Targeting the Poor: How Al-Qaida Would Recruit from Latin America.

The U.S. Department of State and experts on terrorism have suggested that the poor are a potential source of recruits for political and Islamic fundamentalist terrorist organizations. This observation is particularly applicable to the poor in Latin American nations (that is, the Caribbean and Central and South American regions). Focusing on al-Qaida, this paper uses Bayat's (2000) classification of the passive, surviving, political and resisting poor to argue that al-Qaida's recruitment efforts would target the surviving poor residing in Latin American nations because, relative to the other categories of the poor, the surviving poor demonstrate more activities in common with al-Qaida: for example, theft, kidnapping for ransom, narco-trafficking, and illegal immigrant smuggling. Such activities relate both to efforts by the surviving poor to escape poverty and to the planning and execution of terrorist acts by al-Qaida. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]