The so-called “Triple Frontier” where Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay meet Argentine is an area with a large Arab immigrant population and said by U.S. officials to be thick with Islamic extremists and sympathizers, whose businesses have contributed or laundered more than $50 million in terror money, according to a report in the New York Times.
According to the report, the Paraguayan press earlier this year reported that Al Qaeda, as well as other Islamic terrorist groups, had training camps active in the region. The local journals have also reported a secret terrorist summit meeting in the Frontier.
Intelligence officials say that they are skeptical of such reports, but readily acknowledge that Islamic fundamentalists are busily and visibly at work schooling young Muslims in extremist ideology.
These same intelligence officials, says the report, are most concerned with what they perceive as a relentless movement of the Frontier’s Islamic extremists toward São Paulo, the bustling epicenter of Brazil’s estimated 1.5 million population of Muslims.
This new dynamic would make the city even more of an ideal hiding place for those being hunted in the war on terrorism.
And the Times also cites a recent Argentine intelligence report that operatives of Hamas, Amal and the Party for Islamic Unification have been detected; and Egypt’s Islamic Brotherhood has utilized the Frontier as a haven.
Perhaps most insidious, the report says that there are signs that Islamic terrorist groups may have been using the Frontier as part of a complex secret communications network.
The Brazilian police alone have shuttered a dozen telephone-switching operations, which were being utilized to frustrate American satellites monitoring potentially terror-linked telephone traffic.
In 1999 two men targeted by Egyptian authorities to have been actors in the terrorist attack in Luxor that killed 58 tourists were arrested in the Frontier. More recently, the Brazilian authorities arrested Assad Ahmad Barakat, a Lebanese businessman who is said to have been a Hezbollah enforcer and money launderer. Barakat has since fled across the border to Brasília, where he is reportedly resisting extradition.