Guatemala President-elect meets Foreign Minister Katz: “The friends of Israel are my friends and the enemies of Israel are our enemies.”
By Elad Benari
Guatemala President-elect Alejandro Giammattei, who is currently on a visit to Israel, met on Sunday with Foreign Minister Yisrael Katz in Jerusalem and announced that the first thing he will do when he takes office next month will be to approve the declaration of Hezbollah as a terrorist organization.
Giammattei made clear that he would work to ensure that no Hezbollah member will be able to stay in Guatemala and operate from its borders, and also pledged to work so that other countries in Central America make a similar decision. “The friends of Israel are my friends and the enemies of Israel are our enemies,” he said.
Giammattei and Minister Katz also agreed to tighten the security cooperation between the two countries in the fight against Hezbollah.
This was made possible after talks and continuous contacts between Foreign Minister Katz and the President-elect, whom Katz also met at the UN General Assembly in New York.
Katz thanked the President-elect for his warm attitude towards the State of Israel and for the relocation of his country’s embassy to Jerusalem.
Argentina several months ago officially designated Hezbollah as a terrorist organization and ordered the freezing of its assets in the country.
Argentina blames Hamas for two attacks on its soil and ordered the freezing of its assets in the country, Reuters reports.
The announcement in July coincided with a visit by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as Argentina marked the 25th anniversary of the deadly bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in which 85 people died, this past summer.
The Argentine government’s Financial Information Unit ordered the freezing of assets of members of Hezbollah and the organization a day after the country created a new list for people and entities linked to terrorism.
The designation of Hezbollah as a terrorist group was the first by any Latin American country.
“At present, Hezbollah continues to represent a current threat to security and the integrity of the economic and financial order of the Argentine Republic,” the unit said in a statement.
There was no immediate comment from Hezbollah on the move.
Hezbollah, which is a proxy of Iran, has long been linked to the 1992 attack on the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, which killed 29 people, and the 1994 AMIA attack.
The Iranians are accused of ordering Hezbollah to carry out the AMIA bombing, which was the deadliest terror attack in the South American country’s history.
Argentine investigators accuse five former Iranian former officials, including ex-president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, of orchestrating the July 18, 1994 car bombing.
Recent reports indicated that Brazil is considering a similar move.
In 2013, the European Union blacklisted Hezbollah’s “military wing” as a terrorist organization, while failing to blacklist the group’s political arm.
However, EU members the Netherlands and United Kingdom consider all of Hezbollah a terrorist entity, as do the United States, Canada, Israel and even the Arab League.
The British government formally announced in February that it intends to ban the political wing of the Hezbollah terror organization, after previously having banned its military wing.
(Israel National News)
