Lessons to Be Learned: The United States faces what Latin Americans already sadly know; Safety is an illusion. (Trade Talk).

Some time has passed since the horrific airplane-bombings of the World Trade Center in New York, but their resonance hasn't. Many of my neighbors here in suburban northern California say they feel a new vulnerability.

Having lived in Latin America on and off since the 1960s keeps me from sharing in their sense of lost innocence. Latin Americans have a long history with homegrown terrorism, from the leftist Tupamaros in Uruguay in the '60s and '70s to Peru's Shining Path in the 1980 to the rightist paramilitaries today in Colombia. And long before Sept. 11, 2001, Latin Americans--much less than Israelis but more so than U.S. citizens--had direct experience with Middle Eastern-origin terrorism.

Several hundreds of innocent Argentines were dragged into Middle Eastern bloodshed when a bomb exploded in 1992 at Israel's embassy in Buenos Aires. Twenty-nine were killed, including mothers with their toddlers incinerated in the blast. Two years later the same city was slammed again: A car laden with 660 pounds of explosives leveled the seven-story Argentine-Israeli Mutual Aid Association building, slaughtering 85 and injuring 300.

Police and firefighters laboring in New York hauntingly echoed the scene in Argentina's largest city, where rescue workers also clawed through charred ruins for survivors following one of the worst post-Holocaust assaults ever against a Jewish community. Like George W. Bush, then-President of Argentina Carlos Menem vowed to track down the culprits.

When I visited the new Mutual Aid building in 1996, I endured an elaborate security ritual before entering a veritable fortress. Argentina's Jewish community has since learned to live--as U.S. residents inevitably will--in a world of identity cards, permanent guards and automobile barriers.

A month after the car bombing in Buenos Aires, I visited the border area shared by Argentina. Paraguay and Brazil, an enclave that is home to about 12,000 residents of Arab descent. I was looking into allegations that explosives used in the bombing had come from there. For the first time, I heard terms now suddenly familiar to U.S. citizens, such as "globalization of Islamic fundamentalism" or "sleepers," militants who lead normal lives in targeted countries until they strike.

In 1999, a sleeper named Said Hassan Ali Mohamed Mukhlis, a seller of blenders and radios in the Paraguayan border city of Ciudad del Este, was arrested trying to enter Brazil with a fake passport. Brazilians later were horrified to learn that Mukhlis was an Egyptian terrorist on his way to bomb a London target. Like Mukhlis, the hijacker-bombers of the four U.S. airplanes led normal lives--working out at gyms, drinking in bars--until that dreadful September day.

Less than two weeks after the terrorist attack in the United States, 20 people accused of buying and preparing the van used in the Mutual Aid building bombing went on trial. Argentina's Supreme Court has formally accused the Iran-linked Hezbollah group of planning the Israeli embassy bombing in a case that involves 44,000 pages of testimony and 1,500 statements.

"This is an open wound for all Argentines," President Fernando de la Rua said at the time, "like two gashes on the face of the fatherland."

For years, the tri-border has been swarming with agents from Israel's Mossad, interpol, the CIA and the police forces of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay. Yet no smoking gun has surfaced, which shows how difficult it is to secure concrete evidence against the terrorist underground.

Hopefully, the United States will have more luck nabbing the masterminds behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The United States has greater defense resources than Latin America, of course, but only time will tell how much frustration we stand to face in bringing justice to bear on terror.