FBI to Join Crackdown on Latin America Crime

BUENOS AIRES — Concerned that Argentina’s border with Paraguay and Brazil has become a haven for terrorists and mobsters, the FBI will join authorities in the three nations in a crackdown intended as a model for regional cooperation in Latin America, FBI Director Louis J. Freeh said Tuesday.

The lawless border region exemplifies the dangers of globalized crime and the need for a coordinated response in the hemisphere, Freeh said in an interview during a five-day trip through South America, the first by an FBI director.

Fear of growing crime is a top political issue across the continent, Freeh said, pointing to drug cartels, smuggling mafias and terrorist groups as an urgent threat to the region’s security.

Freeh said he is trying to build on an agreement reached by presidents at the Summit of the Americas in Chile last month to create a regional law enforcement alliance similar to Europol, an organization that allows European police forces to cooperate across borders.

“There has to be some regional ability for police forces to work together efficiently, not just in response to particular crimes, but really as long-range initiatives to deal with very complex transnational issues,” Freeh said. He called the planned border initiative a “building block for what can become a much more regional, and even hemispheric, association of operational police resources.”

In a sign of the FBI’s expanding role in South America, a team of eight agents spent last month analyzing evidence here and consulting with Argentine police on the unsolved bombings of a Jewish community center in 1994 and the Israeli Embassy in 1992. Argentine investigators suspect that an alliance of Iranian spies, fundamentalist terrorists and rogue Argentine police officers carried out the 1994 bombing, which killed 86 people.

The agents--including counter-terrorism experts and an explosives specialist who investigated the Oklahoma City bombing--focused on suspicions that the two attacks in Argentina were the work of terrorists linked to Middle Eastern immigrant enclaves in the triple-border region, according to U.S. and Argentine officials.

Freeh laid a wreath at the site of the 1994 bombing Tuesday and met with Jewish leaders, President Carlos Menem and top police and intelligence officials. The FBI team will provide a report to Menem in June, said Freeh, who praised the work of the investigating magistrate in the community center case and the cooperation of police here.

But the lack of results in the embassy bombing and the revelation of a corrupt web of police who obstructed the investigation of the 1994 attack have heightened international and domestic pressure on Argentine officials. They say a major obstacle is the haven for terrorism in Ciudad del Este, on the Paraguayan side of the triple border.

Freeh largely concurred with the view that multifaceted crime groups make the border region a lawless menace to the continent.

“We are certainly concerned about fundamentalist activities and any of the organizations that could operate there and extend their reach well beyond the geography of the tri-border area,” he said.

Ciudad del Este is a hub of Middle Eastern, Asian and South American gangsters involved in contraband, drugs, arms trafficking, stolen cars, extortion, money laundering and pirated products such as videos and cassette tapes.

Intelligence reports and the arrest of an accused Lebanese terrorist and drug trafficker in a plot to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Paraguay in 1996 indicate that groups tied to terrorist organizations use the border region as a base. Terrorists recruit in the Middle Eastern community and finance themselves with the proceeds of smuggling and a “war tax” on merchants, according to U.S. and Argentine experts.

Jurisdictional barriers created by the three borders combine with deep-rooted corruption to prevent effective enforcement, officials say.

But Argentine, Brazilian and Paraguayan police have worked together more closely during the last year to track cross-border movements of criminals and smuggled goods and overcome their wariness of one another.

The new border initiative will translate into U.S. training, computer and surveillance technology, and logistics support for specialized police units being created by each nation, an Argentine official said.

Argentine officials and Jewish leaders say they hope that the concerted attention will produce a breakthrough in the community center case. Aware that his presence has raised expectations, Freeh said he was moved by his visit to the crime scene in the heart of Buenos Aires’ old Jewish neighborhood, where the names of the victims are scrawled on a wall.

“It doesn’t matter where they are, the victims are always innocent people,” Freeh said. “It reminds us what an obligation we have to solve these cases, whether it takes one year or 10 years.”