Hezbollah working with Mexican drug cartels???

A very troubling alliance...

Ties between Lebanon's Shiite Hizbullah organization and Mexican drug cartels have been strengthening over the past few years, the Washington Times reported Friday.

Hizbullah relies on "the same criminal weapons smugglers, document traffickers and transportation experts as the drug cartels," said Michael Braun, former administrator and chief of operations at the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

"They work together," added Braun, "They rely on the same shadow facilitators. One way or another, they are all connected. They'll leverage those relationships to their benefit, to smuggle contraband and humans into the US; in fact, they already are (smuggling)."

A number of American security officials, counterterrorism experts and drug trade law enforcement officials agreed with Braun's comments and said Hizbullah's use of the Mexican drug routes continued to increase with time.

The routes in question start in South America's tri-border region of Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil and continue to smuggling routes above and below the US-Mexico Border. Hizbullah is also suspected of operating similar routes through Venezuela and Columbia.

To finance its operations, Hizbullah relies in part on funding from a large Lebanese Shiite Muslim diaspora that stretches from the Middle East to Africa and Latin America. Some of the funding comes from criminal enterprises.