Iranians at the Gate (Part 2)
Joseph M. Humire on how Venezuela is losing its sovereignty and its history
Intel Briefing: Iranians at the Gate (Part 2)
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.
Joseph M. Humire is Executive Director of Secure Free Society and a Visiting Fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
Part 2
(1:05)
VANDERSTEEL: We’re here in Guatemala City to do research on the migrant invading forces streaming across our southern border by the hundreds of thousands a month. And our contacts and meetings here have yielded intelligence that clearly shows the U.S. government is involved in the weaponization of human migration. Which is actually building the trojan army invading forces into our republic. […]
Tonight we continue with Part 2 of our intelligence briefing on the Iranians at the Gate. An age-old war of empires is now raging at our southern border. [...]
(4:15)
The Iranian threat here in Latin America is very real. Much more real than people actually realize. [In Part 1] the case was made for why Iran has made such a major move into Latin America, realizing after the Iranian Revolution in 1979 that they had no sphere of influence in Latin America, or the Western Hemisphere.
Iran made a bold move with the 1994 terrorist attack, where 21 people were killed on an airplane bombing with the targets being prominent Jewish businessmen that were connected to a terror attack in Argentina, where 84 people were killed the day before in the bombing of a Jewish center in the Argentine capital.
Tonight we pick up with Joseph Humire, foremost expert on Latin America. Joseph is Executive Director of Secure Free Society. This briefing will further develop the Iranian threat and their Sino-Russian partnership and how weaponized migration is being used to destabilize the U.S., as well as further the transnational criminal organizations’ profits for moving drugs, weapons and people across Latin America and into the United States. [...]
(5:50)
JOSEPH HUMIRE:
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 pre-positions for further conflict. And that's exactly what Venezuela is doing. I don't think they're just using this to get their sanctions lifted. Sure, that’s part of it.
YON: It’s also a cover for spies, of course.
HUMIRE: Yeah, I mean, there's all the above, right, Mike? It’s actually a very effective weapon. Where [Greenhill] actually did a great job, she did a study to say, in what instances are you vulnerable to it?
So there's two conditions you have to meet to be a targeted state. One is you’re an open society, vulnerable to public opinion — you know, you care what your people say.
YON: Open societies.
(6:35)
HUMIRE: Well, like, why mass migration wouldn’t really work against China? They don’t care what their people say. They stamp it down, smash it out. They don't have a threat mechanism. And this is why terrorism was never really a good tactic to use against China.
YON: But it works on weak countries.
HUMIRE: And it works in countries that have a democratic kind of structure in terms of looking at public opinion.
And then the second condition is, you have to have asylum laws. […]
(7:08)
A legal framework that guarantees protection for potential asylees. […]
(7:15)
If you have those two things, you're probably going to be targeted. And Dr. Greenhill did a great job understanding all that. So, to me, her work was very important because we don't need to reinvent the wheel, right? Like it's been serious academic, empirical, political science work to understand methodology.
And I feel like in the debate that we're all having with policies — I'm, like Mike, I'm fundamentally a researcher, but I'm also a policy person, I had to testify on the Hill.
So we need to take the argument and give it structure. What you guys are doing is, you're giving it data. You’re giving it specific, real information. […] But if you don't have the structure of an analytical framework, it goes past the policymakers’ heads.
(8:00)
And so I think it's there, it already exists and we just have to put it all together.
So going back to Venezuela. As we talked about in Texas, the border you guys all need to look at is the Colombian-Venezuelan border. That's the one that they've collapsed. The method that they used to collapse this border was very interesting. It was very systematic. That's equivalent to the Lukashenko Belarus-Poland border, but that was done in a very compressed amount of time.
This one, the Colombian-Venezuelan one, was done over a period of years. […]
(8:36)
I mean, it really started 2017. Venezuela was the number one migrant crisis in the world, 7.7 million people have fled that country since 2014. Depending on how you look at the figures, but it's upwards of 20% of the population. That's a huge number.
And most of that affected the South, and South America. In 2014 is when they start trickling out, 2017 is when they started to pour out, and then 2021 is where they started to shift north.
(9:12)
And between 2017 and 2021, Maduro’s main intention was Colombia, was collapsing the Colombian border.
How they did it — we're analytically trying to break this down — so we call this a sovereign border disintegration process, step by step.
So, humanitarian crisis is the big one because the main intent — and I think this is what happened to our border — is capacity. You have to diminish capacity. You have to take the targeted government's ability to deal with migration, so that they leave stateless areas along the border.
(9:50)
In the case of Colombia, I think it's six ports, all the major border crossings toward Colombia could only really handle half of that, like three. Meaning the other three that once were pretty well guarded and well-protected border crossings now became overrun by the cartels. In the case of Colombia, it's the FARC, from Colombia, and the ELN. There's a couple other smaller groups. And the Mexican cartels are there too, because the cocaine's there. It's mostly Sinaloa, but Jalisco’s there as well.
(10:20)
So you had all these illicit actors. So once the state starts to abandon — because they have to concentrate on very few ports of entry that are getting mass migration — the cartels ended up taking over those ports and those border crossings.
And once the incentive starts to change, and the illegal cross-border activity becomes voluminous, then you pretty much can't recover it. Because people respond to incentives, their livelihood starts to depend on these industries. I’m talking about cocaine, narcotics, whatever. Gold smuggling, contraband, whatever it is.
Colombia pretty much lost those border crossings and they concentrated on two or three. But then after you start to see that happen, and then you start seeing the violence. Because the cartels fight with each other over control of territory. […]
(11:15)
Now, I have yet to see the level of violence that we have over on that side. The Mexicans are doing — correct me if there may be cases that I don't know about, but in the Columbia case, it escalated to the point that they were kidnapping military officers. […]
In Colombia's case they don't have a border patrol, the military is their border patrol, the Army and the Marines. But they would kidnap them. They would take them over to Venezuela. It's like a 15 minute ride, 10 minute ride. They would extort their family, and if they don't pay up, they would kill them. And then take the dead body and drop them back off in Columbia. So that became like a routine thing.
(11:59)
It happened, like, every day. Sometimes they will lace their body in explosives and put them on the […] that […] blow up like a human IED. So I haven't seen that yet. But it's gonna come, it's gonna happen.
I mean, let me just fill in. We all look at the parts of the border that are becoming more permeous, where the CBP is pretty much no longer in control. But once that started happening — this is the key. Once that started, then the weaponization of peace starts happening.
Because the two countries that are involved start talking about, we need to have peace agreements. Our border is out of control. Crime and violence is crazy.
This was what Maduro started doing.
And the Russians started doing this. The Russians started asking for peace. They were like, we're really worried about the Colombian-Venezuelan border.
(12:39)
We really think that the Colombian government should sit down with the Venezuelan government, solve this problem, we'd be happy to arbitrate this discussion.
So they use peace as a mechanism to take away your sovereign control of your border. Because they say, in the name of peace, to get rid of these cartels, that we're going to have to basically sign agreements to where my military can operate on your side of the border and your military can operate on my side of the border, both of us arbitrated by an international body.
And that happened with Colombia.
(13:10)
YON: Mao used to call that fight-fight-talk-talk.
HUMIRE: And so that happened with Colombia, and thankfully, [then-Colombian President Iván] Duque didn't make the full mistake of actually going and sitting down with Maduro — that would have been bad.
But they did incentivize the migration, because President Duque, I don’t want to rat on him too much. But he did make the mistake of trying to accommodate migration.
And I think he didn't understand what was at play. He thought this was just like a humanitarian thing, he had a socialist government, bad policies, all the people were suffering. He played into this a little bit wrong.
(13:45)
So all that peace stuff happened. But what you start to see — and this is what we're seeing now in the Colombia-Venezuela border. I was there in April 2022; that was the last time I was there.
Russia started mobilizing its radar system. Venezuela is the largest recipient of Russian foreign military sales in the world — in the world! — upwards of $12 billion of foreign military sales to Venezuela. So they have the S-300, they have the Sukhois, they have the MANPADS. But, they had these P-18 mobile radar systems. […]
(14:28)
Most of the military armament they have is meant for air defense. Because they have this kind of narrative that they're going to get invaded. […]
VANDERSTEEL: Is that air defense related to any nuclear work that are doing in Venezuela on behalf of the Iranians?
HUMIRE: That's a good question. I don't think the nuclear work is happening in Venezuela. Partially. But the real nuclear work is happening in Bolivia. Bolivia has an active nuclear program. […]
(15:02)
They both are doing the same air defense. Bolivia and Venezuela have —
VANDERSTEEL: Buying from Russia?
HUMIRE: And [from] China and Iran. Yeah.
Venezuela has a thing — they launched this in late 2020 — called a Technical Scientific Military Commission. They launched it in November 2020. And it's Russian, Iranian, Chinese advisors.
YON: That sounds like Chinese lingo.
HUMIRE: It is. Very much. And what it was, is basically providing a military industrial complex to be able to connect Venezuela to other countries in Latin America, under a defense architecture that would allow them to pre-position military assets.
So the assets were already there. They just formalized it with this agreement, with this commission.
(15:48)
And that's what they're gonna use […]. They’re playing this really well, honestly, they’re good at war. They know what they’re doing. They're not militarily strong, but they just know how to play the game. […]
(16:11)
So the mobile radars were a problem because it would suck up all the communications, basically. The Colombians just had no chance. Every time they tried to get on […], or tried to get on any kind of thing, it all got sucked up.
The Iranians would send the drones, they were reconnaissance drones. They were the Mohajer 2s originally, then they evolved to Mohajer 6 —
YON: They sent their drones to Venezuela?
(16:32)
Yeah, this is interesting. Before they ever had this thing with Russia — because they also have their drones with Russia — they built an endogenous drone program in Venezuela. So they trained the Venezuelans on how to design these drones, how to manufacture them.
And it took Venezuela a long time to figure this out. And they started that in 2007. And they just, in 2017, started to really get going on actually having a real drone program.
Venezuela now has a drone battalion, where they have Chinese, Russian, and Iranian drones.
The Orlan-10s, which are the Russian ones — Iran honestly has better drones than Russia and China. China has good drones for reconnaissance, but they don't really use PGMs. Iran does. […]
(17:15)
Precision-guided munitions, missiles.
So, think about that. Venezuela is the first country in Latin America, the first military in Latin America, to have an armed drone program. Not Mexico, not Brazil. Not these big countries with bigger militaries. Venezuela is the first country in Latin America to have drones with missiles.
And it’s courtesy of Iran. Iran built that whole thing up.
They haven't used those missiles yet, but what the drones were doing was doing low level overflights, and we identified this gap. I think we have it on our border, too. What's considered airspace?
Usually, I think it's seven, I think 700 feet and above. And so under 700 feet, what is that? You know?
(18:00)
And so they would do this low-level like 500, 600-foot overflights, they would violate your airspace, and then — you know, they’re military drones.
And so you would say, they violate my airspace, they say no, we didn’t. And then you get this food fight.
Nonetheless, they collected all that imagery. They're doing topographic mapping.
So the Russians were sucking up the comms, the Iranians were doing topographic mapping. And the Chinese have one of their most important deep space stations in Venezuela. The big one [Espacio Lejano] is in Argentina, I heard about it, the New York Times, everyone’s reported on it. It’s in Neuquén.
(18:36)
Now China has three deep space stations, two in mainland, and one in Argentina. […] The interesting thing about that is, China says it’s to explore the other side of the moon. Right? Deep space exploration.
YON: The lee of the moon, they say.
(19:07)
HUMIRE: Yeah, but three things. One, it's managed by a company called CLTC. Chinese Launched Tracking. They're directly a subsidiary of the strategic support force which is PLA. They’re like a military company.
YON: People’s Liberation Army.
HUMIRE: Yeah, it’s the Chinese military. So like, okay, you have your military, doing aeronautics, like, like astronaut stuff. Whatever.
Second — and I'm not the best on, you know, understanding the physics of this — but the telemetry that they use on these satellite stations far exceeds the capacity that you would need to do space exploration. Because to do satellite tracking, you have to be able to precisely identify the satellite positioning. And to do precise satellite positioning, your telemetry has to be super advanced.
(20:08)
You don't need that for space exploration, you just have to have a general sense of where the satellites are, so you don’t crash them. You avoid, you maneuver. But if you need precise targeting, it’s to take them down, it is to shoot them down. […]
So this has a lot to do with hypersonics. […]
Because if they need to start to develop the ability to send hypersonic weapons across the world, they're going to need a guidance and control system. And that’s what this base is.
The second thing, they’re pretty much preparing to take — space warfare — take down our satellites. They're mapping the orbits and they can shoot down our satellites. We can shoot theirs down, too. But they didn't have that capability before.
And they're not going to shoot down our satellites over there. They're going to be shooting down NORAD over here.
(21:05)
If you actually watch … the Neuquén station in Argentina, the Venezuelan station in Guárico … and the Capital Region with Washington DC is a straight line. How they position them.
The other satellite tracking station is in Venezuela. They have eleven in South America. China's largest space infrastructure in the world is in Latin America.
YON: Where is it at, in Central America?
HUMIRE: They don't have any yet. They don't have anything north of Venezuela. Yet. But the one in Venezuela — the one in Argentina is the big one. But the one in Venezuela was the original one. And it is on a military base. It's on the Guárico military base inside Venezuela. So that tracking station in Venezuela is what was guiding the drones, the telecoms and the radar to Russia. […]
(22:05)
The Chinese tracking station in Venezuela was providing all the command and control for the radars, the drones and the cyber elements.
VENEZUELA: For Russia?
HUMIRE: For Venezuela, in Venezuela, yeah. But these are Russian weapons. These are Iranian weapons.
I had these debates with the defense community, particularly with SOUTHCOM, they didn’t look at the level of cooperation among these actors that I'm talking about. This is 2018, 2017.
One thing that the Trump administration was trying to understand was, is there wiggle room with China and Russia? Like, can we wedge that relationship? I would love to, just help me find out how to do that. Because in Venezuela, you're not gonna wiggle.
They're already joint capacity, capability. They're synchronizing this stuff. […]
(23:00)
Even President Guaido made this huge mistake. He wrote an open op-ed to China saying if you help me get rid of Maduro, I'll pay back your loans. Stupidest thing ever.
Venezuela is the largest recipient of Chinese credits and loans in the world, even more than Djibouti, $60 billion total. So it's a lot of money. And Venezuela has no way to pay it back. So they've been servicing it through oil they were sending over to China.
That oil stopped a few years ago, when the sanctions started.
But China plays a diplomatic card. They're like, oh, you know, this is all business, blah, blah. And it confused a lot of the analysts because many of the analysts thought that China was really interested in the money.
(23:55)
I said, look, guys, when everybody else was pulling their money out of Venezuela, because it was hyperinflation, it's just an economic disaster. It’s not like the Chinese were the only idiots that were like, we're gonna double down and put more money in.
No. They bought a country.
And this wasn't an economic investment. This was a geopolitical investment, as a platform for further operations.
They did service some of that debt. No one really knows where it's at, now. Some people say $20 billion, some say, $30 billion, somewhere around there is what they owe. But it's indifferent because China did leverage that loan to be able to get concessions. They got concessions. The whole exclusive economic zone, which is the Trade Zone — those are all Chinese concessions.
(24:40)
VANDERSTEEL: Put that in context with how much money we've invested in Ukraine? They bought a country that has an influence on what's happening to us —
HUMIRE: How much did we invest in Ukraine?
VANDERSTEEL: Over 100 billion. And they have a country that has now leverage into us and is helping destroy America.
HUMIRE: Yeah. […]
(28:20)
That’s a lot of money we’ve given Ukraine. There's a difference between servicing a country through aid and investment — which, I’m not sure how you nomenclature, the whole Ukraine stuff.
But then the other one is servicing through credit and loans, because those are, they have interest that compounds. And they also have service agreements. And China prefers that method. They use investment and trade as well, but they prefer that method. Because it provides them economic leverage.
So for example — the space station in Argentina. So that thing was built — roughly around 2010, 2011.
The station was built, and ran very quietly. No one really knew what was going on. Around 2013 they made a bill to propose to get it ratified through Congress. To make it permanent.
(29:16)
To reinforce an executive action by the then president of Argentina, Cristina Kirchner — who's a total radical leftist socialist president. […]
But by ratifying it through Congress, it opened up a debate … they were having a lot of back and forth.
And the government changes hands in Argentina in 2015. Cristina Kirchner goes out, Mauricio Macri comes in. He's more US friendly, more pro-business. I wouldn't say he's anti-China because he did a lot of business with China. China's largest trade partner for Argentina.
(29:56)
But he …wanted to know about the space agency. What was going on with this?
You know, Argentina has no control over this. If Argentina wants to visit the station, you need to make an appointment. It's like you have a second embassy — no sovereign control — on your territory.
And it potentially could be doing military activity. So he says, listen, we have good business relations with China. Let's try to create like a Transparency Board. That kind of helps. At least the equipment, to look at the equipment, so we can just have an understanding of what's getting in and out of this facility.
(30:30)
So he sends his foreign minister to China to negotiate that. And China is very diplomatic, says yes, we'd love to work with you [to] add more transparency to this. […]
Then right as she was leaving they say, but check the contract, please check the contract. And when they looked at the contract of the station, they realized this was a clause that was in all the contracts that they had on infrastructure, but most importantly on their credits and loans, which is called the cross default clause.
Which means that if you try to renegotiate one project, you have to renegotiate everything. It could apply to everything. […] Your loan payments could be accelerated, your interest rates could be hiked. They could do a reassessment of your economic positioning and valuate the infrastructure at a different rate.
YON: There's gonna be no agreement.
(31:28)
HUMIRE: Basically, they could do a whole new agreement on worse terms than when you signed the original one. That's why they prefer the system of credits and loans because it gives them that leverage on loan payments, on interest rates. […]
They had a really important project for Argentina which was called the Belgrano Railway, which would have cut their domestic shipping by like, two days. So they were like, we can't lose this … so they're stuck with that station.
They have elections in Argentina next week, actually. If Javier Milei wins — he’s a free-market, right-of-center president, which we're all pushing for him to win, we hope he wins. If he wins, this is not gonna be an easy fix for him. He’s gonna have to figure out how to get through this.
(32:10)
But SOUTHCOM took a lot of interest and wanted to start looking at the space station. […]
So, where's Columbia and Venezuela now? All this preparatory work basically destroyed Columbia. And then they inserted a radical Marxist president, Gustavo Petro. And now Gustavo Petro and Nicolas Maduro are talking about creating binational and cross-border peace commissions.
So they're basically going to move Venezuelan military to Colombia, with — what I was telling you about — move Colombian military into Venezuela.
(32:42)
Have some element of either the — I think they're talking about UNASUR being the international body to arbitrate those peace commissions. And then their border’s gone. The border’s gone, and Maduro is doing this.
Chavez actually launched this. If you go back to the 17th century, that was all one country. It was called Greater Colombia. So a lot of this revisionist history that China and Iran and Russia are doing is redrawing Imperial maps.
YON: They want to take Panama back, under that kind of —
HUMIRE: Yeah. Greater Colombia — what is today Panama, Ecuador, Colombia, Guyana and one-fifth of Brazil. So that's what they're looking at. They're looking at taking that territory back.
But in the past, it would have been armies — that’s what Bolivar did. But now it's organized crime. It's migrations —
YON: Once they build the big military in Venezuela, and they dissolve that border, that's now the Colombian army as well.
(33:48)
HUMIRE: Yeah, and then Colombia becomes the next element of migration.
YON: And then they take Panama —
HUMIRE: And then they take Panama. And then they take out Ecuador. They're already working on Ecuador and Panama. That’s where you see destabilization in both.
VANDERSTEEL: How does this fit into? If you look at the Declaration of North America that Joe Biden signed with Trudeau and Obrador, homogenized the United States, Canada and Mexico into one region, right? The “New World Order” has the globe chopped up by regions?
HUMIRE: Yeah.
VANDERSTEEL: You've got the North America region, and then this would be the South America region. […] Is this all part of that whole “New World Order” UN design?
(34:25)
HUMIRE: So here's my take on that. I view the UN and the WTO and even the World Economic Forum — I view them as all useful idiots. You know, I think some of them are corrupt. Other ones are misguided. Other ones are overly ambitious.
But fundamentally, when we’re talking about war, we're talking about empires. We're talking China, Russia and Iran. We're not talking about amateurs.
You know, the UN is an amateur. They have only existed 50 years. The PRC has existed longer, in China, Imperial China, goes back even longer. […]
I'm going more into world history, and a lot of these —
YON: Actual ocean currents, not little waves.
HUMIRE: Yeah. And a lot of these mechanisms. Some, honestly, are just misguided. They just don't know what they're doing. They think they know what they're doing. They read the wrong books, or whatever. Some of them are — a lot of them — are just corrupt, you know, and they just, you know, pay to play and then take their take.
I don't know how much strategy goes into what they do. Even Soros, I don't look at Soros as this mastermind. I look at Soros just like a corrupt —
VANDERSTEEL: He’s a useful idiot.
(35:30)
HUMIRE: Yeah. He has a lot of money. He's a rich guy that has a lot of money that can be useful for these other governments that polarize. To infiltrate, to corrupt — and he's done it. And he may think — I can't get into the mind of him. But let's say he gets in, and he thinks he's actually doing a good thing, you know?
But okay, sure, you know your motive. But they're gonna see the path to hell is paved with good intentions.
VOICE 1: So who’s holding the cards, in your opinion?
HUMIRE: China. And Russia and Iran. And actually, if I want to put it in order of battle, China, Iran, Russia.
(35:57)
That Sino-Iranian relationship, don't sleep on that. That is as serious — that’s the Silk Road! The original Silk Road was, you know, Sino-Iranian.
VOICE 1: So you don’t think the UN is influencing China, it’s the other way around?
HUMIRE: Oh, no, the UN has been corrupted, by Iran. If you go to the building, I mean, as soon as you walk into the UN headquarters, look at the portraits of all the — first look in at the positioning of the Iranian flag. It's right in the center. Then once you walk in, and you go to the portraits of all the former UN presidents, look at the fine print — “Donated by the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
(36:28)
That's why the biggest issue that the UN has been doing is Palestinian. […]
It was crazy! Israel has no clout inside the UN. And even forget Ukraine, so that was like a side conflict for them.
We’re living, right now, the moment that UN is going to be the most useful idiot for Iran, because they're going to legitimize the whole Hamas, that whole thing.
And the thing is, with multilaterals is [during the Trump administration] we had this discussion a lot, which is multilaterals had mission creep, they became ends [in] themselves.
Their mission wasn't what they're supposed to do. The mission was to BE them, you know, and be a member of them, or to have them involved. In Europe. And so we lost that whole mission. […]
(37:20)
And I don't want to [make] a blanket statement and maybe some multilaterals are good, that can work. I mean, I think it's still worth preserving NATO. But almost all of them have fundamental — like the burden-sharing. The free rider problem is is a real problem in any multilateral, because there's always going to be countries that are not going to do what they need to do, and they're gonna get the benefits of what other countries are already doing. That's just teamwork, right? […]
(37:50)
But to your question, I focus, to not lose track on what I believe would end up becoming the next World War. And the UN is not going to be — we're not going to fight the UN in a world war. There'll be an arbitrator, they'll probably be on the side of China, in that war, and they'll probably be more of an obstacle.
And I think you can argue — this is more into policy — but you can argue whether the United States should withdraw from the UN. If it even serves US national interests.
I think Israel should probably have that conversation. […]
(38:34)
I can talk a little bit more about what Venezuela is, because that's important as well. But I wanted you guys to understand that they're the ones that are like — when we, if we come back into power in 2025 — hopefully — we're gonna have to solve that problem.
We have to shut the border down. I mean, the numbers are crazy. We're gonna have to do the Third Country Agreements […] But fundamentally, we're not going to solve this until we solve Venezuela, because they're driving the bus.
But they're a platform. You know, Maduro is not like a kingpin, he’s just a proxy. They're a proxy platform for great powers. Nicaragua, Cuba, Bolivia, they're all in on that game.
(39:20)
But Venezuela has the muscle because they've been doing this for a long time, and they were the original one. Chavez. Venezuela was like an anomaly. […]
When 2017 happened, and the Trump administration had a particular interest in understanding Venezuela, we went back to the drawing board. Because we had been doing work 15 years on Latin America, did a lot of work on Venezuela. I was a senior researcher that's, you know, one of the most knowledgeable people about Venezuela.
We did a lot of tactical work, understanding the networks — where their money laundering moves, how their cocaine moves, you know, where they get the weapons from?
I wanted to understand — why? What are they trying to accomplish here? So you kind of went back and changed the questions.
(40:06)
Here's what we learned. It’s very interesting, actually.
I once had to tell this to a Latin American president, and I had to do it in 10 minutes. Do it fast. And I wanted to impress to him how different Venezuela is, and how serious it is and how complex it is.
So I said, Let me tell you a story. Any Latin American president hears this story, they’re going to be like, “I know.”
It's a story of a lieutenant colonel. That captured his country by force in the 90s. And failed, then got democratically elected, nationalized his natural resources, particularly petroleum. And then sparked a revolution first domestically, then regionally. All the while accusing his opponents of [being] imperialists and capitalists and whatever. Dies after 14 years of natural causes, leaving a legacy of crime, corruption and conflict.
So I tell that story, they’re like, Joseph, I know Hugo Chavez’ story.
(41:00)
I'm not talking about Chavez. I’m talking about Lieutenant Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser. So why is Nasser’s story — from Egypt — Identical to Chavez, his story?
Why are there more Venezuelans in Syria today than in Brazil? There's 350,000 Venezuelans that live in Syria. Right now. And 280,000 live in Brazil, right next door. So why is that? […]
(41:38)
HUMIRE: There's a part of Syria, in the Southwest, which is actually where Hezbollah operates with the Russians, called As-Suwayda.
It's called Little Venezuela. That's how they know it, the locals. They speak Spanish and Arabic. They eat arepas and halal. They’re dual nationals, a lot of them. The point to that is —
YON: So they're speaking Spanish over there?
HUMIRE: Yeah.
VOICE 1: How long has that been going on for?
HUMIRE: A hundred years. It wasn't that big, 100 years ago, you know, how long did they get that big? Since Chavez.
YON: When did they start?
(42:16)
HUMIRE: The mass migration from the Middle East to Venezuela, and to Latin America as a whole, happened about 150 years ago. Follow the Ottomans. The Ottoman Empire collapses, they start persecuting Maronite Christians, all the Maronites flee. A lot of them flee over to South America. Mostly to Argentina, Colombia and Venezuela.
Like every mass migration — like we are learning now — ratlines follow. There were ratlines that came in though that — including Ottomans — that followed the refugees.
The next phase of migration was the Armenian genocide. Christians, again, flee, they move.
Lebanese civil war. Syrian dictatorship. Over time, they started coming, and then over time some of them started coming back.
(43:00)
YON: So those were bouncebacks? They came from that region, like Syria, they stayed down in South America for however many generations, and then bounced back.
HUMIRE: Bounced back. But when they started to grow to unprecedented numbers was during Hugo Chavez’ term.
They started incentivizing them to go back to Syria, and they built a population. […]
At this point, in Veneuzela, you could argue that most Venezuelans have ten percent Arab blood. I don’t know, maybe less. Next to Spanish and Italy, Arab is the next largest migration to South America. […] And that actually extended into Colombia, Colombia was another choice destination.
[44:12]
But what I'm trying to say is … Venezuela was built by Syria. That wasn't just socialism, that wasn't just Cuba. That's a conflict that was developed by Syrians. It actually — this is the very irony of it. The whole thing was created by Syrian refugees. Like in the 1960s. So, Cuba, after it conquered the island, it immediately went to grab Venezuela —
YON: What’s the best book on this?
HUMIRE: There is none. There is none. […]
We did this work! Like literally we broke our brains on this. You know, I can show you — I have a bunch of stuff to show you. We went to Jordan. Okay, let me tell you this story. This one story that I will tell you, we figured this out. Venezuelans don't know this. They don't know this part of their history.
Chavez, like every dictator, he did revisionist history. He erased a lot of what happened in the country. He tried to make them believe that Simon Bolivar was the founder of Venezuela. He's not! It's José Antonio Paéz.
(45:24)
Simon Bolivar, to me […] he used to be part of the problem.
Because if you do history and you understand what Simon Bolivar represented, he represented a non-American sphere of influence. He was aligned with Napoleon.
And many people don't know this, but Napoleon Bonaparte tried to take Florida. The Spanish helped us out with that.
So maybe I'll say this. What impressed me about these dictators is that they did study history. So they know, from America's point of view, how to conquer America.
Capture the port of New Orleans. Capture Brownsville, Texas. You know? Collapse the Gulf. They have a real military strategy.
YON: They’re working on those two.
HUMIRE: Yeah, no, I know. That's what I'm saying. I'm looking at it. […] Nobody's seeing it, right?
(46:15)
Like we're seeing, like, this is just some kind of like, you know, random thing that's happening, but it's very systematic. It's very, very calculated.
It's, specifically positioning in, in places that — if you go into history — that would have took out the United States, had we not won the Battle of New Orleans.
If we didn't win the battle of New Orleans, the United States does not exist the way it does. It would have been half of what we exist today, right? The Spanish Main that goes down from the top of Florida — Florida was part of Spain.
So, I feel like these empires have studied imperial history. And have been just waiting their turn, you know, and feel like the 20th century was a mistake, right?
Like that just got out of hand because of world wars, and these Nazis and everything. Now, we paid the price, and we all lost our power, but we're going to come back.
(47:03)
But to the 60s. Cuba tries to conquer Venezuela. Everyone knows oil is in Venezuela. We’ve got to conquer Venezuela, you get all the oil — your revolution’s going to live forever.
So they go for it. They started funding guerrilla insurgents along the border. And they start working with the FARC. The FARC already exists by this point.
YON: At the border with Colombia.
HUMIRE: With Colombia, yeah.
So Cuba conquers the island, ‘58, by 1962 they're already completely on top, the Cuban missile crisis happens.
And then they start […] just focusing on Venezuela throughout the 60s, early 1960s. They fail.
(47:47)
By 1964, the Venezuelan military had apprehended and captured incarcerated all of the leadership of the Communist Party of Venezuela. They had most of them in San Carlos Prison in Venezuela.
(48:07)
A couple of reasons why. Venezuela is a big country, it is a geographically diverse country. It’s multi-terrain. Mountains, coast, Caribbean jungle. Much of the Andes.
Two, its military was actually pretty decent. They weren't like a weak military. So like Cuba's guerrilla warfare tactics that they used to capture Cuba didn't work in Venezuela. So they got smashed.
In 1967 somebody came into the San Carlos prison and broke the communists out of prison. Literally dug a tunnel and broke them out.
So this individual in Venezuelan history is known as Simón el árabe. Simón Elárabe. We had to track down who —
YON: Simon the Arab?
HUMIRE: Yeah. So we tracked him down. […] We went to Jordanian migration records and […] Jordanian genealogy records, we found him. […]
(49:12)
Simon was actually his last name. And he was an operative. He was trained in Russia. He was a linguist but then trained as an intelligence operative. He was the intelligence operative of the Baathists. He was working for […].
And so he infiltrates presenting he's a refugee —
YON: The Baathists in Syria?
HUMIRE: The Baathists in Syria, right. […]
So this is the thing that really got me. This whole thing started from refugees infiltrating because this one guy infiltrates. Says he’s a refugee. And Venezuela was really very naive. They opened their country to the world.
First because of oil, and then because of migration, they're just like, come, we’ll help you. […]
(49:56)
So this guy comes in, he breaks them out of prison, and […] completely changed the doctrine. He brings in these other Syrians and they say, Listen, guys, that guerilla warfare stuff the Cubans are doing, that ain't gonna work.
It didn't work in Africa, Angola, didn’t work in Bolivia. See, don't use guerrilla warfare — use insurgency. Don't attack the military, infiltrate the military.
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