.
I kind of give him the play-by-play information.
I have just been horrified.
To me, this topic is so timely, not just because I'm going to talk about Hezbollah, the Iran proxy that is trying to destroy the hemisphere as we know it, but I wanted to give you a little bit of an account of what I've been listening to and hearing.
And there's a story that I want to talk about, Gali Edan.
She's this woman that has a family in one of the kibbutz.
Her daughter had just celebrated her 18th birthday about four days prior to October 7th.
And they were just, you know, going to have breakfast, you know, just a normal family breakfast with her husband, her son, and her two daughters.
Her 18-year-old daughter that had just turned 18, right?
When they hear all this commotion and the terrorists come knocking inside, they come inside.
They hide in their safe room.
A lot of people have those safe rooms as a bomb shelter or whatnot.
And they were trying to open the door.
And because the door was locked and they didn't come to the door, they shot through the door.
And they killed her 18-year-old daughter in front of her children, her husband.
It was horrific.
And, you know, what's even more, like, horrific is that one of the terrorists that finally made his way in said, Oh, don't worry.
She's with Allah. Can you believe that?
The nerve? So this woman is just, you know, she's broken.
Her husband was broken, and he was taken hostage by Hamas to Gaza.
So she doesn't know what's become of him.
She doesn't know where he is, whether he's okay, nothing.
She's gone on media.
In fact, I saw an interview with her on CNN. Believe it or not, they are covering it pretty well.
And it's really just horrific.
And so many of the photos and videos that I've seen, it's just, you know, it's so sad.
I see them at night, and then I have nightmares, and then I wonder why.
But it's really important to be plugged in.
I love Israel. Dinesh and I went to Israel in December.
Last December. And we were just, we fell in love with Israel.
So my heart aches for Israel and for the Jews.
I think this is a really, really horrible thing that's happened.
And and the the campuses, you know that are that are having all these anti-semitic rallies and it's just horrible But that's why I felt it was an urgent matter that we talk about Hezbollah in our hemisphere because Because it's not far-fetched guys To say that these jihadist terrorists are cut from the same cloth and that these atrocities that took place in Israel
could also happen along our own border.
So I'm going to bring on a special guest for the rest of the podcast to talk about this, to talk about Hezbollah, Iran, the endgame.
So stay tuned.
It's going to be a really good show.
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I would like to welcome to the podcast, Joseph Humeyer.
He is the director of the Center for a Secure Free Society and visiting fellow of the Heritage Foundation.
He's a foreign policy and national security expert who analyzes transregional threat networks.
His social media, you can follow him at x at jmhumeyer and then Instagram at jmhumeyer.
The website is www.securefreedomsociety.org.
I hope I didn't get that wrong.
We will have it on the bottom of your screen.
Joseph, thank you for making the time to be on the podcast today.
Your expertise is really appreciated to try to make sense of all this terrorism, not just in the Middle East, but right here in our own backyard.
Well, first of all, thank you, Debbie. It's a pleasure to be on the podcast.
My best to Dinesh as well.
Yeah, I mean, this is something I think that many people, when they think of things that happen in the Middle East, whether it's Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, terrorism, the current conflict in Gaza, they think that that's isolated to that part of the world.
And it's really not. If you study the history of the Iranian revolution, even the history of Hezbollah, We're good to go.
So that hits us very close to home, not just within the continental United States.
We have Hezbollah in the United States.
There's been plenty of cases that Department of Justice, the FBI, the DEA, and all the law enforcement authorities have dismantled, have busted about Hezbollah operators in the United States.
One very particular one, Ali Karani, the Ali Karani case that got, this guy got convicted and sentenced, I think, to 20-some years in prison for basically preparing terrorist actions out of New York.
So this is a very recent case.
This doesn't even go all the way back to 9-11.
But in essence, I think they're also very present south of the U.S. southern border in Latin America and the Caribbean.
I imagine we're going to get into that a bit more.
But this is something that got very little attention 10 years ago.
It's got increasingly more attention.
But I think it's me and you would probably agree, not enough attention by U.S. authorities and just by the general public at large.
Yes, good.
So let me ask you, why is it then that they see, you know, for example, the history in Latin America, where they've been in Latin America, why is it that they pick places like Venezuela or Bolivia or Argentina?
Why can't they just come straight to, say, Mexico and ignore all that region?
Well, I think two reasons.
One, they did go to Mexico, so they're in Mexico.
So they are, okay. They are in Mexico.
So what happens in Lebanon doesn't stay in Lebanon.
It actually extends to all the Lebanese communities worldwide.
And in South America in particular, there's some very large ones in Brazil and Argentina and in Paraguay.
So they staked their hub initially back then and carried out – I mean, this is something that people don't really, I think, understand in magnitude – carry out the largest Islamist terrorist attack in the history of the Western Hemisphere prior to 9-11.
I'll say before 9-11 – The largest Islamist air stack happened in Argentina, and it happened twice.
It happened in 1992 and in 1994, where Hezbollah first bombed the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires in 1982, and then bombed a Jewish cultural center called the AMIA in 1994, collectively killing 114 people.
But if you take us back to that time period, no one in the 1990s, in the early 1990s, believed that Hezbollah could do something like that overseas.
They had carried out bombings in Lebanon, the Beirut bombings, the infamous ones in the 80s.
They've carried out some bombings in the near abroad, but no one, no analyst, no intelligence professional thought that Hezbollah had that level of capability in Latin America, on the other side of the world.
And I say that because I feel like we're in a similar situation today where people really underestimate how far Hezbollah can carry out its terrorist activities, even though they already did so in the 1990s.
So Hezbollah staked themselves in the South of South America, but there's a point of inflection, Debbie, and I imagine we're going to get more into this, which was with the rise of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, because he provided Hezbollah something that previously they didn't have, We'll be right back with more.
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Hi, we're back with Joseph Humeyer, Director, Center for a Secure Free Society.
Joseph, thank you for being here again.
And let's get into the cultural propaganda that Iran uses to secure the region, and then we can just move from there.
Yeah, so this is important, Debbie, because, you know, Iran basically has used a kind of a soft penetration approach to coming into Latin America.
And it begins with changing their message.
You know, in the Middle East, they use a lot of the Islamic propaganda, they use political Islam as a way to kind of penetrate even in places where Shias are a minority, or even in the Arab world.
I think Hezbollah is very important for their presence in the Arab world being that Iran is Persian.
But in Latin America, they do some of that.
They don't get away from that.
Their essence is as an Islamic revolution.
But they also accentuate other aspects of the Iranian revolution.
I'll give you an example. When they come to Latin America, Iran tends to project themselves or portray themselves as a social movement.
protect its natural resources, referring to British Petroleum in 1979. And when you sell it that way in Latin America, you get a lot of listeners. If you talk about social movements and natural resources, well, all the pretty much Marxist and socialist and communist movements in Latin America say, well, that's what our cause is. That's what we've been doing. So it kind of gets... it doesn't come in through the initial entry point, talking about the 12th Imam, Imam Mahdi and all the religious aspects. That comes later,
but that's essentially their selling point. Iran has 11 embassies in Latin America, and each one of these embassies functions mostly like an intelligence center. And what they do is they propagate Shia Islamic cultural centers.
A former prosecutor of the Amir terrorist bombing in Argentina, Alberto Nisman, he had once called them essentially antennas of the Iranian revolution, meaning that they were served, these Islamic cultural centers were serving as intelligence centers to do collection, research, and so on.
recruitment, to basically do the studies, country studies of all the countries in which they were located.
Today, I would call them cell towers because they've evolved way beyond just being like an antenna, an intelligence operation, but mostly involved in disinformation.
I'll give you one very clear example.
One of the biggest disinformation campaigns that Iran has in the world, and particularly in Spanish and Portuguese and Latin America, is to paint the now deceased Quds Force Commander Qasem Soleimani as kind of a later-day Che Guevara.
As kind of a hero that was fighting against terrorism and fighting for justice.
And I was in Colombia not too long ago.
I'm sorry. I was in Colombia not too long ago, and I was in a public university, which is kind of like a Marxist stronghold.
It's where they do a lot of the Marxist indoctrination to some of the people for the FARC and the ALN and some of those terrorist groups in Colombia.
And in that university, they had a big mural of Qasem Soleimani, where they were projecting him with the beret, with the bonet of Che Guevara.
So this is the level of propaganda that they're doing.
Wow. Most Latin Americans don't know anything about Qasem Soleimani.
I mean, before he was killed in 2020, they probably never even heard of his name.
Wow. So they fool a lot of people into thinking that this guy was like a hero and, in fact, couldn't be anything further from the truth, right?
They call him a social justice warrior.
Yeah, social justice. That sounds very familiar, actually.
So they fool the Christians into thinking that they worship the same God and all those things that they do very well.
And so that is something that is extremely troubling given the fact that they do this with such ease and they don't seem to...
I mean, it's almost like...
They're really very cunning and very smart people.
I mean, we think of them as barbaric, right, because of all the atrocities that they've done, whether it be bombings or beheadings or whatever, but they're very clever individuals.
And it's very, you know, so, yes.
No, yeah. I think that's a great point.
I think it's a really good point to make because when I talk to our friends in Latin America to help them understand the sophistication in which Iran operates, because they're very cunning.
They have strategy. They have vulnerabilities.
I mean, they're not conventionally strong economically or militarily, but because they don't have that conventional strength, they've dominated the arts of asymmetric war.
And so what I do with a lot of our Latin American friends is I say, think of this.
Shia Islam is about 15% of the Muslim world, right?
They're a minority in the Muslim community.
Persians are very culturally and ethnically different than Arabs, and anyone that's been in the Middle East knows that firsthand.
Right. And how does the minority of the Muslim world, which, you know, Shia's, Iran, and Persian being able to dominate Sunni-majority Arab countries, right?
Like, how does that happen?
It's because they master that art of penetration, of strategic penetration, using strategic influence.
Part of that is cultural influence.
I think that's why Hezbollah was so important to them.
So just taking that modus operandi, those tactics, and applying them to Latin America was not that hard for them.
They understood how to do this, and they've done a very good job at reading, essentially, what I call the grassroots activists, indigenous groups, youth groups, and co-opting them and bringing them more towards the side of Iran.
And this is something I think that many people in Latin America have missed. I mean, I can name you many groups in Latin America that on the face don't seem to have anything to do with the Middle East or Iran, but are either financed, trained, or supported by the Iranian revolution.
They had no caceristas in Peru, the quebrachos in Argentina, the colectivos in Venezuela, the cocaleros in Bolivia.
These are groups that most people listen to like, who are they?
Well, they're local actors that people in those countries know about, but if you do the investigations, you find out that they have tentacles that go all the way back to the Islamic Republic.
That is so interesting. We will be right back with more.
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Visit relieffactor.com or call 1-800-4-RELIEF. That's 1-800-4-RELIEF. I'm back with Joseph Humeyer, expert at Latin America and analysis of transregional threats in our networks here in the Western Hemisphere.
Joseph, I want to know why the counterterrorism efforts in Latin America Either aren't or don't seem to be a priority for America.
Why is that? Well, it begins, Debbie, with the fact that they aren't a priority for Latin American countries and governments, right?
So Latin American countries and governments really did not actively participate in a meaningful way during the counterterrorism efforts that were going on worldwide.
A lot of them diminished and downplayed the threats in their countries.
And one of the reasons that happens is because in most Latin American countries, they don't even think of Hezbollah or Hamas for that matter, as terrorist organizations.
There's no official designation for them as a terrorist.
There was actually a very good effort specifically on this point that happened during the Trump administration.
And the Trump administration was actively working with our Latin American partners in the region to hold these major hemispheric counterterrorism conferences with the effort of having countries designate Hezbollah and Hamas as terrorist organizations.
They successfully did that in five countries.
Argentina was the first on the 25th anniversary of the AMIA bombing.
Argentina was the first country in the history of Latin America under a different president, under President Mauricio Macri, to officially designate Hezbollah as a terrorist organization.
They also created a public registry, which is kind of like a sanctions list of Hezbollah in their country.
Colombia, Paraguay, Honduras, Guatemala all followed in suit.
But that effort died during the Biden administration.
In the Biden administration, that no longer became a priority.
They pretty much pushed that effort out the window, and it's more needed than ever.
I'll give you a quick anecdote on this.
Brazil, there was a lot of efforts.
And I was very optimistic that after we were done with these other designations that Brazil might have been the next country to designate.
And that's a big deal because Brazil is a big country.
And we had a very favorable government under President Bolsonaro.
They had actually said and expressed interest in doing this.
Brazil ended up not being able to do it for a lot of obstacles that were happening in their country.
But nonetheless, just a few weeks ago, what happened in Brazil...
Hezbollah operators and supporters were arrested for potentially planning a terrorist attack.
A lot of people in Brazil that were trying to challenge this designation said, well, we don't have this problem in this country.
There's no reason to be able to do this and attract us to be a target.
Well, they're a target regardless because that's how Hezbollah operates.
And one last point, Debbie, on this.
Why this is so important?
Why these designations? And I was very emphatic about making this a priority for Latin America specifically.
It helps synchronize our communication.
I'll give you an example. The State Department has this thing called the Annual Country Reports on Terrorism, where they report on all the terrorist activities worldwide.
Well, if they call their counterpart in, let's say, Peru, for example, and they ask this question, are there any Islamist terrorist cells operating in your country?
Peru would respond by saying, no, they're not.
And then they'll say, well, you know what? The State Department will say, you know what?
I'm not sure. I've heard Joseph talk about this.
Let me call back.
Let me make sure I'm 100% on this.
And they'll call back their counterpart in Peru.
They'll say, no, let me be very specific.
Does Hezbollah operate in your country?
Then Peru will say, oh, yes, Hezbollah is here.
But why? Because Peru does not consider Hezbollah a terrorist group.
And that's the kind of mistakes and lack of communication and synchronization that we don't have with many other countries.
So that's why it doesn't get the level of attention it needs to get.
Wow. You know, I mean, it's interesting because, I mean, from what I hear, Hezbollah was actually responsible for teaching Hamas what to do going into infiltrating Israel.
So these guys are, I mean, horrific.
They're monsters.
And, you know, so go ahead.
No, I was going to say, just to what you're saying, I think they're master deceivers.
Yes. They're very good at deception, and they've taught Hamas and other groups how to do that.
Yes. Well, when we come back, we'll talk a little bit more about this vacuum, I guess, that has happened in the region.
And we'll talk a little bit more about that when we come back.
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I want to welcome back Joseph Humeyer, Director of Center for a Secure Free Society.
And Joseph, I want to say this is probably going to be my...
I don't want to say favorite segment because I think everything that you've talked about is extremely important.
But the reason that I feel like this is...
This is extremely important, especially in my heart, is I am Venezuelan.
I was born in Venezuela.
I still have family in Venezuela.
So I have a lot of interest in what happens in that country.
And of course, the interest has always been how did Venezuela become a socialist country and all those things.
And we could talk about that later.
But I really want to talk about the infiltration of Iran, specifically in Venezuela, and the connection that they have.
It's almost like a sisterhood, right?
It's almost like Iran and then little Iran.
And Venezuela is little Iran.
And how they actually played a role in the socialization of Venezuela, with Hugo Chavez as a big player in this.
But I want you to kind of walk us through, explain everything, why Venezuela, what it means for us.
You know, are there nuclear weapons in Venezuela yet from Iran?
All those things in this segment.
So go ahead.
You have the floor. Yeah, so I mentioned this, I alluded to this earlier, that I think Venezuela has other characteristics that kind of go above and beyond these other countries in Latin America when it comes to Iran and Hezbollah.
Venezuela has become much what Cuba was to the Soviet Union during the Cold War, kind of its principal proxy in the Western Hemisphere.
I refer to it as a platform because it's become weaponized.
Venezuela has become weaponized to have many methods to attack the United States, whether it's migrants, drugs, terrorists, Or even weaponry, drones, missiles, and potentially even some nuclear activities, and we're going to get into that.
But the main reason that Venezuela was targeted in this way was two.
One, because of Hugo Chavez.
Obviously, Hugo Chavez became pretty much, you know, he was like essentially a game changer in Latin America to taking a region that would have had a lot of prosperity and opportunity to taking it 100% towards conflict, corruption, and basically the destruction of their institutions and society.
Hugo Chavez was that.
Not just for Venezuela, he wasn't for the entire region because his tentacles of his illicit oil money basically got into all the elections in Latin America.
That's the first factor.
The second factor is, and I talked about this, you know, Hezbollah penetrates Lebanese communities.
There's a very large Lebanese community and Syrian community in Venezuela.
You know very well Debbie being from there and having family there.
And you know if there is a community in Latin America of Lebanese expatriates that are most captured by Hezbollah It's the Venezuelan one when you have people with the name of Tarek al-Isami Being one of the most important people in your government.
You know that that community has been captured by Iran and Hezbollah So what have they done with this and I'm gonna use this statistic to kind of like give you the sense of the magnitude of this Today there are more Venezuelans in Syria than there are in Brazil, right?
There's about 270,000, 280,000 Venezuelans in Brazil, which is right next to Venezuela, and upwards of 350,000 Venezuelans in Syria.
Why is that? There's a certain part of Syria that's called the little Venezuela, Asoaida.
It's where they speak Spanish, Irarepas, and Arabic.
And it's a strong fall for Hezbollah and Russia and Iran that were defending the dictator Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
So the same reason that Syria is so important to Iran to have that kind of land bridge from the Levant and Lebanon through into Iran is the same reason Venezuela is so important because it's the air bridge to get all their activities into the Western Hemisphere to attack the United States logistics.
So the reason you have these two big communities is because Iran is Hezbollah have built a logistical network from Syria to Venezuela to basically destabilize the world.
And so that's the real big so what on Venezuela.
On Venezuela. Tell me a little bit about this Tarek el-Assami.
Who is he and where is he now?
He's probably the most important man in Venezuela.
Everyone focuses on Nicolas Maduro because he's the face of the regime.
He's the president of the country. But really, under Maduro, there's very important people and probably nobody more important than Tarek Al-Asami because he's been the minister of Paraba, just every important ministry in the economy and this national security of Venezuela.
He was the minister of interior.
He was the Minister of Petroleum. He was the Minister of Mining, the Minister of National Industry. He was the Vice President of the country. He was also a governor of a very important state called Aragua. But the most important thing that I think Tariq Al-Aslami did among a bunch of things was when he was starting his career, this is back in 2007-8 under Chavez, he was the Minister of Interior and he created an immigration scheme to basically document members of Hezbollah, Hamas, and others to be able to have a complete fake identity.
Why that's so important for the United States is because the number one source country of migration to the US southern border is Venezuelan. But there is no way that we know with any kind of certainty that all those are Venezuelans because what Tariq Al-Aslami did as the Minister of Interior in charge of their immigration system was giving them not just passports and visas, a full suite of documents, driver's license, bank records, property records, to take someone from Lebanon and to say that he was born in Venezuela when he never even stepped foot in Venezuela
and doesn't even speak Spanish.
That's the level of support that Tarek El-Sami provided, and that's creating a conundrum for immigration because we don't know all the Venezuelans that are in the United States if they're actually truly Venezuelans.
Oh my goodness. So you're saying that the million plus people that have come through the border from Venezuela, some of them could be Hezbollah?
I know for a fact that there's some that are.
We're documenting some of these cases and we're looking at them.
And there's one case in particular that I'll be able to talk to you about.
They'll be in very short order.
It's not public yet, but we'll talk about it soon.
And what I'm saying is it is not a big percentage, right?
So there's 7.7 million Venezuelans that have fled that country since 2014, the largest mass migration in the history of the Western Hemisphere and the largest currently in the world, largest in Syria, largest in Ukraine.
But what I'm saying is it doesn't take that many.
It can literally be less than 1% of that that's tied to this illicit security scheme that Tarek del Asami erected in Venezuela.
And that we're talking about in the thousands, like in the thousands of people.
And, you know, when 19 hijackers were able to cause chaos in 9-11 in 2001 in the United States, you can only imagine what a thousand terrorists could do operating throughout our country.
So is he still in Venezuela?
Because I thought that he was under indictment, like in 2019.
Is he there?
Is he still operating? What is he doing?
There's an indictment by the Department of Justice against Tarek Al-Assami and many other leaders of the Venezuelan government, including Nicolas Maduro himself.
And there's a lot of confusion because he recently resigned as the Minister of Petroleum and people took that as him losing power. But in Venezuela, the ministers aren't like they are in Switzerland, right? They're not like, you know, really functional ministers that have his main operations are outside the government. And according to our research, he's not, he hasn't He's still operating in Venezuela, no longer in the public light as a minister, now in the shadows, but that's probably where he's even more dangerous.
Tarek El-Assamy is still active in Venezuela, he's still powerful, and he's still involved in a lot of things that are happening with Iran and Hezbollah in the Western Hemisphere.
Wow. Well, when we come back, I want to talk about the term pink tide, because I think it's very...
Dinesh didn't even know what that was, actually.
So let's explore. Let's talk about it when we come back.
We are back with Joseph Humeyer, Director of Center for a Secure Free Society.
And Joseph, in the last segment, I mentioned that I wanted to talk about the term pink tide.
Dinesh has never heard of this term.
He didn't know what it was.
And I want to know, who came up with it?
Who coined the phrase?
What is it?
You know... And then once we get into that, then I want to talk a little bit about the candidates that are running in some of the Venezuelan elections that are right wing and if they stand a chance given all of this.
Yeah. So, yeah, no, the term ping-tang, I think it was coined by some academic, but it essentially refers to a political shift that was happening in Latin America in the first decade of the 21st century, led by Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, that basically took Latin America into the orbit of socialism, some called 21st century socialism.
So, you started propping up all these socialist, populist, progressive presidents.
Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Daniel Ortega, the resurgence in Nicaragua, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Lula da Silva in Brazil, Cristina Kirchner in Argentina.
So that created this kind of block and people started seeing this shift.
What happened in like the second decade of the 21st century, essentially between 2010-2020, was what some call the conservative wave.
can argue whether these presidents were actually conservative, but they're certainly pro-business and pro-the US. But when the political pendulum swifted back to the right, the problem was those right of center presidents in Latin America, I'm referring to Mauricio Macri in Argentina, Piñera in Chile, Duque in Colombia, the problem was that they didn't have a geopolitical vision while the pink tide did. The pink tide completely aligned their foreign policy with Russia, China, and Iran. The other side tried to continue to do business with China and the United States,
continue to buy weapons from Russia and South Com, they ignored Iran completely.
So because of this lack of geopolitical vision, we had basically the crumbling of a lot of the right of center presidents in Latin America, the most recent probably would be Guillermo Lasso in Ecuador. And now we're seeing the resurgence of Marxist presidents in Latin America, President Petro in Colombia, Gabriel Boric in Chile, Zio Monacastro in Honduras, the return of Lula da Silva in Brazil.
That's right. And I think all eyes are now on Argentina because this is really going to be the inflection point if Javier Malay, a libertarian candidate that, you know, very much tied to the right of center networks in the region, if he can win, he can basically shift this tide to get away from the Marxism that's been taken over Latin America in recent years.
Yeah, and I saw on social media that he was embracing the Israeli flag, and you mentioned before the break that he's converting to Judaism.
Yes, my understanding is that he's been studying quite a bit under a rabbi in New York to basically make this conversion and becoming much more spiritual, understanding that, you know, as he kind of elevates himself in the political life of Argentina, the battle goes way beyond just the political battle.
It's almost a spiritual battle because the opponents to liberty in Latin America, I mean, Hugo Chavez, Maduro, Evo Morales, Cristina Kirchner, I mean, these are criminals.
Yes, evil. In the case of Christina Kirshner, she has criminal indictments and convictions.
She was convicted of corruption for over a billion dollars in public work projects.
So Javier Malay knows he's not going up against just your random politician with some leftist ideas.
He's going up against some very dark forces, and I think he's trying to build strength.
We wish him the best in the elections on this Sunday, and hopefully the Argentines elect right in this election.
Yeah, yeah. What do you think his chances are?
Do you think they're good? You know, they're good.
I mean, he's got the popular support.
I mean, he's become very kind of like an icon in Argentina.
He's got, you know, kind of like some people say he's got like this Trump style and his bannerisms, but with worse hair.
He was a former rock and roll singer.
But I would say this.
I have not seen a leftist Marxist president come to power in Latin America without first dividing the right.
Exactly. Have them fight against each other, and then they prop themselves with a minority support.
That's one thing I might be worried about in Argentina, because elements of the right in Argentina, because of the populist style of Javier Malay, are saying, we don't want Javier Malay.
We don't want Masa, we don't want the Kirshnerists, but we don't also want Javier Malay.
To me, that's a bad move, because whether you agree with his style or don't, you definitely don't want to have this socialist take over your country.
In Argentina, it's going to make a lot of economic problems.
Yeah. Well, I mean, Joseph, that is exactly what's happening in America.
I mean, really. The Republican Party is dividing, is arguing, bickering, whatever.
They're not uniting when, in fact, we have to in order to defeat the left because...
As you know, they're like a cancer and they stick together and they actually do have some really good ways of getting those votes, whether it be fraudulent, as we know, or otherwise.
They fool the public.
And I think when we look at governments in South America, I always say, you know what, that's exactly like it is here.
Yeah, I think.
I think over time, the United States has been kind of preaching to Latin America to emulate the United States.
And what's happened over time, because of our dysfunctional politics, we end up looking more like Latin America with a two-tiered justice system, very irregular elections, and just all the things that you used to see in Latin America are now seeing here in the United States.
Yeah. I think 100% to what you're saying, Debbie, in the sense that we may have differences in the conservative movement.
I would even go broader than the Republican Party in the United States.
But those differences are put aside when you have authoritarianism creeping on your doorstep.
And the measures that have been taken by the Biden administration are moving the country in that direction.
I mean, just what they're doing to President Trump.
Exactly. I would never have thought I would see in my lifetime political persecution under political opposition in the United States the way I've studied it in Latin America.
But we're living it today.
And what I'm really worried about is the normalization of political violence.
Because in Latin America, that's already happened.
And what you start to see is political assassinations.
You start to see political kidnappings and things that are very, very violent and just unhealthy.
I'm worried that the United States will move in that direction unless we fix this and fix it fast.
Yeah. Well, I mean, we have a movie out, Police State.
I don't know if you've seen it yet, but we talk about all that, you know, and it's just horrible that we are actually having to do a movie called Police State in America.
So when we come back, we will have our final segment with Joseph Humeyer.
We are back with Joseph Humeyer.
He is the director of the Center for a Secure Free Society.
And this is our final segment.
We're going to talk about the endgame in Iran, Hezbollah, in the Western Hemisphere.
But I also want to talk about...
How Hezbollah and the Hezbollah training camps and all of those things that are happening in Latin America and Central America and Mexico are sort of crossing with the cartels?
Because as we know, the cartels are not Islamic, but how do they manage to work with each other?
Yeah, so this is what we call in the defense community threat convergence.
Okay. Because yes, while you're right, while cartel members aren't becoming Islamic or Islamic terrorist organizations aren't abandoning Islam just to become drug traffickers, what you're seeing is the fusion of the two and what's called logistical networks, the financiers, the fixers, the facilitators, the logistical operators that are the glue that are bringing these two worlds together.
Like a real quick example would be like if you're an accountant, For the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico and Hezbollah now comes to Mexico, you're probably a good candidate to be an accountant for Hezbollah in Mexico.
That's a small example.
But, you know, in 2018, then Attorney General Jeff Sessions, he listed the top five transnational criminal organizations in the world, the top five by the Department of Justice.
The first three were Mexican drug cartels, the ones that you know about, Sinaloa, Jalisco, Nueva Generaciones.
And the fourth one was the MS-13 gang from Salvador, which was very brutal back then.
And the fifth was Hezbollah.
And that caught a lot of people's attention.
How is Hezbollah mentioned with Mexican cartels and Salvadorian gangs?
Because Hezbollah has become so active in the illicit drug trade that they have become the money launderer preference of choice for all the cartels in Latin America.
One of my colleagues had once called them a Western Union or Federal Express to be able to move money across continents in behalf of the cartels.
There is a litany of cases in Latin America of what we call Hezbollah supporters basically operating in high levels schemes of money laundering and drug trafficking so that Hezbollah could fund its war efforts now against Israel, but then against Syria and in support of Iran.
So they're very much involved in the drug business.
Do you think also that some of the tactics that the cartels have learned, like the beheadings and just the, you know, like, I'm going to hang, I'm going to cut somebody's limbs and I'm going to hang it on the bridge, those types of things, do you think that those are tactics that they learned from Hezbollah?
I don't know about those in particular.
I mean, the cartels have always been very brutal.
I mean, going back to the beginning, they've always been beheading.
They've always had very brutal measures and tactics.
So I don't think the brutality was learned necessarily from Hezbollah.
But what has been learned is the logistical network schemes, the ability to move money, the ability to weapons.
I think the weapons that they have gunned.
There's a case. I'll highlight this one case.
In 2020, there's a case of a Syrian Venezuelan.
His name is Adel El Zabair.
He was actually a parliamentarian.
He was a member of the National Assembly of Venezuela, a legislator who took leave of absence from being in the legislation in Venezuela to go to Syria to fight in the Syrian civil war on behalf of Bashar al-Assad.
That's crazy in itself.
But when the DEA who was investigating this case, when they uncovered the real reason he went to Syria, they found out it was because he was part of a group that was brokering a deal between Hezbollah, Hamas, the Syrian government, the Venezuelan government, Iran, and the Colombian narco-terrorist, the FARC, particularly, to broker a cocaine for weapons scheme.
And in 2014, a bunch of weapons, small arms, rocket-propelled grenades, all these things, started arriving from Lebanon and Syria to Venezuela to give to the FARC so that they have this small arms capability.
So weapons is a big part of this.
The cocaine goes north and east, but the weapons come west, and they've been able to make the cartels much more powerful than they otherwise would be.
Wow. What about the tunnels?
Because I know that in Israel, you know, Hamas has done all these tunnels that go into Israel, and that is also the case with the Mexican border, right?
They have tunnels. Do you think that that's another tactic that they've used?
I know somebody that worked on this, particularly within U.S. law enforcement, and he was convinced that this was done by Hamas.
Particularly, Hamas had helped specific members of cartels, engineers in particular, on how to basically develop not just the tunnel per se, because anyone could develop a tunnel.
It was the electrical capability, the electrical power of the tunnel.
Because that's not something that's easy to do.
And they had these very sophisticated engineers in the Palestinian territories and Lebanon that helped the cartels do this.
I didn't investigate this myself, but I have a colleague, a friend that did so out of U.S. law enforcement, and he was convinced that's the case.
Wow. So your personal opinion, Joseph, what do you think?
Are we in trouble?
What can we take from this?
I mean, we're in trouble.
The world's on fire. I mean, there's small wars erupting all throughout the world and some of them turning into big wars.
But I think really what we haven't realized yet is we're on the precipice of World War III. Iran is a major actor in that world war because they have aligned themselves with Russia and China.
So the three together, Russia, Iran, and China, have decided to take the world into a global conflict so that they can change the international order.
But the big difference between the previous two world wars in the 20th century is that this time it's going to be fought part of this war, a big part, in Latin America.
Latin America was not a major part of the First and the Second World War.
They provided some support to the Allies in the United States.
But this time they will be because those three actors, Russia, China, and Iran, have been able to capture Latin America and turn it as a weapon against the United States.
So that's the big lesson.
The United States needs to start paying attention to Latin America because, you know, I'm going to use a sports analogy, in boxing, it's not the hardest punch that knocks you out.
It's the punch you don't see. And in the case of the U.S. foreign policy and security, the punch we're not watching is Latin America.
Well, thank you for your analysis and your perspective, and God bless you for the work you do.
I follow you.
I follow it. I think you are amazing, and thank you for coming on the podcast.
Absolutely, Debbie. It's a pleasure and honor.
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