ACCESSION NUMBER:00000
FILE ID:95092812.LAR
DATE:09/28/95
TITLE:28-09-95 CONGRESS WARNED ABOUT NEW HEMISPHERIC TERRORISM
TEXT:
TR95092812 (Officials, NGOs testify to committee) bc (600)
By Bruce Carey
USIA Staff Writer
WASHINGTON -- Hizballah terrorist cells supported by Iran and
threatening the West are festering in the tri-border region of
Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, U.S. officials and private groups told
Congress.
Officials from the State Department and the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI), and representatives from non-governmental
organizations testified before the House International Relations
Committee Sept. 28, warning that a small number of terrorists hide and
flourish among the growing Middle Eastern, Islamic population of the
remote tri-border region.
"We are up against a new and growing form of international terrorism,"
FBI Assistant Director Robert Bryant warned. "It is loosely structured
and comprised of many groups and persons who use violence to promote
their personal, political, social, or economic beliefs."
He said Latin America has long been one of the most active regions for
terrorist activity, but it is now host to a new brand of terrorist --
the international radical. He added that this type of terrorism was
responsible for the March 17, 1992, car bombing that destroyed the
Israeli embassy in Buenos Aries, for which Hizballah claimed
responsibility.
Hizballah has a "presence" in the tri-border area, where illegal
fundraising, smuggling, gun-running, and drug trafficking are rampant
and where the three national governments have no strong forces, Bryant
said, so that "Hizballah activities can go easily unnoticed."
Although the vast majority of persons of Middle Eastern extraction in
the region are law-abiding, their concentration there enables
terrorists to blend into the population, Bryant told the panel.
This transnational criminal threat "requires a concerted response from
the international law enforcement community. The FBI is pledged to
share counterterrorism intelligence, training, and techniques with our
counterparts" in the Western Hemisphere, he asserted.
The FBI has agents assigned to many U.S. embassies throughout the
region and others serve as attaches to law enforcement organizations
of those countries, he said.
State Department counterterrorism coordinator Philip Wilcox said the
1992 Israeli embassy bombing, the 1994 bombing of a Jewish cultural
center in Buenos Aires, and the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center
in New York "brought us home to the truth that our hemisphere is also
vulnerable to international terrorism."
Hizballah "is now the major international terrorist threat in Latin
America," he said.
Wilcox supported the FBI's contention that Hizballah has an extensive
network of cells in the tri-border area, as well as in Colombia and
Venezuela.
Ruben Beraja of the Argentine Jewish Association said that terrorist
acts can be linked increasingly to drug trafficking.
"We are ... struggling ... to protect our future from the threat of
narcoterrorism, whatever its ideological affiliation," he said.
Barry Mehler, national commissioner of the Anti-Defamation League,
called for the establishment of a commission among the three
governments of the tri-border region "to help control the porous
border." He said Washington should call upon Buenos Aires to support
such a commission and to step up investigations of the embassy and
cultural center bombings.
Committee Chairman Ben Gilman echoed the concerns and statements of
the witnesses. "It is an unsafe world out there, particularly in the
Americas, where we have become the newest targets of these cowardly
terrorists....
"It threatens all of us, our way of life, and our fundamental
freedoms. We must all battle this scourge together in the Americas.
Not to do so serves merely to reward terrorists and encourages more of
the same, whether abroad or here at home."
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