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This is only half the story. Every year for twenty years a column appears in an American paper outlining the corruption in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay. However, in Foz de Iguassu, Brazil you will find a huge, private, Libyan country-club which is open to every Middle East gangster in South America, and a beautiful mosque has been constructed in Foz. Most importantly, the old Christian Syrian/Lebanese families who settled the Argentina-Brazil-Paraguay tri-border region and initiated commerce there in the early twentieth century have been forced out of business by Muslim Arab merchants who have bought off the governments of the three nations.

On numerous occasions the United States embassies have complained of the presence of known Hizbollah agents in the region, but they have become as welcome there as the expatriate Nazis were after WWII. (Among other things, the Assad family of Syria is involved in the trade of hashish for South American cocain.) It is a dangerous place that should receive more reporting than it gets.