IRAN’S REVOLUTIONARY Guards organisation has increased its presence across Latin America, particularly in Venezuela, according to a Pentagon assessment released this week.
The report to the US Congress says the movement’s Quds Force maintains operational capabilities across the world and is well-established in the Middle East and North Africa, but “recent years have witnessed an increased presence in Latin America, particularly Venezuela”.
The Quds Force is responsible for Revolutionary Guards activity outside of Iran, including cultivating and training other radical Islamic groups.
The report warned: “If US involvement in conflicts in these regions deepens, contact with the IRGC-QF (Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corp-Quds Force), directly or through extremist groups it supports, will be more frequent and consequential.” The US is providing financing, equipment and training to Colombia’s government in its civil war with Marxist guerrillas.
Venezuela’s left-wing president Hugo Chávez is opposed to the US presence in neighbouring Colombia, and maintains a close relationship with Iran. The two states have agreed to co-operate on developing nuclear energy.
Analysts say that despite raising US hackles, the relationship is more rhetorical than substantive, however. “There has been an effective demonisation of Chávez in the western media, so he is an easy hanger to put things on,” says Larry Birns, director of the Council of Hemispheric Affairs, a Washington DC think tank.
“He comments on everything, and is not usually judicious. But he is more bark than bite and he has a lot of problems to confront, both domestic and foreign, and I hesitate to think that he would be imprudent enough to get involved in an overly close relationship with Iran.”
With US influence over the direction of Latin American affairs waning, Brazil also has cultivated ties with the Middle Eastern country. Last year, Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmad- inejad, received a warm welcome in Brasília, and Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, will visit Tehran next month.
Argentina, which is usually ideologically close to Venezuela, has accused the Revolutionary Guards of orchestrating Hizbullah-executed attacks in Buenos Aires – against the Israeli embassy in 1992, and the AMIA Jewish Community Centre in 1994, which killed 85 people in the single worst anti-Semitic attack since 1945.
Argentina has issued an international arrest warrant for five Iranian officials over the bombing, including the country’s current defence minister Ahmad Vahidi, who was head of the Quds Force at the time of the AMIA bombing.