Iran’s growing influence in Venezuela challenges the West
Iran is striving to expand its influence in fellow U.S. adversary Venezuela, which is hosting an Iranian cultural fair this week and seeking Iranian assistance to revive the ailing Venezuelan energy industry.
The International Fair of Venezuelan-Iranian Culture and Friendship opened March 4 in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, and runs through Sunday. It is organized by a Caracas-based group called the Center for Intercultural Exchange in Latin America, or CICL.
The U.S. research group Foundation for Defense of Democracies said in a report last December that CICL is a Latin American branch of Iran’s al-Mustafa International University, which the report describes as Tehran’s principal institution for recruiting, indoctrinating and training foreign converts to Shi’ite Islam.
Videos posted Friday on CICL’s Instagram page showed Iranian Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance Mohammad Mahdi Esmaili visiting the fair.
Julio Borges, Member of Venezuela’s Opposition Justice First Party:
"The presence of Iranians and people from other countries that are different from our culture — for regular Venezuelan people, it is something strange that has nothing to do with our tradition.
It’s like a political occupation of our country and it’s trying to change our democratic values. At the end of the day, what those [political occupiers] are doing is simply using our country as a base in order to develop operations in Latin America. This is something that has to be taken seriously by Western countries."
Source: IMFAT