Russian FM Rep. Cites Latin America As New Haven For Terrorists

The Deputy Director of the Russian Foreign Ministry's Department on New Challenges and Threats, Dmitry Feoktistov, spoke out about the growing threat of terrorism in South America, speaking at the Inter-American Committee on Combating Terrorism, held in Washington last week.

“There is a danger of camps in the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean for training jihadists, establishing ties between terrorists and local criminal and drug syndicates,” Feoktistov said.

“We are concerned about the activation of recruiting activities of extremists, especially in the Caribbean states,” he added. “We do not want it to grow into an epidemic.”

Feoktistov believes that a peculiar situation has arisen as a result Daesh, also known as “Islamic State” and “ISIS,” being beaten down in Iraq and Syria. Latin America, he says, acts as a fallback position, where the terrorist organization is trying to augment its power.

At the meeting Feoktistov supported joining the Russian Federal Security Service’s International Data Bank on Countering Terrorism, which contains information on 89 terrorist organizations and more than 11,000 foreign terrorists.

Feoktistov said Russia is ready to facilitate the training of intelligence officers and called on the participating countries to consider the possibility of joining the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s Convention on Countering Extremism.

He told reporters that Russia is currently in talks with Argentina and Brazil on joining the International Counter-Terrorist Database.

"A number of concrete countries here in the region express interest in joining this database, particularly Argentina and Brazil," Feoktistov said on Thursday. "We are discussing concrete modalities of their joining the database that consists of a huge amount of information about terrorists."

Russia and Argentina are working on a bilateral intergovernmental agreement on the fight against terrorism, expected to be signed by the end of this year, likely during the G20 Summit that will be held in Argentina.