mr. farah works as a consultant on security challenges, terrorism and transnational organized crime in latin america. for the two decades before consulting, he worked as a foreign correspondent and investigative reporter for "the washington post" covering the drug wars in andean region, the diamond trade in west africa and radical islam and terrorism financing. the witnesses will now be recognized for five minutes to give an oral presentation of their testimony. without objection the witnesses' written statement will be made part of the record following their oral remarks. once they have finished presenting their testimony, each member of the task force will have five minutes within which to ask their questions. on your table for the witnesses there are three lights. green means go. yellow means you're running out of time and red means stop. the microphone we're told is very sensitive so please make sure you're speaking directly into it. with that, professor realuyo, you're recognized for five

mr. farah: if you look at the way it is documented, where you have iranian banks setting up and operating or in the case of ecuador where the president of ecuador authorized a small state owned bank to become a a channel for iranian money and authorize it explicitly they were going to have communications encrypted and the key would be held in the iranian embassy, that is a little unusual for a normal banking structure. the problem in this setting is that when you have a state sanctioning those activities no one will investigate them and that gives us the point of the -- absolute impunity of the state provides. once you have the state that is willing to use criminal groups or terrorist organizations is part of their state sanctioned policy as opposed to what we see perhaps in mexico where they want a judge who will not condemn them, they want a border guard who will let them cross, they want a policeman who will let things go by. the new construct is stay protected and state driven. that is a fu

mr. farah: thank you very much for the opportunity to testify about the dangers next this among the terrorism crime and corruption. i will focus my remarks on latin america where we are seeing the convergence of three factors in new and dangerous forms. the convergence of terrorism transnational crime, and corruption are at the core of a strategic threat the united to states. i describe the emerging tier for the security priority as criminalized states. the states that actively other -- use organized crime that the state craft would rely on active to its fund themselves. in our hemisphere come we primarily see this in a network that would emanate from venezuela where you have the political project amongst multiple nations whose underlying goal is harming the united states as well as operating the criminal enterprise. other than being pursued by law enforcement and effort to impede their activities transnational kamal networks and terrorist groups are able to operate in more stable, secure envir