The World Affairs Council Young Professionals March 3, 2009

Terrorism thrives in lawless and disenfranchised regions of the world. From the tribal areas of Northern Pakistan to the slums of Brazil, terrorist groups and urban gangs are found in shadow economies, financed by drug trafficking, illicit arms sales, document forgery, and other criminal activities. Until recently, Latin America has been near the bottom of U.S counter-terrorism priorities and no recent terrorist attacks appear to have originated there. Yet recent trends in Latin America may pose a significant danger to the United States. For example, could a relationship between Venezuela and Iran be an opening for terrorist? Can more be done to diminish the conditions that terrorists seek to exploit?

Doug Farah is currently a scholar at NEFA Foundation and the International Strategy and Assessment Center. He is a frequent guest lecturer on finance and national security to the U.S military and intelligence community. For twenty years, Farah was a foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, covering wars, terrorism and criminal activities in Latin America, the Caribbean and West Africa.

His writings have appeared in The New Republic, Foreign Policy Magazine, Men's Vogue, Mother Jones, The Financial Times, The American Journalism Review, The Washington Post Magazine. Farah won the Sigma Delta Chi Distinguished Service Award for a series on death squads in El Salvador and the Maria Moors Cabot Prize from Columbia University for his coverage of Latin America. He is the author of Blood From Stones: The Secret Financial Network of Terror, the premier book on the subject and now cited as one of the best books written on al Qaeda’s funding mechanisms.