In January, Colombia and Honduras designated Lebanon’s Hezbollah as a terrorist organisation.
The move came in the context of a counterterrorism meeting in the Colombian capital of Bogota, attended by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The Jerusalem Post noted that Pompeo and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had “campaigned in recent months to have more countries in the region sanction Hezbollah”.
The Post quoted Netanyahu on the “important step” the two nations had made in “join[ing] Israel and the US in our fight against global terror”.
And yet, it wasn’t so much a “step” as a continuation of business as usual; after all, Colombia and Honduras have long been joined at the hip with the US-Israeli duo in major global “fights”.
In the 1980s, for example, Honduras served as a launchpad for the US terrorisation of Nicaragua, a key battleground in the all-important war on communism. The Central American nation also got to host its very own CIA-trained death squad, which - as the Baltimore Sun explained - “terrorised Honduras” for much of the decade.
As luck would have it, Israel was also involved at the time in arming and otherwise assisting the repressive Honduran regime, partially as a favour to the US.
In Colombia, too, Israel abetted rightwing terror: the late Carlos Castano - who after attending training in Israel in 1983 went on to become a founding father of modern Colombian paramilitarism - credited the Israelis as his inspiration for the whole paramilitary thing.
Flash forward to more recent years, and it’s clear that Colombia and Honduras are highly qualified candidates for the US-Israeli model of fighting wars of terror, disguised as wars on terror, which have devastated human populations from Afghanistan to Iraq to Palestine and beyond. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.