On Tuesday afternoon, the Foreign Relations Commission of the Chamber of Deputies held a secret session. In this, he received the United States ambassador to Chile, Bernadette Meehan, accompanied by the Undersecretary of the Interior, Manuel Monsalve, and the Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs, Gloria de la Fuente. Officially, the topic to be discussed was the Visa Waiver Program. However, an unavoidable topic of the meeting was the situation of the Lebanese guerrilla Hezbollah (or Hizbullah) in the Southern Cone. At the meeting were the majority of the parliamentarians of the commission, made up of seven from the ruling party and six from the opposition. After the presentations, the American ambassador’s intervention began.
“The ambassador’s intervention was super technical. She showed us what the work had been like between American and Chilean services, such as the civil registry and the PDI. She also explained to us that there were a couple of legislators and especially groups in certain states of the United States, who have asked to cut the Visa Waiver to Chile due to certain cases where there has been robbery of houses in uninhabited places. They are million-dollar houses, which are not visited regularly. However, heThe Chileans who have been detected are counted cases“, says one of the attendees at the session*. Sources close to the ambassador maintain, however, that the diplomat pointed out something different, since the cases would not be counted, but many and in the 50 states.
On this point, the parliamentarian maintains that these groups – close to Trump and that put noise and pressure on the visa – would correspond to America Great Again, a supremacist political movement that has aroused concern in several diplomats in the region and also in the sixteen security agencies of the United States due to its nationalist ideology, where they promote poorly founded and racist accusations, ranging from former President Barack Obama not being born in the United States United until the Democrats’ immigration policies want to replace white Americans with Latino immigrants, in addition to homophobia, to which are added other conspiracy theories and an antagonistic relationship with the main media.
The ambassador also addressed the agreement for the exchange of police information and criminal records within the framework of the Visa Waiver Program.
After his presentation, Undersecretary De la Fuente and then Undersecretary Monsalve made comments. It was then that, during his speech, one of the opposition parliamentarians asked about the presence of Hezbollah in the country. The question was somewhat uncomfortable. Mainly – they explain in the Executive –, because Ambassador Bernadette Meehan is considered one of the best officials in the State Department specialized in Islamist guerrillas, to the point that she even worked on reserved matters in the National Security Council, one of the sixteen White House security agencies and coordinates foreign intelligence information.
According to those who know her, during her posting to the Washington embassy in Colombia she survived the assault and kidnapping by paramilitary groups in Bogotá. After that she moved to Iraq, she studied Arabic and was assigned to Dubai, one of the financial centers through which Hezbollah remittances pass.
An uncomfortable question
“We had already finished talking about the Visa Waiver, when deputy Stephan Schubert asked him two or three questions. Monsalve, somewhat uncomfortable, responded for about 5 to 10 minutes, pointing out that there was no information about Hezbollah’s operational activity, but the deputy asked more questions again. Monsalve emphasized that there was no operational activity of Hezbollah and, since she is also an economist, a question that was not asked was left up in the air and that was whether there was any non-operational or financing activity in the Free Zone,” he says. a legislator to The counter. On this point, sources present maintain that the ambassador reiterated that the institutions of her country are very vigilant in detecting these groups anywhere in the world.
“(As the session is secret), in general I can tell you that the undersecretary said that they had no evidence that Hezbollah was operating in Chile and that the issue of the Visa Waiver was mainly addressed,” the deputy Cristhian limited himself to saying. Moreira (UDI), one of the few who agreed to speak without reservation about his name.
“We know that in Latin America there is a presence of transnational groups of this type in the Triple Border and we must be careful that they do not reach Chile, where we have a Free Trade Zone, but there is no proven presence in Chile. There is no information even in the Special Intelligence Commission,” comments another parliamentarian in this regard.
And after in the United States Senator Marco Rubio (Republican) made a series of statements about the presence of Hezbollah in Chile, in a session of the Subcommittee for the Western Hemisphere of the Foreign Relations Committee of the House of Representatives, and that the Argentine Minister of Security later did so, even mentioning the Iquique Free Zone in a television program, the tension over the Lebanese Shiite guerrilla that controls from the south of Beirut to the Israeli border was at the pinnacle of the debate.
In fact, Monsalve – according to two sources – had requested an intelligence report from police agencies to know precisely the situation of the Lebanese group in the Southern Cone and, thus, be able to rule out “Hezbollah operational activity” in Iquique and Santiago.
Another of the parliamentarians adds: “The session was long, it lasted about two hours, and at the end the topic was addressed. Monsalve actually answered a couple of questions for a long time, somewhat uncomfortable because it was not the topic of the session, and pointed out that there was a presence of the guerrilla in the Triple Border of Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil, as indicated by some books specialized in Islamic terrorism (…). He did not refer to the 2002 case of the businessman detained in Brazil, nor to that of his nephew.
Indeed, as reported The counter, In a note last Sunday, the Lebanese businessman Assad Ahmad Barakat, who has lived in Iquique since July 2000, was accused in 2001 by the CIA as the leader of a former financial structure of Hezbollah, in the Triple Border.
Barakat arrived in Paraguay in 1985, as a teenager, after fleeing the civil war in Lebanon with his father, who was an assistant to a politician in Beirut. Barakat prepared a large business network in Ciudad del Este, in which fundraising was involved and which began to expand since 1996.
The days of the Hezbollah man in Iquique
Assad Ahmad Barakat appeared a year later in Chile, in the northern city of Iquique. Although his stay lasted for nearly 14 months, he formed three companies, bought two apartments and used the services of a lawyer who was a member of a Court in that city, little of his background exists in our country, and the few that he has, are they reserve. It is known that during his stay in Iquique – despite his acquisitions – he rented an apartment on the ninth floor of the luxurious Arrecife building, on Arturo Prat Avenue, in front of the headquarters of the VI Army Division.
His contacts abroad were made by telephone and in a rare Saracen dialect, so the “pricks” were of little use and, like a “dealer”, he carried several cell phones with advanced encryption technology. The Lebanese’s own associates claim to have seen him no more than five times in a year.
At the beginning of 2001, the CIA provided a series of background information to the PDI regarding the activities of three Lebanese citizens (Assad Mohamed Barakat, Ismail Arafat and Khalil Saleh), who operated in the Iquique Free Trade Zone with several commercial companies, the main one of which was Saleh Trading Ltda.
Arafat and Saleh had ties to Lebanese intelligence and the CIA suspected that the company was created to launder money for Hezbollah, based on the group’s activities in the Triple Border. The matter escalated when an investigation was opened in the Court of Appeals of Iquique, for the crime of financing terrorism, which began to be investigated by the Police Intelligence Brigade (Bipol) of said city, together with a group of officers. of the PDI grouped in what would later be called the Department of Foreign Affairs (DAEX), of the same institution.
After September 11, 2001, Paraguay suffered the rigor of intense North American pressure to eliminate Hezbollah’s financial network from its borders. Ten days after the attack on the Twin Towers, 16 Lebanese who had entered Ciudad del Este illegally were arrested, and they had to apologize. A month later, in October, police raided an electronics wholesale store owned by Barakat.
Nasrallah’s letter to the Barakat
Floppy disks, video tapes and compact discs were included in the seizure from the raid. The video and CD recordings totaled more than 60 hours of speeches by Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah.
The police also found a letter from Nasrallah addressed to Barakat, expressing deep gratitude for the monetary contributions sent to his organization from the Triple Frontier.
After the 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, the CIA’s pressure on the PDI grew, arguing that Barakat was also linked to Al Qaeda, something that did not make much sense, given the conflicting factions to which both groups belong: While Hezbollah is Shiite, as already indicated, Al Qaeda (like ISIS) not only belongs to the Sunni wing of Islam, but, within this, is part of the Salafist current of radical Islam, which considers that anyone who does not be Salafi (e.g. Shiites) is an apostate.
At the beginning of 2002, the CIA asked the Chilean Investigative Police for something unusual: to help them “extract” Arafat from Zofri, Iquiqueña, who was closely watched by agents of the US agency, who by that time had already They occupied two apartments that operated as safe houses in Iquique. But the PDI refused.
Barakat, who also has Paraguayan nationality and identity documents from Brazil, Lebanon and Iran, escaped to Brazil in 2002, a country in which he was arrested in 2019, accused of multiple crimes, including financing terrorist activities.
*EDITOR’S NOTE: This article was modified after its publication, given that the parliamentarian who gave the statement that was put in quotes and which maintained that the United States ambassador in Chile had spoken of America Great Again (Maga), She then qualified and corrected her statements, ensuring that the American diplomat never said it explicitly, but that it had been her inference.