Mick Hartley

You might think there'd be little appeal in Latin America for the Iranian Shi'ite thug Qassem Soleimani, a man who bears responsibility for the murder of tens of thousands of Syrians, as well as orchestrating Iranian militias across the Middle East. If he's carefully de-Islamised though, and presented as some kjnd of heroic fighter against the evils of US imperialism, then yes, it can work. Emanuele Ottolenghi writes in Tablet on the recently founded Qassem Soleimani Chair for Sociocultural and Geopolitical Studies in Latin America and the Middle East in Caracas, and the work of spreading Iran's revolution to the gullible but ever-present anti-American climate among those let down by Marx but always on the lookout for some new heroes.

For decades, Iran has patiently sought to export its Islamic Revolution to Latin America. Alongside Iranian embassies, one academic institution stands out as a bastion of Iran’s influence operations in the region: Al Mustafa International University, which has branches in over 50 countries, and which the U.S. Department of the Treasury sanctioned in 2020 for its role in Iran’s propaganda efforts, including the provision of material support for the training and indoctrination of Shiite militias. With an $80 million annual budget, Al Mustafa is one of Iran’s leading propaganda outlets. Its robust budget enables it to spread Iran’s revolutionary message far beyond the walls of its campus.

The university’s latest achievement is the establishment of the Cátedra Libre Qassem Soleimani, or the Qassem Soleimani Chair for Sociocultural and Geopolitical Studies in Latin America and the Middle East, a center that was inaugurated in November 2020 at the Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela in Caracas. The late Qassem Soleimani was the commander of the Quds Force, the elite unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards’ Corps in charge of overseas operations….

What began in the early 1980s as a subtle effort to propagate revolutionary Iran’s worldview through mosques and cultural centers is increasingly loud and visible, thanks to Iran’s transnational alliances with hard-left movements and regimes in Latin America, which help facilitate Al Mustafa’s proselytizing and propaganda work. Thanks to the zeal of its acolytes and Iran’s funding, a vast regional network is now in place. Revolutionary fellow travelers from communist Cuba to the Castro-Chavista regimes in Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela have given Iran greater access, freedom of action, and resources to consolidate its outreach and leverage local anti-American sentiment to serve its own interests.

It’s no surprise that Iran’s foray into Latin American universities has scored its biggest success in Venezuela. Caracas has been Tehran’s closest ally in the region since the late Hugo Chavez and his Bolivarian brand of anti-Americanism seized power there in 1999. Relations flourished under Chavez’s tenure, and especially when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was Iran’s president from 2005 to 2013….

Al Mustafa-sponsored institutions are an echo chamber for Iran’s narrative of resistance to so-called imperialists and oppressors, usually embodied by the United States and Israel, which resonates more in parts of Latin America than a specifically Islamic message would, winning support from old-fashioned communists and nativist, indigenous separatists. Among these groups, anti-Americanism is an easy sell.

Since Soleimani’s death in 2020, Iran has lionized him as an iconic hero of the “Resistance,” depicting him for Latin American audiences as a latter-day Islamic Che Guevara. This theme reverberates in Spanish-language, pro-Iran propaganda: In a January 2022 blog post republished by TeleSur, Chilean author Pablo Jofre Leal, a collaborator of Al Mustafa University’s Hispanic languages department, Islam Oriente, and other Iranian proxies in Latin America, evoked Che’s words to describe Soleimani: “The highest level which the human race can aspire to is to be revolutionary.” Soleimani, he added, was “an authentic revolutionary.” The mandate of the Soleimani Chair at the Cátedra is to explore themes that are part of Soleimani’s “legacy” as “a hero and martyr in the anti-imperialist struggle.” As co-director Ramon Medero explained in a video launching the Cátedra, Soleimani is “a martyred hero who immediately became a symbol of justice and a paradigm to be followed by all oppressed people of the world.”

The White House seems uninterested in all this, preferring to concentrate instead on the highly dubious benefits of reviving the JCPOA. Ottolenghi thinks they're making a mistake.