Tri-Border Region Seen as Hub for Aid To Radical Groups
Jump to full article: The Washington Post, 2006-08-03
Author: Monte Reel Washington Post Foreign Service
Intro: CIUDAD DEL ESTE, Paraguay -- For years, this region -- where the boundaries of Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina converge -- has been considered a teeming stew of globalization's more unseemly byproducts. Much of the trade that crosses the borders, officials say, is illegitimate. The region is full of smuggled goods and laundered money.
Now U.S. officials are launching a broad series of new measures aimed at uncovering money-laundering rings that they believe are funding Hezbollah and other radical groups. . . .
Meanwhile, the State Department this year helped draft stricter anti-money-laundering legislation that was passed by Argentina's congress. The U.S. Embassy's legal adviser in Asuncion, Paraguay has held training courses during the past year for investigators and prosecutors in charge of combating possible terror links, according to the Justice Department.
Glaser said it is the links to Hezbollah and other radical groups that "concern us most."
U.S. officials cite a smuggling case in March in which 19 people were charged in Detroit for allegedly operating an international ring that illegally moved cigarettes through Paraguay and Brazil. The indictment alleged that profits were funneled to Hezbollah. . . .
A trip to one of two warehouses where agents collect three to four tons of confiscated goods from the markets each week offers an instant corrective to that notion. The cardboard boxes are bursting open with pirated CDs and DVDs, PlayStation games, shoes, Hello Kitty dolls and watches. The air smells like tobacco, from thousands of cartons of phony Marlboros.
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