Iranians at the Gate (Part 1)

In Guatemala with Joseph M. Humire. Transcript.

Intel Briefing: Iranians at the Gate (Part 1)

A 3-part interview with Joseph M. Humire conducted by Ann Vandersteel, Michael Yon and Masako Ganaha, originally broadcast on Rumble channel “Right Now with Ann Vandersteel” on the 6th, 7th and 9th of November 2023.

Jopseh M. Humire is Executive Director of Secure Free Society and a Visiting Fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

Part I 

VANDERSTEEL (4:34): [We are] currently in Guatemala City where we had a briefing last night with Joseph Humire. He is with the SecureFreeSociety.org and a leading authority in Latin America and who the key stakeholders are, who are moving the pieces around the board. It’s not just the CCP. We have deeper, darker demons at our doorstep. […]

(5:02) 

Tonight we not only bring you an incredibly important intelligence briefing on Latin America, but also some snippets of what Team Operation Burning Edge has been doing as we’ve traveled from Belize into Mexico, and down here to Guatemala City. […]

“Migration has evolved from a method of coercion — which is a tactical tool — to a strategic weapon that actually steals sovereignty and pre-positions for further conflict.”

(7:45)

Just like President Trump spoke about, these NGOs, “Belize Amnesty Operational Update” as of June says that the United Nations High Commissioner for Migration (UNHCR) and partners “support the Belize government’s amnesty program as an alternative legal pathway to regularize asylum seekers in the country.

“During registration 12,765 individuals, including asylum seekers, applied to permanent residence in Belize. UNHCR provides the technical support and capacity development to government officials and direct assistance to asylum seekers.”

(8:20)

The conglomeration of the New World Order as developed by their non-governmental organization partnerships is on full display — in a country with less than 500,000 residents.

Interestingly, all of the embassies represented in their countries were within blocks of each other. The U.S. embassy, a massive, massive structure in, again, a country with less than half a million people. And guarded, quite securely I might add. […]

(14:20)

As we focus in on the migration, who are the key players? How do they fit? What sort of tools, tricks and psyops are they using? NGOs of all flavors, shapes and sizes, all assets deployed, including the environmental hoax — it all comes together. Because forced and weaponized migration has many entry and exit points, and many areas of effort to get these people to move. There has to be incentive, there has to be pressure. And of course, war has always been one of the most incredibly important aspects of getting people to leave one country to go to another.

(15:00)

MICHAEL YON: You can see the road signs with “MIGRANTES”, you know, the migrants. “Get your children vaxxed”. It’s the information ecosystems here. UNHCR, their office in Belmopan, the capital of Belize. We were just at it yesterday. The UNHCR, which is a primary pump for “migrantes” — the migrants — is like 40 yards from the front of the US Embassy in the capital of Belize. It’s right across the street. It's basically an annex of the US Embassy.

IOM has offices here now in Belize City. They have offices in Guatemala. All over the world, whether I go to Amsterdam or we go to wherever, they're in airports, like terminal three at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam. They’ve got a ticket office, you just go through the front door of terminal three and through the rotary doors, take a left, and there's the IOM office, handing out tickets to people for wherever they want to go.

Many of the people that go through Schiphol will go to Quito, Ecuador. And through Quito they end up going through Colombia and the Darien Gap, Panama, and up to the United States. And right now, every day, there's flights from Africa to Istanbul, Turkey, over to Bogota, Colombia, and then those people even take flights to the United States from Colombia, or they go through the Darien Gap. 

This is happening seven days a week. You see huge amounts of flights going into Nicaragua of Haitians and Africans. Now, there's been a lot of controversy in the last week or so on that, you can find it in the news, but huge numbers.

Huge numbers of people bypass the Darien. There's many different routes, many different capillaries and arteries that people are using to get into the United States. Some of them just fly directly. Some go on, obviously, student visas, others go on birth tourism and anchor babies — there's many different methods to do it, and they're using all of those maximally. 

You see the huge protest yesterday, in Washington DC surrounding the White House, you see somewhere in Berlin, Panama City, all over the world, France, it’s on, it’s on, it’s on. This is exactly as many people predicted it. 

Many people long before me saw it. For instance the crazy man, Alex Jones. He wasn't crazy after all. He just talks loud. And he was actually right. This is actually what's happening. You see these huge camps being put up — they literally are taking Walmart Supercenters and using those as facilities to house people now. That sounds very crazy a few years ago, it is an absolute reality. You can go to the former Walmart Supercenter in Brownsville, Texas, as we have done. It is now run by an organization called Southwest Key. It is housing roughly 1500 boys right now. They're basically prisoners. In Brownsville, Texas, right there by the McDonald's. It's right there. And the sheriffs — nobody does anything about it. It's quite serious. 

People who are paying attention are — they do realize now the house is on fire. It's not a matter of hey, we'll cross that road when we come to it. You're beyond the point of no return. You are going into war, period. There. You're in a war. It's actually — we're beyond that.

People ask me every day: when will this break? It's already broke. Look at Washington DC right now. Look at Berlin. Look at all across Europe. Look at — there is no border in the United States, period. And anybody who's running for president who is not talking about mass deportations is not a serious person, period. If you're not talking about doing mass — if you're just talking about, hey, we're gonna pass laws to shut them off. You're not serious. You're not even serious. We got enough laws. Shut the border, begin mass deportations. Anything short of that, you’re just a boy. And that's where we're at right now.

MASAKO GANAHA: There are many issues related to migration. And one which, now, many people pay attention to is Kurdish people. Because they have Turkish passports, they can come without a visa. And they overstay, and they eventually claim asylum. They can do this as many times as they want because there is no limit for how many times you can apply [for asylum]. It’s similar to what’s happened in the United States. […] Belize, they are strongly against illegal immigration. So when people cross illegally, they catch you, and then they will immediately put those people in prison for six months, and then they will be sent back to their country. So that's one thing we should really learn from Belize.

VANDERSTEEL: I wonder, though, how long it’s going to be before the government of Belize actually disregards that and falls victim to the International Organization for Migration, IOM, the United Nations. I wonder how long before they actually fall victim to the money, and start taking the money to further the migrants through this country all the way to America? 

I have to believe that's going to be the next step, here, because this country is very poor. There's only 400,000 people here. And you know, it's very inexpensive to live here. […] You can get a one bedroom apartment for $35 a month, Belizian money, that’s like $17 U.S. It's incredible how inexpensive it is here to live. So do you think that perhaps the government here is going to be bought off like governments all over Central America?

GANAHA: Actually, we met an officer working for a migration office. […] He was saying those international organizations [are] trying to make Belize more kind to those refugees, like humanitarian, those kinds of words. So he was worried about those policy changes. […]

(30:15)

VANDERSTEEL: Now for an intel briefing that is going to rock your world. The barbarians are at the gate — and I mean the Iranians. Yes, folks. It is more than just the CCP, here, that's a threat to America. Conversation and intel briefing with Joseph Humire next.

(30:37)

JOSEPH HUMIRE: One of the biggest challenges that we had in 2017 was personnel training and policy. You know that old saying in DC that personnel is policy? You don't get the right people, you don't get the right policies, even if you have the policy idea. And what happened in 2017 is we spent way too much time just trying to get the right people in positions, identifying, placing. During the whole transition it was just, like, chaos. 

So 60 organizations have come together, including mine — Heritage is the big one, taking the lead on it — for something called Project 2025 [Presidential Transition Project]. To already write the policies for the next Republican administration. Let me just say, the next administration, because it doesn’t have to be partisan. And also find the right personnel that have the qualifications to serve in important positions. And they’re using this thing called Schedule F. Most political appointees are Schedule C appointees. […]

(32:10)

My background is more on geopolitics, and I'm mostly a regional specialist. I spent 15 years doing Latin America work. I can’t say I've done everything in the 33 countries, sovereign countries in the region, but a good 80 percent. We have good networks in pretty much every one of these countries. 

I'm at a point now, thankfully, I don't have to do a lot of the research on my own. We have teams that do them, and I get reports about them. And every now and then I'll go do a site visit, like when I went to the Darién, I think was February. But usually when I do that, I will do it with the host nation’s military. In the case of Panama we did with Senafront and with SENAN. We did an air journey in the field. 

(32:58)

So, this terrorist attack. AMIA. The day after the AMIA attack, they bomb this commuter plane. I can't remember the number of passengers but it was like —

MICHAEL YON: Twenty one.

HUMIRE: Between twenty and thirty. Killed everyone on board. But specifically who they were targeting were two businessmen, one was president of the largest bank in Panama. And they were connected to the financing of this Jewish cultural center in Argentina. […]

(33:43)

So let me just go back a little bit. Iran is a major actor in Latin America. Big, big actor. Much more than people understand or give them credit for. Since the dawn of the 1979 Iranian revolution, they very quickly understood you have a geographic disparity with the United States. And they want to diminish the disadvantage over time. And so they started building networks.

They really had their moment at the turn of the century. They carried out these attacks before they even had a robust network. And not only were these successful attacks — like the 114 collectively killed, plus the 21 for the one in Panama — but they got away with it. No arrests. Nothing really happened to them. So they use that as kind of a catalyst to build out. And then when Chavez comes in, in Venezuela, they build out that network.

(34:33)

And now we're at a point where Iranian armaments are coming into Latin America. Missiles, fast boats, drones, high-end technology, and Iran does the dirty work for China. 

As opposed to the Cold War, which was like a fight within the Western family —because Marxism, at the end day, is a Western philosophy coming from Russia — China and Iran had an Oriental philosophy. Very different from anything that we've ever dealt with, in the past. Islamist and Maoist. 

(35:08)

But nonetheless, they look at themselves as kind of the guarantors of a new international order. Russia I think — more specifically Putin — is on board with this whole thing. But in Latin America, China has a lot of clout. Economic, political. So Iran can do a lot of the agitation, the aggression, the very provocative acts, because they have nothing to lose. I mean, even if Iran gets caught in planning a terrorist plot or doing something, that’s Iran. So everyone's just, like, it’s Iran, it’s what they do.  

China, if they get caught doing anything that looks like it's trying to directly affect U.S. national security interests, they can lose political and economic legitimacy, which they don’t want. 

(35:51)

They enabled Iran to do these kinds of things through their financial system, through their embassies, their information network — just through their clout. They have real clout. Iran doesn't have real leverage, like they don't have a big diplomatic presence. They don't have huge economic relations, but they have China. 

[…]

(36:2)

What I actually most wanted to impress on you guys, because you guys just came from the Darien Gap, you’re looking at the [U.S.] southern border. 

Venezuela. 

That's what I really wanted to talk to you guys about. Because Venezuela is probably the most complex thing that you probably ever see. From the Trump administration, they tried to tackle this. They went after it with a policy of maximum pressure, the level of pressure that we place on Venezuela in terms of sanctions and political. Few countries have had that kind of treatment. I mean, North Korea and maybe Iran. 

We sanctioned 12 of their industries — banking, telecoms, big industries. Oil. We have over 160 individuals that were sanctioned from the regime. They were isolated. We had 60 countries that didn't recognize Maduro as president, they recognized another guy, Juan Guaidó, but it barely made a dent. It didn't really even do anything. 

(37:15)

And so the big question is, when the United States flexed, maximum pressure on Maduro, how did they resist? And now, and now —

YON: What year did that pressure start?

HUMIRE: Trump administration. So between 2017 and 2019, there was incremental pressure, mostly individual sanctions targeted at individuals and entities that were part of the regime. And in 2019, till pretty much Joe Biden came on board, It was maximum pressure, and that's when we started [sanctioning] sectors and industries.

(37:44)

VANDERSTEEL: Do we really see the Iranian presence start to really take off after the Monroe Doctrine was sort of just ignored, you know, when Carter gave away the canal and we sort of stepped away from —

HUMIRE: Him and Kerry, famously, I think it was in 2015.

VANDERSTEEL: Kerry went over, right. […]

(38:04)

HUMIRE: No, Iran has been working in Latin America from day one. The inflection point, or where they really started to blossom, was when Chavez and Castro created this thing called the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA). And that's still the center of gravity of all the conflicts in Latin America. It was a collection of — it fluctuates with the membership, but it was a collection of 13 members at its heyday. I think it's now down to 10. But the key members are Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Bolivia. Those are the four. 

(38:38)

Those are the four most authoritarian countries in the region. They're semi- to non- permissive environments for U.S. diplomacy and intelligence. Venezuela is, and Cuba, pretty much non-permissive. Nicaragua and Bolivia have varying levels of engagement, but it's getting harder and harder, and they persecute their opposition. That happened in 2004. 

(38:55)

When that (Bolivarian) alliance was erected, that was the catalyst for Iran. Iran actually became an observing member, and Syria, in 2006. So right after, they became involved in all the meetings. So that alliance is really the cause of conflict. 

And so what I was going to with the Venezuela thing was, you know, we hit them with our big — outside of military force — we hit them with our big diplomatic and economic guns, barely make a dent. And the response on behalf of Maduro — this is what I call Maduro’s maximum pressure campaign — is migration. It’s drugs, migrants and terrorists.

(39:36)

And so, the migration into the United States, into this new southern border, is driven by Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela. China, Iran, Russia, use it — they all benefit from they all steer it, but the mechanisms, the logistical mechanisms, were developed by Maduro. And I could dive into that.

Let me begin with this. So this is actually something that me and Michael talked about. We dived into this in 2018. You guys remember the Central American caravans? Actually it was here, in Guatemala. […] I was here in 2018. And I do a lot of training with our partner militaries in Latin America, and so I was actually training the Guatemalan military […]. 

(40:27)

And the caravans started, October 2018, and it went from 180 Hondurans on October 12th to 7,000 something by October 20th. So in eight days it just went [snaps fingers]. And so I was here, and everyone's going crazy. If you remember in the news, all the media is going nuts.

Trump shuts the border down and everyone calls him xenophobe, racist, all that stuff. And all the international media comes down here. Had a friend at the time that was at a high level of the Guatemalan government. He gives me a call and he's, like, Joseph, we got a problem.

I said, I can see, I can see the news. He was like, no, the caravans, we’re on that. He said, our problem’s the press. He's like, we're trying to show them that this is not organic, that there's systematic […] things that are driving this. There's some irregular aspects of it. 

(41:16)

And they don’t want to have the time of day. They don't want to talk to us, they don't want to receive anything from us.

I said, so, how can I help? 

He said, well, you talk to the press, can you look at this stuff? We're not going to taint your view, we'll just help you with logistics. 

So they basically accommodated me to do a week-long tour. Basically I traveled with the caravans from the Agua Caliente port of entry in Honduras, Guatemala to the […] port of entry between Guatemala and Mexico. And we actually wrote a report on this I could share with you guys. 

(41:44)

But the big “so what?” of that was two things: the route and the composition. 

The caravans were structured like convoys. I mean, they had an advance party, the main body, a rear party. So you could tell … anyone that moves thousands of people, if you could do that, effectively, that means you're organized.

You’d have a hard time moving 100 people in a conference from one room to another room, much less thousands. So the composition really drilled my attention because it's very well structured and organized and efficient to some level with with its dingles and dangles and whatever.

(42:23) 

And then the other was, the route that they took was already prepared. They didn't take the fastest route, which would have been the Pan-American highway or the shortest route, which would have been up the Caribbean. They took the slowest and the longest route because there was NGO infrastructure that had already been developed. 

(42:40)

So that’s when we started digging into the NGOs, and wanted to know, who are these NGOs? Now some of them you guys probably don't —

YON: What year was that?

HUMIRE: 2018. You could argue that the migration, the mass migration phenomenon, began in 2014 with the unaccompanied minors, and there's an argument to be made on that. But 2018 is when the numbers start going [gestures up]. 

If we didn't do the third country agreements or the MPP [Migrant Protection Protocols] or Remain in Mexico, 2019 would have been horrible. 

And 2020, the pandemic obviously subsided things, and then in 2021 things exploded. 

And so, my point is, let’s just skip to the “so what”. So we certainly have the NGOs, the specific NGOs in Honduras, and — I don’t think they exist anymore — they were called Pueblo Sin Fronteras. People without Borders. Yeah, they were financed by Maduro.

VANDERSTEEL: Was there no Soros money in that?

(43:30)

HUMIRE: A little bit, but I mean, compared to the dollars — like, Soros will give you a grant, right, he'll give you maybe $50,000, $60,000. Maduro’s giving millions. 

But the thing is, Maduro wasn't giving the money for the structure of the NGO, Maduro was giving the money specifically for the caravans. So Soros gives money to a lot of these NGOs —

VANDERSTEEL: Where was Maduro getting the money? He was so sanctioned.

HUMIRE: Well, he wasn’t sanctioned at this point, the industries. This was 2018. He was sanctioned, individually. But Venezuela’s still, you know —

VANDERSTEEL: Oil?

HUMIRE: That's part of it, they still have the largest oil reserves in the world, and it's all kind of dysfunctional now. But [Venezuela’s] major source of revenue is cocaine. 

(44:12)

You know, one third of the world's cocaine comes from the Colombian-Venezuelan border. And that's a $250, $300, $350 billion global industry. That's buku money, right? And then they have other illicit revenue streams. They do gold smuggling, they do contraband. I mean, these guys, money is not their problem. They have plenty of money.

With the sanctions, when we did the sector sanctions, they had trouble with money laundering. Because they were laundering a lot of their money through the oil industry, through their gold industry, through their banking industry. When they got sanctioned it got more difficult for them, but they found alternative channels. […]

(44:53)

Pueblos sin Fronteras was created by a guy named Bartolo Fuentes, who was a Congressman from Honduras who was part of a political party that's now in power, Libre. And that was created by a former president named Manuel Zelaya.

So Manuel Zelaya went through Latin America for about six months, talking about caravans. Talking about migration, and also talking about border security as a crime against humanity. To have border enforcement is considered a human rights violation. 

So they were creating this narrative, and then Maduro started pumping the money in. So Honduras and Venezuela have a major drug corridor, that's the major cocaine corridor.

YON: Are they doing it by boat? Or by airplane, or?

(45:36)

HUMIRE: All of the above. They use semi-submersibles —

VANDERSTEEL: Submarines.

HUMIRE: We’re talking multiple shipments of cocaine.

YON: They don’t even need to use submarines, they can just take a ship, right?

HUMIRE: So the best, most effective way for them is cargo ships. Because that's bulk, you know? […] We’ll seize that every now and then, you know, we could seize it. SOUTHCOM will seize it, every now and then, the Hondurans could seize it. Coast Guard in the Caribbean. Costa Rica actually, they don’t have a military, but they actually have a really good Coast Guard and they're very effective at counter narcotics. But they have other methods. 

And the cartels are adaptable. Remember, the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, is in prison for drug trafficking. Honduras is a narco state. And now they're worse because now this Libre party, that was the one that organized caravans, is now in power, is the President now. And that's why she's out in China, you know Xiaomara Castro went to Beijing, yeah? […]

(46:35)

So the question in my mind was, why does Maduro care about Central American caravans, and why does he care about our border? He's got all these other issues with his borders. And that's kind of led us down to this rabbit hole. 

And so we looked for some academic literature. This is still, to me, the best academic work on weaponized migration. It's actually a leftist professor, a bunch of them. She's the main one, Dr. Kelly Greenhill, her book is called Weapons of Mass Migration (2010). 

She did a really good job at empirically studying how migration could be used as a method of coercion. Right? So she documented, I think, it’s 81 instances since the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, which legalized asylum. 

So once asylum became a legal mechanism for persecuted persons, then, governments started realizing that we can exploit that. And so she documented these instances, 80, 81, I can’t remember the exact number of times, you can look at it. 

(47:45)

What was interesting about the documentation of what she did was, one, the success rate is pretty high. It's like 60-some percent, which if you look at sanctions as a method of coercion, it’s like 40, under 40 percent. So it's actually more effective than sanctions. It's a weak man's weapon, it’s basically a weak nation’s weapon. Is migration. 

YON: I see it being increasingly used.

HUMIRE: I’m going to get to why. So I spoke a lot with her. She actually originally termed it “coerced-engineered migration,” because she, we can look at her table, she documented it into coercers and targeted nation states, right? 

YON: Panama was coerced. And targeted.

(48:25)

HUMIRE: Yeah. Because there's basically concessions. You want to get more financial aid, you want to get sanctions lifted. You want to get recognized in some international fora. Sometimes you just want attention, or you want to drive a narrative, or whatever. There's all these reasons why you do this.

She documented it in a way that [migration] is mainly a method of coercion, where I took her work and when we adapted to Venezuela, but when we looked at it, to where I think it went above it, and I call it “strategic engineered migration,” because I think coercion is no longer the main goal. 

(49:00)

To me the big case that made me see that more clearly was Poland-Belarus. Lukashenko. 

YON: I shot right up there from Morocco when that was happening. 

HUMIRE: Yes, yeah. So you think about that, right? So the same theory, you use mass migration, you flood Poland's border, I think Latvia-Lithuania as well. You know, the EU goes up in arms and stuff and Lukashenko is talking about how they don't recognize him as a legitimate president. Fake election. But he's still sanctioned. He didn't get the sanctions lifted. He's still kind of ostracized from the European community even more so, now, after the invasion of Ukraine. 

(49:38)

So I was like, was this just a bad case? Because it was very, the logistics around that was really robust —

YON: You mean in Belarus?

HUMIRE: Yeah. Yeah, like Iran helped Iraqi Airways develop the flights to be able to shuttle all the Kurds over the northern part of Iraq. Russia used their airlines. They also used RT to do a lot of disinformation about legitimizing Lukashenko. Delegitimizing Poland. China, I think, got involved at some level of being like the, you know, the typical arbiter of the conflict with the EU. 

(50:15)

My point is, I saw this going beyond just coercion, and as a preparatory mechanism for great power conflict. 

YON: Turkey was doing it too, and now they’re doing it again —

HUMIRE: And Turkey was doing NGOs and travel agencies —

YON: El Salvador.

HUMIRE: Yeah, Turkey is big in El Salvador. And so, the thing about that instance was, think about it, that was in October to December 2021. And then Putin invades Ukraine in February 2022. So, to me, it was in prepar — and now what are we talking about, we’re talking —

YON: That’s why I went there, I spent five weeks watching them trying to push those migrants in —

HUMIRE: And now he’s got his nuclear forces in Belarus. Now he's got the Wagner Group in Belarus. And so, to me, it's now become, migration has evolved from what Dr. Greenhill looked at, from a method of coercion — which is a tactical tool — to a strategic weapon that actually steals sovereignty. It steals sovereignty and it pre-positions for further conflict.

[…]

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