Iran Making Plans For Latin America As Nuclear Deal Nears
Mardo Soghom
Iran International
“Iran’s play in America’s backyard” is the headline by the official government news website IRNA heralding new hopes of expanding influence in Latin America.
Iran International
“Iran’s play in America’s backyard” is the headline by the official government news website IRNA heralding new hopes of expanding influence in Latin America.
The article tried to give credit to hardliner President Ebrahim Raisi for making more inroads in Central and South America, particularly drawing attention to the election of a leftist president in Columbia.
IRNA publishes several articles daily to praise the accomplishments of the president who is under fire even by some hardliners for having failed to deliver any of his promises when he got elected last year.
The article about Latin America published on August 25 is no exception, presenting as a victory a trip by one of Raisi’s aides to Columbia in early August to take part in the inauguration of Gustavo Petro, a former anti-American leftist guerrilla fighter. IRNA said that Petro had condemned the targeted killing of Qasem Soleimani in January 2020 on the orders of former US President Donald Trump, saying, “America always empowers the worst in the Middle East.”
The article mainly speaks about Latin America’s economic and diplomatic potential and makes no mention of Iran’s long-running overt and covert operations to build influence and networks in the region, together with its proxy, the Lebanese Hezbollah.
“Experts believe areas of cooperation with Latin American countries can include energy, particularly oil, food production industries, chemical industries, infrastructure, dam construction, electricity generation and hydroelectric power…,” IRNA said, adding a few other options.
Iran already closely cooperates with Venezuela in fossil fuels and security matters.
However, since 2005 when Iran’s attempts to expand its foothold in Latin America gained more momentum, Tehran has made plenty of economic promises to the region’s countries, but few have materialized because the period since has been marked by crippling international and US sanctions on Tehran.
With a possible nuclear deal on the horizon, these sanctions will be lifted, and Iran will get hold of tens of billions of dollars it can spend in Latin America. The IRNA article seems to be oriented toward making investments in countries friendly with the Islamic Republic.
But some countries are a bit careful about Iranian activities. In early June, Argentina grounded a Boeing 747 that Iran provided to Venezuela to launch an air cargo company. The plane was carrying at least five Iranians all with IRGC (Revolutionary Guard) ties.
Gerardo Milman, an Argentine lawmaker, told Iran International on June 23 that Iranians aboard the Venezuelan plane planned “attacks on human targets.” The aircraft itself had belonged to an Iranian airline with ties to the IRGC and had been sanctioned by the United States.
Secret Iranian and Hezbollah networks are involved in illicit activities, allegedly including the drug trade for generating funds.
Iran also converts locals to Shiite Islam and sends some to its seminaries in the religious city of Qom to be trained and indoctrinated.
US Senators Bob Menendez and Marco Rubio were concerned over Iranian activities as far back as in 2012 and held hearings to assess the threat of Tehran launching anti-US operations from its backyard.
Two experts in 2020 offered a grim prospect on Iran’s influence in the region. “Iran has penetrated the governmental structure of many Latin American nations, especially the nations of the already left-leaning Bolivarian Alliance (Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Nicaragua, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and Grenadines, Saint Kitts, and Nevis), and this is not only unconventional but also very dangerous.”
Mehrzad Zarei, father of 17-year-old Arad who died in the shootdown, who had started his symbolic 400-kilometer march from his son's grave in Richmond Hill, Ontario, arrived in Ottawa Thursday hoping to personally deliver his protest letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
With Trudeau out of town, Zarei held a meeting with parliamentary secretary to the prime minister Greg Fergus instead. Family members of other victims from Flight 752 who held photos of their loved ones and remained outside the Prime Minister's Office.
"Today's message, we say, enough is enough," Zarei told reporters before the meeting, and went on to read his letter addressed to Trudeau.
Criticizing a lack of justice for the victims of the incident, he demands that Canada designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization, as was stipulated by a Canadian parliament's resolution in 2018. Other demands include Canadian sanctions on Iranian authorities and for the case to be pursued at the International Court of Justice, and The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).
Having planned a sit-in in front of the parliament, the family members will return to Ottawa on October 4 to mark 1,000 days since the flight was shot down and to renew their calls for justice.
The airliner was shot down by two air-defense missiles fired by the IRGC on January 8, 2020, as it took off from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport. Only hours earlier, the IRGC had fired more than a dozen missiles at Iraqi bases hosting US and coalition troops in retaliation for the killing of the IRGC Qods Force Commander Ghasem Soleimani who was killed in Baghdad by a US drone strike just five days earlier.
Justice for Iran, a London-based non-governmental human rights organization, filed its complaint against Iranian politician and author Ataollah Mohajerani for incitement to terrorism in a 1989 book, Critique of the Satanic Verses Conspiracy, and for defending a death fatwa for blasphemy against Rushdie by Iran’s late leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
“Almost all Muslim schools of jurisprudence share the view that whoever insults the prophet deserves to be killed. His repentance cannot be accepted,” Mohajerani, who was also a cleric in Iran, wrote in his book in which he called the Indian born British writer an “apostate”.
The complaint was filed with the counterterrorism unit of UK police on August 16 against Mohajerani, a British citizen who resides in London, Shadi Sadr, human rights lawyer and one of the Co-founders of Justice for Iran told Iran international Thursday [August 25].
British officials have not yet commented about the complaint filed against Mohajerani.
Some Iranian public figures have alleged that western governments’ “forbearance of the Islamic Republic’s terrorist activities and hatemongering” paved the way for the recent knife attack on Rushdie in the United States while others have accused Mohajerani of defending Khomeini’s fatwa and being an apologist for the Islamic Republic.
“How is it possible that the British government allows a former official of the Islamic Republic of Iran to live in the UK and call for the murder of a British citizen. Mohajerani still defending the fatwa against Salman Rushdie,” Masih Alinejad US-based activist Masih tweeted August 15.
In a series of tweets after Rushdie's stabbing, Mohajerani, a former vice-president and minister of culture and Islamic guidance, implicitly defended writing the book in praise and justification of Khomeini’s fatwa, describing the royalties from the book’s sales as “legitimate and sweet”. Mr. Mohajerani has refused talking to Iran International and other foreign based Persian language media.
Mohajerani later tweeted to deny that he approves of the attack on Rushdi and called the attempt on his life a ‘tragic incident’ but also said he hopes that the British author will cease “insulting prophets and religions during the rest of his life”.
He has responded to the possibility of being investigated by the British authorities and a trial by saying that this will provide him with a “golden opportunity” that he is ready to exploit.
Sadr told Iran International that her organization consulted a group of expert British lawyers about the case before filing its complaint. “The British lawyers said Mohajerani’s writings are evidence of “incitement of terrorism” and “sharing terrorist content”, she said.
Sadr added that the lawyers who were provided with the English translation of Mohajerani’s writings and recent tweets on the attempt on Rushdie’s life in New York in August filed the complaint with the British authorities on behalf of Justice for Iran.
Iran's hardliner media doubled down on praise for the attack on Rushdie as many condemned the stabbing by a man allegedly sympathetic to Shiite extremism.
Khomeini's death fatwa against Rushdie resulted in several failed assassination attempts against him as well as his publishers and translators. Satanic Verses’ Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, was killed, its Italian translator, Ettore Capriolo, was seriously injured in a stabbing attack, itsNorwegian publisher,William Nygaard, was shot, and an arson attack by a fundamentalist mob against its Turkish translator, Aziz Nesin, at a hotel in Sivas, Turkey, in 1993 led to the death of 37 people. Nesin narrowly escaped.