However, most of these plots seem stupid and inept when thwarted, but if one succeeds those who failed to take it seriously will be excoriated as inattentive and inept. Although political use is made of these things, they are all too real, and the would-be perpetrators are often autonomous and self-directed.

If there are twenty plots a year and one in a hundred succeed, we’ll have one successful one every five years. Basis statistics tells us that there are enough trials, even an improbable event becomes probable.

Upon winning independence, Guyana was more or less evenly split between the African-Guyanese ex-slaves and the Indian-Guyanese ex-indentured laborers. Its first Prime Minister was a communist, Cheddi Jagan, whose wife Janet was an American Jewess from New York. Trinidad has a similar history, but the African-Trinidadians have a clear majority.

The Indians generally have higher IQs and come from a Great Tradition, which gave them a leg up. In Fiji, unlike Guyana and Trinidad, these ethnic battles are fought with bullets as much as ballots.

The U.S. has more experience at assimilating strangers than do these islands (for pedants, yes, I know, Guyana is only an honorary island), and for the moment there are more resources to go around. Even here, we already have major political turf battles in Los Angeles, and Mexican youth gangs are taking over turf at gunpoint. Only rather short-sighted capitalists who have adopted multi-culti rhetoric as a matter of convenience can be blind to the obvious risks. Of course, if you live in a gated community, send your kids to an exclusive private school, and prefer not to mow your own lawn, you can afford to turn your nose up at “nativism.”

There’s a considerable population of Arab immigrants in South America (including Argentina’s ex-president Menem and São Paulo’s sometime governor Maluf), although for historical reasons they are sometimes known as “turcos”. n Brazil, ownership in architecture and contracting tends to be Jewish and in the rag trade, Arab. Most turcos are Christians but there are some Muslims, some of whom no doubt are jihadis who can blend into the smuggling culture of the “triangle.”

I am all for commerce and minding our own business as the cornerstones of our policy in the Southern Cone. Less neglect of our own southern frontier would be a good idea; we can dream, can’t we?