SUBSCRIBER+REPORTING — The United States this month, announced a fresh slate of sanctions on a family nexus of seven Hezbollah operatives and bankrollers spanning Lebanon to Latin America, with officials accusing the individuals and their organizations of providing material support for the terrorist outfit’s footprint in the US’s backyard.
Key on the list was Amer Mohamed Akil Rada, a Lebanese national and alleged key player in executing the 1994 attack on the Argentine-Israelite Mutual Association in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 people. According to the US Treasury Department, Rada resided in South America for over a decade, operating a charcoal business that traded between Colombia and Lebanon, with more than eight percent of the profits benefitting Hezbollah.
Rada’s formerly Belize-based brother Samer was also slapped with sanctions after officials implicated him in several drug trafficking and money laundering ventures across Latin America, while also running the Venezuela-headquartered cryptocurrency consultancy firm BCI Technologies. Rada’s son Mehdi Akil Helbawi and his Colombia-based firm Zanga S.A.S. were also named alongside the Lebanon-based company Black Diamond and its owner Ali Ismail, who officials accused of transferring funds to Mehdi’s firm.
“(This) action underscores the US government’s commitment to pursuing Hezbollah operatives and financiers no matter their location,” Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Brian E. Nelson said in a statement. “We will continue to root out those who seek to abuse the US and international financial system to fund and engage in terrorism.”
The sanctions illuminate the flagrant – and ever-growing – security threat of Hezbollah’s imprint in Latin America.
“Hezbollah’s presence in Latin America goes back four decades and is deeply rooted. Its networks serve the dual purpose of raising funds to finance Hezbollah, much of it through illicit activities such as drug trafficking and money laundering and providing logistical support and infrastructure for Hezbollah’s terror plots,” Dr. Emanuele Ottolenghi, Senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) told The Cipher Brief. “It is extremely important to Hezbollah, but it is also beneficial to its regional partners since rogue regimes like Venezuela and cartels rely on Hezbollah’s networks to conduct their illicit activities.”
Hezbollah formed in the early 1980s, amid Lebanon’s fifteen-year civil war, which erupted in 1975, after long-simmering indignation with the country’s extensive and armed Palestinian presence. Portraying itself as a Shiite resistance party, Hezbollah pledged in 1985, to drive out Western powers from Lebanon, called for the decimation of the Israeli state and vowed allegiance to the Iranian Supreme Leader. The outfit was designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) by the U.S. State Department in 1997.
However, the label hasn’t stopped Hezbollah, often considered an Iranian proxy, from securing a foothold in Latin America, most notably as a means to generate revenue through drug trafficking. In the directory of more than two thousand foreign narcotics kingpins listed by the U.S. government, officials say almost two hundred are connected to – or affiliated – with Hezbollah.
Tehran’s penetration into Latin America dates back to Hezbollah’s founding years, with the advent of Mohsen Rabbani to Buenos Aires in 1983. He initially operated as a halal meat inspector before becoming a teacher and leader at the At-Tawhid Mosque. A decade later, Tehran delegated him cultural attaché of the Iranian Embassy, where he is said to have assumed the leadership role of Hezbollah operations on the ground – a position he remained in for fourteen years. Rabbani was later found responsible for masterminding the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, slaying 29 people and injuring more than 240, followed by the Argentine-Israelite Mutual Association two years later.
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According to Ottolenghi, Hezbollah’s activities are part crime and part terror, affecting U.S. national security.
“Hezbollah terror plots typically focus on US and Israeli and Jewish targets. Hezbollah’s illicit finance supports Latin American crime syndicates and thus contributes to flooding US markets with lethal drugs,” he explained. “By basing part of their illicit financial activities in the US as a transit point between Latin America and the Middle East, Hezbollah also threatens the integrity of the US financial system. They also engage in other white-collar crimes, such as counterfeiting, intellectual property theft, tax evasion, and the like. It’s bad all around.”
In 2008, U.S. officials launched Operation Titan – a joint mission with Colombian investigators. Over two years, authorities uncovered numerous associations between the Medellin-based cartel La Oficina de Envigado and the extensive expat Lebanese community. Such associations were believed to be emboldened by Hezbollah operatives who developed a labyrinth of cross-border trade routes and couriers between Colombia and neighboring Venezuela. During this time, the Bolivarian Republic’s Embassy in Damascus, Syria, was also used to facilitate high-level meetings between senior Venezuelan officials and Hezbollah’s top brass, setting in motion a cocaine-for-weapons conspiracy between the Lebanese terrorist group at Colombian rebels Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, better known as the FARC. Five years later, a cargo plane full of small arms touched down in Caracas from Lebanon as partial payment for the cocaine that FARC issued to the Maduro regime.
Operation Titan resulted in more than 130 arrests and the seizure of $23 million in illicit funds, but ultimately failed to halt Hezbollah’s criminal enterprise in the area. In particular, Venezuela remains a leading Hezbollah hotspot. The country’s critical location in South America, at the intersection of the Caribbean, provides Hezbollah with the ability to push close to U.S. soil and build a covert web of funding, training, intelligence, weapons, supplies and trade routes with official Venezuelan cover to bolster its terrorist rein globally.
“At the political level, radical leftist leaders in the region, including in Venezuela, have recognized a coincidence of interest with radical Islamic extremist movements such as Hezbollah in the struggle against the US and the associated rules-based international order,” noted Dr. Evan Ellis, a research professor of Latin American studies at the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute.
In 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) put forward several narcoterrorism indictments against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and members of his government, as well as Syrian-Venezuelan dual national Adel El Zabayar, whom the US accused of working with Maduro on a narcoterrorism scheme involving the FARC, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and Hezbollah.
Experts say the deeply-entrenched Hezbollah existence enables Iran to operate carte blanche in Venezuela, assisting the oil-swathed but corrupt and cash-strapped Maduro administration in refining its heavy crude and repairing its oil refineries on the Paraguana peninsula, assistance allegedly paid for in gold.
US assessments also maintain that Hezbollah remains incredibly aggressive in the tri-border area, encompassing Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. Secretary General of the Organization of American States, Luis Almagro 2017 referred to the region as “a source for Hezbollah financing.” Money-making endeavors in this area extend beyond the narcotics trade and into prostitution, human trafficking and tobacco trading as means of supplementary revenue.
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Even though much research and attention has been given to Hezbollah in Venezuela and the Tri-Border domain, experts caution that the organization’s tentacles extend further. For example, a Hezbollah operative was arrested in Peru in 2014, accused of devising a terrorist mission, and in Chile, security forces say they unearthed and disrupted a Hezbollah plan targeting civilians. Three years later, Bolivian law enforcement reported a Hezbollah-connected warehouse and captured a massive amount of explosive precursor material, according to The Washington Institute. Then, in 2021, reports from Colombia alleged that Hezbollah had established a plot to assassinate an Israeli national as a component of a larger scheme to retaliate against America for the death of Iran’s spymaster, Qasim Soleimani.
Experts say that Hezbollah sustains narcotics and money laundering ties to many of Latin America’s largest and most violent cartels, ranging from the FARC in Colombia to the PCC in Brazil to the Los Zetas in Mexico. U.S. authorities have also highlighted that Hezbollah has assisted Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel in constructing smuggling tunnels beneath the U.S-Mexico border, similar to those they have built between Lebanon and Israel, in a trade for cash.
“Hezbollah’s presence in various countries such as Paraguay, Venezuela, and Colombia is concerning, but even more so, are the illicit activities of Hezbollah in Mexico, our neighbor,” said Wesley Tabor, a former DEA agent who was stationed in Venezuela and across much of Latin America. “The introduction and continued involvement of Hezbollah’s illicit partnerships in Latin America create with every year, more and more embedded relationships. These strengthened relationships over time lend to more and more transference of operational trends and ultimately passing of terrorist type operation intention; this will end in future terrorist attacks on U.S. soil.”
As some experts assert, the encroachment of Hezbollah – which receives upwards of $700 million annually from Tehran – into the Western domain is a calculated gift for the heavily-sanctioned and economically isolated Iran.
Earlier this year, Iranian state media announced its intentions to broaden military operations and station warships in the strategic Panama Canal, which links the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and could prove a pervasive and profoundly troublesome threat to U.S. interests and security. Weeks after the disclosure, two Iranian warships received authorization from Brazil’s government to dock in Rio de Janeiro, sparking pushback from Washington and Israel.
“Iran benefits greatly from Hezbollah’s activities,” Ottolenghi stressed. “Hezbollah’s networks assist Iran’s efforts to procure weapons and technology; they have planned and carried out terror plots on Iran’s behalf; and Hezbollah’s support networks also act as a go-between with local political leadership and political movements that align with Iran’s agenda of anti-Americanism in the region.”
Ryan Berg, Director of the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS), highlighted that most of the revenue earned in Latin America returns to the main Hezbollah organization in Lebanon, which ultimately aids Iran in projecting power and influence across Latin America.
“Together with the United States, countries in the region need to use the financial and legal tools available to curtail Hezbollah’s activities. During the Obama administration, the US government pulled back on a major counter-Hezbollah operation in Latin America, so-called Operation Cassandra, partly as a way to entice Iran into the JCPOA nuclear agreement,” he continued. “This was a major mistake. In part, rooting out Hezbollah is so difficult because of permissive environments in the region, weak legal regimes and institutions, and a lack of political will – often transnational organized crime groups take priority over groups like Hezbollah.”
Washington has raised the alarm regarding Hezbollah for years, yet only a handful of countries in Latin America have responded to U.S. concerns. In July 2019, Argentina became the first country in the region to proclaim Hezbollah a terrorist organization. A month later, Paraguay followed suit. Colombia and Honduras also made the designation in January 2020, as did Guatemala in October. But since then, any formal designations have fallen to the wayside.
What can the U.S. do about the burgeoning threat so close to the homeland?
Ellis says the single most important action the administration can undertake is to rethink the easing of sanctions and other measures on populist authoritarian regimes, notably Venezuela, “which has returned to economic health and reintegration into the Latin American political system, facilitating the ability of Hezbollah to operate in the region.”
“The presence of Hezbollah networks gives anti-US actors such as Iran, asymmetric options against the US that could be leveraged in the future, particularly if Iran-US hostilities deepen or in the distant but possible case of Iranian support to a future US China military conflict,” he said. “As the US decreases its military footprint in the Middle East and shifts its policy focus away from the global war on terrorism, I worry that attention to - and resources for - following terrorist groups such as Hezbollah in the region are decreasing rather than increasing. International law enforcement cooperation and effective partner nation law enforcement capability in the countries in the region where Hezbollah operates is key.”
Ottolenghi emphasized that Washington needs to show allies in the region that Hezbollah’s activities are detrimental to their domestic interests, pointing out Hezbollah’s collusion with crime syndicates and Hezbollah’s extensive use of corruption.
While Washington has typically employed a steady stream of sanctions via the DOJ and OFAC, some argue that the burgeoning scope of Hezbollah operations in Latin America requires more resources to curb and eradicate it. Others like Tabor contend that sanctions have proven “feckless” as Hezbollah’s relationships in the region continue to thrive.
“The US is showing mixed signals to the world, especially in our backyard. In cases like Venezuela, we have indicted and sanctioned government heads who have demonstrated continued violations of US and international law. Despite this, the US continues to do business with them, principally by oil purchases,” he said. “Until the US, other Western allies, and the UN get serious about true accountability of rouge states which support Hezbollah activities in the world, it will not abate.”
Reporting by Hollie McKay
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