Iran's Deadly Ambition (18 page)

Of these developments, the most worrisome are the tacit military ties that have been erected between Quito and Tehran. A number of secret military cooperation agreements are known to have been signed between the two countries in recent years, and at least some level of Iranian activity is believed to be present in the port city of Manta—a key strategic point because of its proximity to narco-trafficking routes and the Panama Canal, the object of surveillance. However, meaningful military-to-military cooperation between Iran and Ecuador may be difficult to achieve, since the Ecuadorian military is strongly tied to the United States after years of deep and institutionalized cooperation between the Pentagon and the Ecuadorian Ministry of Defense.

But even if the formal relationship between Ecuador and Iran remains tentative, Iran’s asymmetric presence in the country is advancing rapidly. Iran’s presence, according to local experts, is “deep and profound but secret” and includes troubling links between Iran and organized criminal groups.
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The Iranian regime is also believed to be carrying out illicit financial activities in Ecuador, using banking agreements and bilateral commerce as cover. Perhaps the best example of this activity is the notorious COFIEC Bank affair, in which the
Iranian government established commercial links with a state-owned bank as a means of skirting international sanctions.
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The Islamic Republic also has become an active recruiter and proselytizer in Ecuador. A 2012 investigation by the news magazine
Vistazo
found that at an Iranian-backed cultural center in Quito was being used as a base to recruit disaffected Ecuadorians for conversion and to provide ideological training and indoctrination.
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These gains are notable, both for their intensity and for what they indicate about Iran’s position as an integral part of ongoing leftist anti-American resistance in the region. But Tehran is thinking bigger still.

REGAINING GROUND IN BRAZIL

When he touched down in Brazil on June 20, 2012, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was a man on a mission. Publicly, the purpose of the Iranian president’s visit—his first to the South American nation since 2009—was to join the more than one hundred other dignitaries attending the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development taking place in Rio de Janeiro. The real reason for Ahmadinejad’s trip, however, was more urgent. Iran’s president hoped to use his personal touch to reinvigorate the once-robust ties between Tehran and Brasília.

Ahmadinejad had his work cut out for him. During the administration of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who served as Brazil’s president from 2003 to 2011, Brasília was one of Tehran’s strongest partners in Latin America. Under Lula’s leftist government, Brazil turned into a major diplomatic backer of the Islamic Republic’s will to nuclear power, with Brazilian officials rejecting the sanctions they believed were being unjustly imposed upon Tehran.
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Bilateral trade—which had been at low levels throughout the 1980s and 1990s—soared, hitting $2.9 billion annually in 2008.
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But political ties took a marked turn for the worse with the ascension of Dilma Rousseff to the Brazilian presidency in January 2011. Rousseff, a former women’s rights activist who spent time in prison, made a point of distancing herself from Iran, repeatedly rebuffing Iran’s diplomatic overtures and signaling her displeasure at Iran’s troubling human rights record. For Iran, the reversal was both sudden and surprising, and officials in Tehran saw it as nothing short of a betrayal. Iranian government spokesman Ali Akbar Javanfekr said as much in an interview with São Paulo’s influential
Folha de São Paulo
newspaper, in which he blamed Rousseff for abandoning Lula’s legacy and having “destroyed years of good relations.”
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If Ahmadinejad hoped his 2012 visit would help thaw these icy political bilateral ties, he was sorely mistaken. On that occasion, Iran’s head of state failed to even secure an audience with Brazil’s president, and he left the country shortly after the U.N. summit concluded without much access to key Brazilian decision makers. Even so, Iran has reasons to be optimistic that its relationship with South America’s most important geopolitical player will eventually get back on track.

For one thing, the change in political tenor that accompanied Rousseff’s ascension did not lead to a complete rupture between the two countries. Trade ties between the two countries remain robust—at least from Iran’s perspective. In 2012, Brazil did more than $2.1 billion in business with Iran, making it far and away the Islamic Republic’s largest trading partner in the region.
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Diplomatic contacts, too, have continued. The institutional and bureaucratic infrastructure that enabled close ties between Tehran and Brasília during Lula’s tenure remain in effect, complete with regular meetings between Iran’s envoy and Brazil’s foreign-policy establishment. As one local observer put it, “there has been a change in the retail, but not in the wholesale.”
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For another, Iran’s informal presence in the country is significant—and getting stronger. According to regional experts, there are signs of active recruitment and proselytization among Brazil’s poor by Muslim elements, including representatives of Iran.
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The network of Mohsen Rabbani, the Islamic Republic’s informal ambassador to Latin America, is also known to be active in Brazil, as is Hezbollah, which maintains a significant presence in the triple frontier at the intersection of Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina. In Brazil, as elsewhere in the region, Iran’s proselytization—and the growing appeal of Islam in general—is assisted by a lack of economic opportunity and by a lingering political atomization among segments of the population. This trend is reflected in the growing number of converts and mosques now visible in São Paulo and other Brazilian cities.

Iran’s interest is understandable. Brazil ranks as Latin America’s largest economy and the world’s seventh largest, according to both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. By dint of this global economic stature, Brazil represents a major geopolitical prize for Iran—the cooperation of which would greatly hamper any future Western efforts to economically isolate the Islamic Republic. And today, as the West continues to normalize its relationship with the Iranian regime, Brazil is beginning to show an interest in revisiting its once-robust ties to Tehran.
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TEHRAN’S TANGO WITH ARGENTINA

In March 1992, Argentina became the first Latin American victim of Islamist terror when Hezbollah, Iran’s Lebanese proxy, carried out a suicide bombing against Israel’s embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 29 and injuring 242 others. Two years later, in July 1994, the group struck again in even more devastating fashion, bombing the Argentine-Israeli Mutual Association (AMIA) in Buenos Aires. That attack claimed
the lives of 85 civilians and injured more than 300 others, making it the most devastating incident of Islam-inspired violence in Latin American history. A subsequent investigation by Argentine state prosecutors found that the attack had been “ordered by the highest authorities of the Islamic Republic of Iran in conjunction with Hezbollah.”
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All of this makes Argentina an exceedingly odd candidate for Iranian outreach. Yet, contrary to all conventional wisdom, recent years have seen a marked improvement in ties between the two countries. Since 2011, Argentina’s leftist president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, has broken with tradition and hewed to a more conciliatory line toward Iran.

Signs of a reorientation first appeared in the fall of 2011, when Argentina’s U.N. envoy, Jorge Argüello, broke with historic practice and remained seated during Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s address before the General Assembly. The move was a very public statement that Buenos Aires was ready to turn the diplomatic page in its relationship with Tehran.

The about-face was surprising, to say the least. During his time as president from 2003 to 2007, the late Néstor Kirchner had hewed to a consistently anti-Iranian line, demanding greater accountability from Iran for its involvement in the 1994 AMIA attack. But Kirchner’s widow and successor as president, Cristina Kirchner, gradually took a different tack.

The reasons for the reversal were both practical and ideological. Economically, Argentina was in steep decline as a result of Kirchner’s populist policies, from higher taxes to greater regulation. Argentina’s financial books became so speculative and manipulated that, in February 2012, the prestigious
Economist
magazine took the unprecedented step of removing the country from its indicators page.
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This left the Kirchner government economically isolated, and over time
it provided the “incentive for the Argentine government to reverse its policy toward Iran.”
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Iran was quick to exploit the opening. In 2012, Argentina’s wily foreign minister, Héctor Timerman, met with his Iranian counterpart, Ali Akbar Salehi, in what was widely seen as an effort to engineer a more public rapprochement between Tehran and Buenos Aires.
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The initiative bore fruit: by early 2013, Iran and Argentina managed to create a “truth commission” to investigate the 1994 AMIA bombing.
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The arrangement was absurd, insofar as it effectively allowed Iran to investigate a crime that it itself was accused of committing. Nevertheless, it was a concrete sign that Kirchner was willing to allow Iran to rewrite its sordid history with her country.

The thaw had a distinctly economic component as well. Minimal as it was for years on account of frayed relations, Iranian-Argentine trade surged, increasing by more than 500 percent over 2005 levels. By 2013, thanks to the burgeoning contacts between the two countries, economic ties rested at $1.2 billion annually.
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Since then, relations have soured somewhat. A predictable failure by Iran to seriously investigate the events surrounding the AMIA bombing led to a drop in public support for the arrangement, culminating in the annulment of the deal by an Argentine court in May 2014 on the grounds that it was unconstitutional.
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More recently, the Iranian-Argentine relationship has come under renewed scrutiny by the international community following the suspected murder of Argentine state prosecutor Alberto Nisman, the principal investigator into the AMIA bombing, just hours before his scheduled appearance before the Argentine Congress to present his findings of collusion between the Kirchner government and the Islamic Republic.

Nevertheless, a real, lasting restoration of relations between
Argentina and Iran remains possible—if not probable—for a host of domestic reasons. As scholars Julián Obligio and Diego Naveira noted, “President Fernández de Kirchner’s populist economic policies, including: massive public spending, increased regulation, higher taxes, trade barriers, and poor monetary policy have led to chaos, a dwindling economic growth rate, high levels of inflation and unemployment, and a drop in foreign reserves that have thrown Argentina into economic free fall.”
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Amid this deterioration, Cristina Kirchner’s government has become desperate for foreign allies and more willing to forgive the Iranian regime for its rogue behavior.

Argentina’s loss may be Iran’s gain—and a serious national security problem for the United States. This is because Argentina ranks as Latin America’s most advanced weapons state. From the 1960s through the 1990s, successive governments in Buenos Aires developed the country’s nuclear program and ballistic missile capabilities. While it has progressively turned away from developing weapons of mass destruction over the past two decades, Argentina today still boasts a robust nuclear energy program. And because it does, nonproliferation experts have warned, the possibility that a cash-strapped Kirchner regime could become a “proliferation turntable,” transferring vital nuclear-related know-how to the Islamic Republic, cannot be ruled out.
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IRAN’S OBJECTIVES

What, exactly, does Iran want in the Americas? Over the past decade and a half, Iran’s engagement with Central and South America has taken the form of a bewildering array of activities. At first blush, these efforts appear disorganized and only marginally effective, leading some analysts to dismiss Iran’s regional presence as little more than an “axis of annoyance.”
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Others have minimized the long-term strategic
significance of Iran’s regional inroads, seeing them as defensive in nature—a simple reaction to Western sanctions that is aimed at shoring up support for the regime’s nuclear effort and broadening international sympathies for Tehran.

Upon closer examination, however, it becomes clear that Iran’s activities in Latin America amount to far more than that. A 2009 dossier prepared by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs noted that “since Ahmadinejad’s rise to power, Tehran has been promoting an aggressive policy aimed at bolstering its ties with Latin American countries with the declared goal of ‘bringing America to its knees.’ ”
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Three years later, the Pentagon came to much the same conclusion. “Iran continues to seek to increase its stature by countering U.S. influence and expanding ties with regional actors while advocating Islamic solidarity,” it noted in its April 2012
Annual Report on Military Power of Iran
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Iran, in other words, is pursuing what military planners might call an “anti-access strategy” in Latin America—promoting its own ideology and influence at the expense of the United States. Or, as former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad himself put it some time ago, “when the Western countries were trying to isolate Iran, we went to the U.S. backyard.”
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