For decades, Congress and experts have documented the Islamic terrorist group Hezbollah’s involvement in Latin America in terms of money laundering, training camps, and smuggling operations.
Why does the Middle East-based Hezbollah even have a connection to Latin America and Venezuela? For starters, Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro was a known ally of the Islamic regime in Tehran, which created the terrorist group.
As CBN News has reported over the years, Iran and Hezbollah’s tentacles run deep in the Western Hemisphere. Iran forged military and business alliances with several dictators and corrupt leaders in the region throughout the 1990s and 2000s, most famously with Venezuela, which hosted camps for Hezbollah fighters and transported members of Iran’s Quds force
The Middle East Forum explains, “For decades, Venezuela’s transformation under Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro was not just a national tragedy—it was a regional and global security emergency. What began as populist politics devolved into kleptocracy, terror facilitation, and a nexus of Islamist extremist collaboration with Iranian terror networks.”
The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) also reports that Hezbollah has helped the Venezuelan regime “launder money through multiple way points.”
“Hezbollah enjoys open support from local authoritarian regimes aligned with Tehran, such as that of Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuela – which, for all intents and purposes, has become Iran’s forward operating base in Latin America,” FDD explains.
BELOW: CBN News spoke with Ryan Brobst, the director of the Center on Military and Political Power at FDD, for some background.
