Iran throws a counter lasso against the US

A man of God and an enemy of the Great Satan." This is how the official media in Iran has described Fernando Lugo, the Paraguayan priest who has just surprised everyone by winning his country's presidency in a hotly contested election.

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was among the first foreign leaders to congratulate Lugo on his election victory. For Ahmadinejad hopes that, led by Lugo, Paraguay would add another link to what he calls "the counter lasso", the chain of anti-American regimes he is supporting with the help of his "brother" Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan President.

Ahmadinejad's analysis is simple: the US is trying to throw a lasso around the Islamic Republic with the help of allies in the Middle East, Transcaucasia, and Central Asia. Therefore, the Islamic Republic should throw a counter lasso through an alliance in US's very backyard in South America.

Lugo is a de-frocked Catholic bishop, expelled by the Vatican because of his involvement in radical leftist political activities in the name of "liberation theology". He visited Iran in the 1990s to pay homage to the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini - a man Lugo has praised as "a forerunner of the modern global revolutionary movement".

The Iran-run Hezbollah, a global movement of Khomeinist militants, has built a base in Paraguay since the late 1980s by recruiting within the Shiite community of Syrian-Lebanese origin that represents an estimated 15 per cent of the population.

That base played a key role in ensuring Lugo's victory, especially through a massive fund-raising campaign supported by Iran and Venezuela.

Cuba under Fidel Castro was the first Latin American regime with which the Islamic Republic forged an informal alliance. Over the past 18 years, Iran has injected billions of dollars into Cuba's ailing economy, helping the Castro regime absorb the shock of the loss of Soviet patronage in 1991.

However, it was only in the late 1990s that Tehran found a true Latin American ally in the person of Chavez. He has helped Iran create a radical axis within the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) with Libya and Algeria as occasional allies.

However, relations between Tehran and Caracas remained somewhat lukewarm as Mohammad Khatami, the mullah who preceded Ahmadinejad as president, proved reluctant to lead Iran into a systematic confrontation with the US.

With Ahmadinejad as president, Iran revived its militant policy of challenging the US. He has visited Latin America four times in three years, more than any other region of the world.

With help from Chavez, Ahmadinejad is now trying to win the leadership of the so-called Non-Aligned Movement, a grouping of over 150 Third World nations, some of them anti-American since the days of the Cold War.

Both Ahmadinejad and Chavez have every reason to be pleased with their strategy. The US is clearly in retreat in its own backyard. The Monroe Doctrine, designed to deny European powers a dominant role in the American continent, does not apply to Iran, determined to carve its own zone of influence in Latin America.

At the start of the new century, Brazil already had a moderate leftist regime under President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva. Since then, Bolivia has also elected a leftist firebrand in the person of President Evo Morales. Chile, Argentina and Uruguay have opted for moderate leftist governments while Ecuador has taken a sharp turn to the left.

Ecuador's new president Rafael Correa had suspended talks for a free trade agreement with the US and threatened not to renew the lease for the American air base at Manta next year. Joining the so-called "Progressist Front" of Latin American countries with leftist regimes, Ecuador has also returned to Opec, increasing the influence of Iran and Venezuela.

In Nicaragua, the Sandinista, under President Daniel Ortega, slightly less leftist, but a lot older, have returned to power. Oretga highlighted his alliance with Ahmadinejad by making Iran the first country outside Latin America that he visited soon after returning to power.

Even in Peru, the return of Alan Garcia as president has revived the corpse of the left. The only piece of the puzzle still tilting to the right is Colombia under President Alvaro Uribe. Not surprisingly, a campaign has been launched to "get Uribe".

Seen from Tehran, all this is a confirmation of Ahmadinejad's "working hypothesis" that the global tide is turning against the United States and that the idea of clipping the wings of the American "Great Satan" is no longer a mere revolutionary fantasy.

Under Ahmadinejad, Tehran has signed contracts worth $40 billion with Caracas, a huge sum considering the modest size of the Venezuelan economy. Contracts worth a further $30 billion have been negotiated with Bolivia, Nicaragua and Ecuador. Iran's business relations with Cuba, Brazil and Peru are also booming.

Problematic

Relations with Argentina have remained problematic largely because of arrest warrants issued by a court in Buenos Aires for a number of senior Iranian officials in connection with the bombing of a Jewish cultural centre over a decade ago.

These contracts come in four sectors. The first, and the largest, is energy. Iran's aim is to replace as many of the US companies as possible in the Latin American oil and gas industry.

A joint Iranian-Venezuelan consortium hopes to dominate the natural gas sector in Bolivia while launching new exploration schemes for oil and gas in Nicaragua, Ecuador and Peru.

The second sector is armament. None of the Latin American countries has a credible weapons' industry. The Islamic Republic hopes to fill that gap. Iran has already sold $4.5 billion worth of military material to Venezuela and is training hundreds of Venezuelan military personnel.

The third sector is security. Iranian and Venezuelan security services have already set up a coordination committee and developed a system of exchanging information. Nicaragua is expected to join soon, along with Cuba, Bolivia and Ecuador.

Finally, Iran is investing in Latin American media. The first step in that direction has come in the form of a $1 billion Iranian investment in developing a Spanish language television network to compete with the major American satellite channels.

As Ahmadinejad likes to tell his Latin American hosts: the Americans are going, the Iranians are coming!

Amir Taheri is an Iranian writer based in Europe.