PARAGUAY | Military called to back police, again. Recently installed President Nicanor Duarte, who had campaigned on a promise of tough action against crime, has ordered the armed forces to provide support for the police in `prevention and security operations'. The military high command promptly announced that patrols `on rivers, land and air' would begin immediately. Duarte's action followed a call from the senate, itself prompted by two kidnappings and a string of holdups that had made a great impact on public opinion.
Duarte's predecessor, Luis González Macchi, had twice taken similar action — to no noticeable effect. The visiting executive secretary of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Santiago Cantón, warned publicly that using the military in police functions was risky. `The training of the police and the army are very different,' he said. `The differentiation of military and police roles was one of the great achievements of the return to democracy in the region.'
ARGENTINA | Bringing the 1994 bombers to trial. The investigation into the 1994 bombing of the Amia-Daia building in Buenos Aires (a Jewish community centre), long obstructed by the Menem administration, has become a high-profile event since President Néstor Kirchner ordered, shortly after taking office, the declassification of relevant state intelligence files. The investigating magistrate, federal judge Juan José Galeano, has enlarged the list of international arrest warrants against Iranian officials allegedly involved in the bombing, which killed 85 and injured more than 200.
This has landed Argentina in a big diplomatic row with Iran, after the British police acted on one of those warrants and arrested the former Iranian ambassador to Argentina, Hadi Soleimanpour — who is now undergoing a process similar to that experienced by former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.
The Amia-Daia bombing and the bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires two years earlier (which killed 23) were the only two cases of major acts of international terrorism in Latin America. So far the only people arrested and put on trial are members of the so-called `local connection', involved in the procurement of the elements used in the attack (a group which includes former police officers). The Iranian suspected of most direct involvement is the long-resident cleric Moshen Rabbani, leader of the al-Tawhid mosque in the Buenos Aires suburb of Floresta, who was given diplomatic cover by the Iranian embassy shortly before the bombing.
BRAZIL-PARAGUAY-ARGENTINA | No terrorists in Triborder area. Donna Hrinak, US ambassador to Brazil, has flatly refuted `speculation, even among people of the US government' about the existence of terrorists in the Triborder, or Triple Frontier, area where Brazil meets Paraguay and Argentina. `Today,' she told the Brazilian magazine IstoÉ, `it is clear that there is no evidence of terrorist groups in the region.'
As to the funding of Middle Eastern terrorism by the Triborder Arab community, she said, `I believe that the great majority of people who send money to the Middle East do it moved by noble and legal interests [...] Everyone knows that there is much criminality in the Triple Frontier [but] as regards the existence of terrorist cells, I repeat, we have no knowledge of that.' [She also says Colin Powell said this first.]
[For context, see our Special Report, Latin America and the US `war on terror', SR-03-02.]
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