Hezbollah’s Alarming Presence in Mexico

By Anthony Tsontakis

Two budding trends suggest that a merger between terrorism and transnational organized crime is, at the very least, in its embryonic phase around the globe.

On the one hand, it has become clear that terrorism financed by profits from drug trafficking, or narco-terrorism, is the preferred method of sustenance for the organizations that most threaten American interests.  On the other hand, powerful drug cartels have increasingly turned to terrorism as a means to coerce sovereign governments to tacitly accept the presence and expansion of transnational criminal organizations within their territories.

Accordingly, nothing short of new conceptual and legal frameworks are required if our security agencies are to tackle the complicated problems posed by the burgeoning fusion of terrorism and transnational organized crime.

Ungoverned territory is the common denominator that has enabled the emerging union between illegal drugs and radical politics around the world.  To be sure, lawless land is the platform from which terrorists generate the revenue, through drug trafficking and other forms of organized crime, which enables them to indoctrinate, recruit, and train operatives to launch politically-motivated attacks against human life, civilian property, and legitimate government infrastructure all over the planet.  At the same time, ungoverned territories are the bases from which the world’s most notorious drug cartels contract with terrorists to trade drugs for the weapons they use to terrorize populations and intimidate governments.

Hezbollah’s drug operations, for example, take place in the ungoverned territory it controls in southern Lebanon, as well as lawless territories in the Balkans, parts of Africa, and Latin America.  This is significant because, while Hezbollah receives an estimated $120-$200 million in aid yearly from the Iranian government, it generates more than 1,500 times that annually through drug trafficking.  According to expert testimony delivered to the Canadian House of Commons a few years ago, for example, Hezbollah generates $180 million annually from hashish grown in the 13,000 acres it controls in the ungoverned Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, $3 billion yearly from its heroin-refining laboratories, and billions more from its drug trafficking networks in Latin America.

For their part, Mexican drug trafficking organizations enjoy de facto control of various swaths of ungoverned territory in northern Mexico.  Their transportation and distribution networks have been expanded so successfully that seven major Mexican drug organizations now control almost all the trafficking routes into the United States.  To consolidate their power and to fend off the Mexican government’s drive to reign in the drug cartels, these organizations have turned to tactics familiarly employed by jihadist groups in the Middle East, including beheadings, kidnappings, bombings, and torture.

“All the things that Al-Qaeda and the Taliban have done are now being used by these organized crime cartels,” former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff explained in a speech on the nexus between drug trafficking, terrorism, and organized crime last January.  The situation has so deteriorated that the Justice Department’s National Drug Intelligence Center characterizes Mexican cartels as the “greatest organized crime threat” the United States faces today.

What is worse, however, is that Mexican trafficking organizations are beginning to take advantage of ungoverned territories throughout Latin America to form linkages with Middle Eastern terrorist groups that seek to profit from the drug trade.

In March, 2009, for example, an expert testified to Congress that “permissive environments” (i.e., ungoverned territories) throughout Latin America are what create opportunities for Mexican cartel operatives to “rub shoulders” with operatives from Hamas, Hezbollah, and other like-minded organizations.

Like Mexico, Latin America is also not the final frontier for the Mexican cartels.  According to a recent Congressional Research Service report, Mexican drug trafficking organizations “operate not only in the Western Hemisphere, but are known to be aggressively transnational, seeking to expand their consumer markets and explore new transit routes and safe havens with low law enforcement capacity and high corruption.”  To be sure, a joint report by the U.S. Departments of State and Homeland Security released last February explains that Mexican drug cartels have a presence throughout Europe, West Africa, and the Asian-Pacific.

Not surprisingly, therefore, multifaceted and dangerous relationships between terrorists, drug lords, and international arms dealers are emerging all over the world, including just south of the U.S. border.

Last month, for example, the opening shot of a new narco-terrorism conspiracy prosecution was fired, when a federal judge ruled the U.S. government did not violate a suspected international arms dealer’s due process rights.

The ruling is the first court order in a case that began last year when a Grand Jury indicted Jamal Yousef, a former member of the Syrian military, for his alleged participation in a terrorist plot to trade military-grade weapons stored by Hezbollah in Mexico to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia, or FARC, for over 15,000 pounds of cocaine.

FARC is designated as a terrorist organization by the United States.  “FARC is a highly structured terrorist organization, styled as a military group and comprised of approximately 12,000 to 18,000 armed guerillas,” according to the indictment.

Transcripts of secretly recorded conversations were presented to the federal court that prosecutors claim reveal the arms were stolen from the U.S. military in Iraq, were purchased there on the black market, and are now being stored in Mexico by a member of Hezbollah.

Yousef’s lawyer, Melinda Sarafa, emphasized in a telephone interview with me that “no actual weapons were produced or observed in connection with the allegations.”  However, evidence produced by prosecutors included an email that attached several photographs of the weapons cache, including a picture of a man posing in front of the weapons.  The weapons include automatic rifles, M-60 machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, hand grenades, anti-tank munitions, and C-4 explosives.

When I asked about Yousef’s alleged relationship with Hezbollah in Mexico, Sarafa declined to comment.

The allegation that Hezbollah stores military-grade weapons in Mexico has raised eyebrows in Congress.  Representative Sue Myrick (R-NC) is urging the Department of Homeland Security to investigate the presence of Hezbollah along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The Department of Homeland Security has not yet indicated whether it will investigate Hezbollah activity near the U.S. border with Mexico.  But Myrick says that a string of recent car bombs in Mexico by drug cartels near the border “show an evolution in the tactics being used by the drug cartels and bear a strong resemblance to those employed by Hezbollah, raising questions as to who trained the cartels.”

What this all suggests is that the merger between terrorism and organized crime is at least incipient.  We accordingly need new concepts and attitudes.  The war on terror and the war on drugs should no longer be separated into two domains.