July 18 marks 30 years since the bombing of the Argentine-Israeli Mutual Association (AMIA) building in Buenos Aries, which killed 85 people including six of my fellow Bolivian citizens. As is true of many crimes that can be linked to the Islamic Republic of Iran, no one has ever been held legally accountable for the terrorist attack, even though it is well understood that the operation was carried out by Hezbollah at the behest of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
In absence of that accountability, the Iranian regime and the IRGC have continued working to expand their influence in Argentina and in the rest of Latin America. The threat of Iran-backed terrorism has never left the region, and has in fact grown on a global scale, as evidenced by numerous reports of other attempted bombings and targeted assassinations.
In June 2018, an Iranian diplomat working out of the regime's embassy in Vienna was identified as the mastermind of a plot to set off explosives at a gathering of tens of thousands of Iranian expatriates near Paris, which had been organized by the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI). And just last year, the Spanish politician Alejo Vidal-Quadras very narrowly survived being shot at point-blank range in central Madrid.
While being transported to hospital, Vidal-Quadras used his phone to communicate the word "Iran," and he later clarified that he knew the Iranian regime to be behind the attack because he has "no other enemy." There are many other politicians throughout the world who could say just the same thing, and they are all potential targets of schemes by the IRGC and the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS).
Unless the international community takes major steps to confront these institutions, it will only be a matter of time before one of those schemes has an impact as bad or worse than the 1994 AMIA bombing. And just as importantly, unless the international community adopts a plan to help the Iranian people remove themselves from the tyranny of the current system, there is no limit to how long the IRGC and the MOIS will go on plotting violence against Iranian dissidents and activists, Western nationals, and anyone deemed a threat to the theocratic dictatorship.
Fortunately, there is no shortage of policymakers in the Americas and in Europe who are prepared to adopt new strategies for dealing with the Iranian regime, its terrorist institutions, and their proxies. Unfortunately, the actual leaders of Western governments have largely remained mired in policies of complacency and outright appeasement, even pushing back against a growing chorus of support for measures that would undermine Tehran's ability to terrorize foreign adversaries while also suppressing dissent at home.
In 2019, the United States saw fit to designate the entire IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization. Since then, strong majorities in both the UK Parliament and the European Parliament have urged their governments to join in taking that simplest and most obvious step toward limiting the reach of Iran's terrorist-supporting hardline paramilitary. Yet both the UK and the EU have dragged their feet on the issue, apparently fearing a loss of diplomatic openings with the regime.
But those diplomatic openings were never genuine in the first place, and have never yielded any sort of moderation in the regime's conduct, not even in matters regarding terrorism and violent threats against foreign nationals. Nevertheless, Western narratives of pending moderation within the Iranian regime have flared up again in the wake of Iran's recent special election, which led to the so-called reformist Masoud Pezeshkian being appointed to replace President Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash in May.
The pro-democracy coalition known as the National Council of Resistance of Iran held a conference in the wake of that election's first round of voting, which I had the honor of attending in Paris at the end of June. It emphasized that Pezeshkian's victory would not signal any potential for real change and that even the most dedicated "reformists" in mainstream Iranian politics are both unwilling and unable to challenge the will of the clerical supreme leader.
In recent years, the NCRI has acquired the formal endorsements of thousands of lawmakers across dozens of countries, all of whom recognize that the threat of Iranian terrorism will only evaporate with the collapse of the existing regime. It is therefore the responsibility of all democratic governments to blacklist the IRGC, undermine its terrorist proxies, isolate the Iranian regime, and give moral and political support to the Iranian people and the Iranian Resistance as they rise up and overthrow the theocratic dictatorship once and for all.
The anniversary of the AMIA bombing should be a reminder of this responsibility, not least for any nation that is threatened by the persistence of Iranian influence.
Jorge Tuto Quiroga served as the president of Bolivia in 2001-02.
