Iranians at the Gate (Part 3)

Joseph M. Humire on Hezbollah in Latin America

Intel Briefing: Iranians at the Gate (Part 3)

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 3

(4:26)

VANDERSTEEL: The Iranian Islamic base theocracy, coupled with the military technology from China and Russia, has made Venezuela the proxy platform for the Chinese, Iranian and Russian invasion into the Western Hemisphere. 

Going back 150 years and the fall of the Ottoman Empire, migration from the Middle East […] has generated a non-American sphere of influence, with state sponsors of terror that know how to conquer America through strategic geographic conquests. 

Their land grabs and economic investments are setting their sights on American ports — like New Orleans and Brownsville, Texas — which clearly go hand-in-hand with the developing I-69 corridor that runs through Colony Ridge, a 60-square-mile development in Liberty County, Texas that is home to tens of thousands of illegal aliens and will grow to house up to 250,000.

Team Operation Burning Edge has been on the ground in Central America […].

Tonight we continue with the intelligence briefing given in Guatemala City by the foremost expert on Latin America, defining who the key stakeholders are and why this is a battle between empires dating back thousands of years. 

Join us as Joseph Humire, the Executive Director of Secure Free Society, continues his analysis on the trans-regional threats in the Western Hemisphere.

(7:23)

HUMIRE: So this is the thing that really got me. This whole thing started from refugees infiltrating because this one guy [Simón el árabe] 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. […]

So this guy comes in, he breaks [the leaders of the Communist Party of Venezuela] out of prison, and […] completely changed the doctrine. He brings in these other Syrians and they say: Listen, guys, that guerrilla 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. That’s what we did in Egypt, that’s what we did in Syria.

It’s doctrinally different.

(8:12)

YON: Subversion.

HUMIRE: Subversion. It’s much more subversive. That’s where you get Lieutenant Colonel Hugo Chávez. Because Chávez was a product of those meetings. It was a product to actually create a person that will go into the military, rise through the ranks and create a network. It's called the MCB — the Bolivarian Continental Movement 200, was what the original movement was called. And that's who tried to do the failed coup in ‘92 in Venezuela. 

But my point is, is to say that this whole story on Venezuela is of Arab origin.

And nobody, nobody knew that. Other than the bad guys, but none of the governments knew it. Our agencies didn't know it. We missed it. 

So that's why the pressure didn't work. Because we didn't know what we were pressuring, you know? We didn't know the right targets. 

So now where we're at […]. Every country that we're studying since then, we're seeing a very similar pattern. Panama — the Arab network controls Panama. Look at their Ministry of Communications, look at their migration minister, look at their banking, look at their media.

(9:23)

It’s all Lebanese, or some Syrian or other. Colombia, same thing. Ecuador, same thing. Honduras, same thing. 

Mexico is not as — but Mexico’s very prominent. So from […] this out, we look at clandestine networks. The [clandestine network] that we know about, very well, because of the Cold War, is the communist clandestine network.

That’s controlled by Cuba and managed by Russia, which the Chinese have tapped into. We got that one, we’ve been studying that since the Cold War.

(9:54)

The other clandestine network is the power clandestine network. It’s not communist. They’re actually capitalists. They love money. Import-export, trade, investment, tourism — and that’s the one that is destabilizing a lot of these countries. […]

We’ve been studying the power network in each one of these countries. And the families. And who they’re tied to. Outside of Venezuela we did Colombia — […]

(10:44)

They’re mostly Lebanese, Syrian, Palestinian, Turkish. And Iraqi. Those are the main — some Qatari, but not much.

But really there are three. Palestinians, Syrians, Iranis. […] So the largest Palestinian populations are in Chile and Honduras. The largest Lebanese populations are in Brazil. And Mexico. […]

YON: Where are they at, in Chile?

HUMIRE: Mostly Valparaíso, and a little farther south. 

(11:41)

They’re also in Santiago, obviously. Well the new government, Boric, he was brought up by the Palestinian network. Their largest soccer team is Palestinian.

YON: In Chile?

HUMIRE: Yeah yeah yeah. Here’s the thing, they’re mostly Christian. They’re not Muslim —

YON: I was going to ask you about the Lebanese, are they mostly Christians?

HUMIRE: Percentage-wise, ninety precent Christian. Ten percent Muslim. Less in some countries. And out of those ten percent Muslim, mostly Sunni, very small Shia.

It doesn’t matter. Because — […] 

(12:24)

Whether they’re Christian, Muslim — doesn’t matter. They’re power players because they move money.

And they — this is why I pushed so hard to get Hezbollah designated as a terror group in these countries. Because Hezbollah operates all these networks, Hamas does the Palestinians. 

But if you don’t say Hezbollah is a terrorist group, then — like, a Hezbollah facilitator doesn’t come to a meeting and say, hello, I’m from Hezbollah. You know? […]

No, they’re very good salespeople. But Hezbollah has penetrated these communities, these Lebanese communities, has corrupted them, like a mafia. […]

(13:20)

They corrupted them, and then they figured out which are the right families to coerce.

So, I’ll give you a great example. In the Tri-Border area near Paraguay, the Hijazi family. The Hijazi is not Hezbollah, but Hijazi owns Ciudad del Este, that Tri-Border area city. 

[Kassem Mohamad] Hijazi got arrested, he’s in jail now, for money laundering for Hezbollah. That’s a typical case of how Hezbollah is operating. Hezbollah is very adept at this. My point is just to say that there are these networks.

(14:00)

For Panama, really, like for the Darién stuff, start to look at that. Because the Tren — I don’t know if you guys ran into this, you guys ran into a bunch of Venezuelans. […]

There is a transnational criminal organization called the Tren de Aragua. […] The one that the Venezuelans get pushed through, for smuggling, is called the train for Aragua. That, to me, is a Hezbollah offshoot.

YON: A lot of those have tats on their face, right?

(14:35)

HUMIRE: They’ve got tats all over. But the Tren de Aragua, nobody believes their origin story. 

Aragua is a state in the Caribbean coast of Venezuela. There was a prison in […], there was a prison-based gang. They’re called “pranes,” these prison gangs. And then the “pranes” morphed into this organization called the Tren de Aragua. […]

(15:12)

It was basically a street gang, like an MS-13, that was controlling the neighborhoods, poor neighborhoods, in Venezuela. When the migration pushes out — Colombia, Peru, Chile — the Tren de Aragua follows.

All these Venezuelan ghettoes that have been created in Chile, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia, the main mafia that controls them is the Tren de Aragua. They extort them, they pressure them, they smuggle them if they need to move, they traffic them, sex trafficking, a lot of that stuff.

So they’re specialists at this. They don’t even get involved in drugs, that much. They let the other groups do that.

(15:52)

So they’re the main group that started pushing the migrants in Colombia, that already existed, in Venezuela, over to Necoclí, over to — and they operated in this area of Chocó. Did you guys go to Chocó?

YON: No.

HUMIRE: Chocó is the hub of migration for Colombia. And Chocó is where the Tren de Aragua came in. Chocó is very interesting area. It’s the most Afro/indigenous area of Colombia. So most of the Colombians there are black.

It’s a large agricultural producer. It’s also near the water, so it’s an export hub. And it’s also poor.

The mayor of [Acandí,] Chocó, is on record saying we’re going to help push the migrants out.

(16:38)

That is the area that the Venezuelans and elements of the Colombians are using, systematically, to collapse the gap. 

Because the network’s there in Chocó. […] The Venezuelan government, and this cartel that I’ve been describing for you, the Tren de Aragua, they are the two that are in Chocó.

And then local political actors in Chocó are — Mary O’Grady of the Wall Street Journal did a column on this about three weeks ago. […]

(17:25)

VOICE 1: I would imagine that Iran would be the one that’s on top of all those Arab […] that you mentioned. 

HUMIRE: It is.

VOICE 1: So, what kind of influence are those guys wielding? You mentioned media, what in particular?

HUMIRE: The Arab families?

VOICE 1: Yeah, how exactly has that quote-unquote “power network” infiltrated these different countries, specifically?

(17:45)

HUMIRE: Industries. Let me backtrack.

Those networks didn’t systematically infiltrate anything. They’re just prominent families of Arab origin that gained influence in very key industries. Like banking, like telecoms. Carlos Slim, he’s Arab. He’s also the largest telecomm provider of Mexico. 

Shakira. She’s Arab.

So, Shakira’s not part of a plan, but she’s influential. And if you can get into her network, you know?

VOICE 1: Got it.

(18:21)

HUMIRE: The families existed, because they’ve been involved in this migration that’s happened for a hundred years. What Hezbollah in Iran did was study that network. 

Because they understand that Arab world. So all these families have relatives on the other side of the world, in the Middle East. Hezbollah knows — I’ll go back to the Hijazi family.

The Hijazi were not always a Hezbollah facilitator. They were just a family that grew a big business. Textiles, appliances. […]

They just became really successful businessmen that had a tremendous amount of influence because they grew their businesses.

YON: Lebanese?

(19:08)

HUMIRE: Lebanese. Hezbollah rose in 1982. When Hezbollah starts to come into the Tri-Border area, they go like, Hijazi family? Who are the Hijazis in Lebanon? They talk to the Hijazi’s in Lebanon, they co-opt that family.

(19:28)

In Panama, is the Wakeds. The Wakeds won the La Estrella [de Panama] newspaper. 

The United States sanctioned the Wakeds. We got a lot of pushback. 

YON: That’s a Lebanese family?

HUMIRE: Lebanese family. They were laundering money for Hezbollah. Every president, every Panamanian president, has yelled at the United States for that. […] Because they’re major political donors too.

My team in Panama did — it’s more recent, we just started working on the Panama one this year actually. They just gave me a presentation three months ago.

(20:10)

They explained to me how this network works, inside the industries in Panama. It was super impressive. I was like, they control the country. You know?

YON: The Lebanese?

HUMIRE: The Lebanese, yeah.

VOICE 1: And this all goes back to that mass migration you talked about, that started 150 years ago?

HUMIRE: Yeah. So obviously the Spanish migrated ever since the colonial period, they had the Italians that migrated […] you have some Germans that migrated, some British in Argentina.

You have other countries. But the one that really — I don’t know why it never got attention — was the Arab one. That’s major! That’s, like, millions of people. Have come.

(20:48)

That’s the one that’s most relevant for refugee resettlement. They actually migrated before there was actually a concept of “refugees,” you know? They were fleeing persecution.

I would say, a strategy to combat it — most of those communities aren’t bad, they are good communities. We need to compete in those communities. We need to go to those Lebanese communities in Panama and start to play. And start buying up those families ourselves.

YON: They’re just business people. 

HUMIRE: That’s what I’m saying. They don’t want to work with Hezbollah, but they don’t want to be killed by Hezbollah.

(21:34)

They also see great opportunities to launder money, because no body’s giving them any flak for it. Corruption is endemic. 

We just never played in those spaces. We didn’t see it, or — I don’t know.

We’ve designed a strategy to be able to play in those spaces.

We did it with the communist networks. The communists are mostly in academia, in Latin America. Every university has a communist club. Still, to this day. That’s like with the Confucius Institutes, they built off of that platform, off the communist network.

YON: Did the Confucius Institutes emulate that? Or they built off of it? How —

HUMIRE: They built off of the communist network in Latin America. […] 

(22:25)

Because Latin America’s universities are socialist, for the most part. We complain about U.S. universities being socialist? [That’s] nothing compared to those — in Colombia, for instance, there are two universities that the police don’t go into. Because they will get kidnapped. Public universities.

VOICE 1: No way!

HUMIRE: Yeah, it’s crazy! One of them really did kidnap, they kidnapped these three police officers once, held them hostage inside — and it’s the national university! 

The one in Mexico is UNAM. UNAM, it’s not that bad, UNAM is more civilized. […]

VOICE 1: Who, since they don’t have police there, who —

HUMIRE: FARC, ELN. That’s their recruiting ground, they recruit there.

(23:13)

The police are all around it. But they don’t want problems. So they’re like, we know what they’re doing, as long as they don’t spill out to the streets, you’ve got your little safe space.

It’s like a safe zone, safe city, something like that. But it’s the biggest university, Universidad Nationale [de Colombia]. I never knew why they don’t shut it down.

I went in once — ill advised, by the Colombian police. It wasn’t dangerous, but it was like, spotters everywhere, they were surveilling everything that comes in.

(23:50)

They have murals of all the FARC and ELN leaders, and I saw murals of Putin and Soleimani. Inside those universities. They’ve gotten real propagandized with that stuff.

They have an NGO in Colombia called […] Soleimani. The Iranians funded a, they have, they’re using Soleimani as a figure, as like an Iranian Che Guevara in Latin America. […]

(37:45)

The reason we were down [in Matamoros, Mexico], there was a very high-value terrorist that passed through a shelter. From Venezuela. Into Brownsville. One of these Simón el árabe types, went into Brownsville. So we believe he set up a network in both countries. In Matamoros and in Brownsville. […]

(40:25)

The way he was running the migrant shelter was very irregular. He was allowing too much transit. Migrant shelters — real ones — are designed for care. His was designed for transit. Like a Metro stop. […]

When I was there … a year ago, there weren’t Venezuelans that were coming through here. It was mostly Caribbean, Haitians, Central Americans. And now there’s Venezuelans coming through. A lot. 

You remember in Brownsville, those migrants that were sitting on a curb, that this car ran over? […]

(41:09)

It’s the only time Maduro commented on Venezuelan migrants. He put a communique out. He basically said, we’re really worried about the xenophobic nature of the United States, how they’re treating Venezuelan migrants.

All b.s. Because there have been many Venezuelan migrants that have been killed, harassed, all throughout the Americas. […]

(43:08)

But the real thing is, why did Maduro write this? Because it’s been happening all over, there’s all kinds of Venezuelans who have gotten — […]

To me the question really wasn’t the migrants. It’s what does he want with Brownsville? Because Maduro wanted to illuminate Brownsville, you know? That’s why he wrote about it.

We had already been already following this network that had already established itself in Matamoros, and potentially in Brownsville.

And I was trying to figure out why, why, that’s a very specific area that they’re focused on.

VOICE 1: “On the border, by the sea” is [Brownsville’s] motto. Ship it in, ship it out. They actually dug a 30-mile trench into Brownsville from the Gulf, so they actually have shipping  […] —

(43:48)

HUMIRE: That’s a big part of what I was thinking. But actually Mike, Michael you put me onto something else — getting a little it further out, I actually think it might have a lot to do with road, rail and ports. Like basically figuring out access points that they can pre-position organized crime, so they can start controlling the territory around key choke points for ports, rail and road. And I think —

(44:15)

YON: Dissolve the borders.

HUMIRE: I think, I think Brownsville is road, right? It’s a highway corridor?

YON: I-69 corridor, it goes right by that Colonia, at Liberty County, that we’ve been flying over.

HUMIRE: This is exactly what they did in Colombia. They looked at — what are the critical infrastructure? Where do they have their major oil refineries? And then all the gangs and cartels —

YON: That Colonia there […] —

(44:42)

HUMIRE: Because three to four years ago, there were no Venezuelans crossing into Brownsville. They were all going to Eagle Pass, or further up to RGV.  They just started recently. Last year, really. Going max numbers — […]

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