The president of the Confederation of Israelite Associations of Venezuela (CAIV), Abraham Levy Benshimol, has said it was worrying that the militant Lebanese group Hezbollah could be operating in his country. In an interview with Argentina's Jewish News Agency (AJN), Levy Benshimol said the Jewish community was concerned by a story published last week by the ‘Los Angeles Times’ newspaper, and reproduced by Israeli media, according to which Hezbollah could have a base of operations in Venezuela.
"We have nobody that would provide us with information", Levy Benshimol noted, and added that because of that he had no other information "other than that published in the media." In turn, the president of the Israelite Federation of Sao Paulo, Brazil, Ricardo Berkiensztat, told AJN that the Jewish communities of Latin America and the world should "work together to exert pressure on Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, so that he knows how dangerous it is to have a terrorist group in his state" since Hezbollah “may be his friend, but they can change their mind because they have goals and they go get them." The leader of Sao Paulo's Jewish community added that the news "was not new, because we already believed that the ties between Iran and Venezuela are growing" and that is why they are "worried" and "looking carefully at what is going on there."
The executive director of the Representative Committee of Jewish Entities in Chile, Marcelo Isaacson, told AJN that the presence of Hezbollah militants in Venezuela had been a great concern for a long time:
"We have been insisting on this issue for a long time, due to the well-known relationship between [Iranian leader] Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Chávez, and we knew that the flights from Iran were going to increase," the Chilean leader said. Isaacson warned that the presence of the Lebanese organization "creates instability in the security of the region" and stressed that the Jewish community has already relayed this concern to the Chilean government. "Faced with this security instability, we should attempt to create unity among the governments and the secret security services," he said.
He welcomed the recent meeting between leaders of the World Jewish Congress and Chávez as "a step forward toward reaching a consensus between the Jewish community and the Venezuelan government." Referring to that meeting, the president of Uruguay's Israelite Central Committee (CCIU), Israel Buszkaniek, told AJN that, after the meeting "where an agreement was reached to start a better relationship", this is not the time "for the Jewish communities to take a stance" on Chávez's relationship with Iran. And he added: "We should establish the degree of certainty of the information" that Hezbollah is operating in Venezuela.
