It is worth remembering that in the 90s of the XXth century in Argentina, immigrants from the Middle East committed two terrorist acts: the bombing of the Israeli Embassy (1992) and the building of the Jewish community in Buenos Aires (1994). Then dozens of people died, hundreds of victims were injured.
According to the well-known analytical company “The Soufan Group (SG)”, from 2011 to the present, at least 27,000 foreign citizens from 86 countries of the world have already gone to Syria and Iraq to fight on the side of the ISIL. About 76 of them were from South America.
In 2011, the US FBI accused two Iranians of conspiring to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States. According to FBI staff, they also planned to organize a terrorist attack in Argentina.
This year, at the 18th session of the Inter-American Committee Against Terrorism, international experts reiterated the common view that the Islamic state, having suffered a military defeat in Syria and Iraq, where it tried to recreate the Islamic caliphate, is currently actively expanding its terrorist activity abroad, to prove to the whole world its vitality and the scale of its influence.
In addition, according to official statistics, other Islamic terrorist groups, such as “Hezbollah”, are active in Latin America, which has a wide-spread network of strongholds in Venezuela and has wide support from Iran.
On the 4th of May at the 18th Session of the Inter-American Committee Against Terrorism, Dmitry Feoktistov, the Deputy Director of the Department for New Challenges and Threats of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, pointed out the existence of camps for the training of jihadists and recreational bases in the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, with local criminal and drug cartels. To date, are particularly concerned about the activation of the recruiting activities of extremists in the Caribbean states, where the share of citizens professing Islam is high.
At present, the most alarming are those young Latin Americans who are still leaving for combat operations in Syria in order to join to the ISIL because they are unhappy with their life and cannot be realized at home. In addition, it should be noted that the secret services of Latin America still do not focus on fighting global terrorism. In many Latin American countries of the “left” camp, state security services are only spying on political opponents and oppositionists.