EXPORTANDO JIHAD: HOW IRAN IS USING ARAB PROXIES TO PROMOTE THE EMERGENCE OF AN ARAB-LATIN AMERICAN IDENTITY.

This study questions the conclusions of much of the literature on Iran's influence in Latin America that geographic distance and cultural differences limit its effects. It argues that just as Marxism attached itself to Catholicism in the creation of Liberation Theology, so it attached itself to Islam in the creation of Political Islam. In both cases, powerful authoritarian states created a class of university-educated youth and turned the state bureaucracy into a national employment agency to absorb them. In both Latin America and the Middle East this project was unsustainable and some of the educated unemployed channeled their frustrations into creating ideologically driven subversive groups. In the Cold War many of these were Marxist groups but in both regions, a large organizational infrastructure of religious resistance groups were also created. In Latin America Liberation Theology priests who aimed to help Indigenous peoples reclaim land that had been "usurped" by non-Indians since the times of the conquest led these groups. In the Middle East some of the main resistance movements were created to oppose Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories but also southern Lebanon. The paper outlines the cultural influences that facilitate the creation of an Anti-Imperialist front in Latin America that combines the "revolutionary democratic" movements of the countries in the Cuba-Venezuala axis and the radical Islamist movements of the Middle East. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]