Iran’s Infiltration of Latin America With U.S. influence waning, Tehran moves in, as a new report on Argentina shows. By Mary Anastasia O’Grady

Posted By on June 20th, 2016

http://www.wsj.com/articles/irans-infiltration-of-latin-america-1466374190

Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman died of a single bullet to the head in January 2015, a day before he was scheduled to testify to Argentina’s Congress about an alleged government coverup of the 1994 Iranian terrorist bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish community center. There is still no official court ruling on whether he was murdered, but a new investigative report—to be published Tuesday—goes a long way in proving motive.

Joseph Humire, the executive director of the Washington, D.C., based Center for a Secure Free Society, uses thousands of documents and legal wiretaps released to the public to show how the prosecutor’s death eliminated a key stumbling block for Iran and “paved the way for [it] to move into a new phase of its information and intelligence operations in Latin America.” If the theocracy, which is the No. 1 state-sponsor of terrorism in the world, did not murder Nisman, it was the biggest beneficiary of his death.

Nisman was the special prosecutor investigating the terrorist attack on the Jewish community center—known by its Spanish initials as the AMIA. In 2006 he indicted eight former Iranian officials (including former President Ali Rafsanjani) and one Lebanese national. The following year, at Nisman’s behest, Interpol issued “red notices” for the arrest of six of the accused. But Iran took no action.

Using legal wiretaps, Nisman later built a case that President Cristina Kirchner’s government had a covert agreement with Iran to wipe Tehran’s fingerprints off the AMIA attack in exchange for Iranian oil and reopening Iran’s market to Argentine grain and beef.

Nisman had filed a criminal complaint against members of the Kirchner government the week before he died. Killing him did nothing to stop the public from learning of the contents of his report. Yet his death did put the brakes on his plan to bring the Iranian crime into the international arena. It had the potential to undermine the key foreign-policy objectives of Tehran.

Iran’s asymmetric warfare against the West demands commercial engagement because it allows Tehran to deploy political operatives specializing in propaganda, intelligence and terrorism and to finance their activities under the guise of business activity. CONTINUE AT SITE

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