When Hezbollah makes headlines, it’s usually in reference to its military entrenchment in southern Lebanon, its alignment with Iran, or its influence on the internal politics of Beirut. Rarely does the Western Hemisphere—let alone South America—enter the discussion. And when it does, the framing tends to follow a familiar arc: Hezbollah, in search of hard currency, has plugged itself into narcotics, smuggling, and money laundering networks across the continent, particularly in the Tri-Border Area of Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina. This framing is not entirely wrong—but it is incomplete. The prevailing analysis treats Hezbollah’s South American activity as an opportunistic extension of its Middle Eastern operations: a way to fund the real action elsewhere (Sánchez-Azuara 2024). But this view underestimates the strategic thinking behind the group’s presence in the region. It also overlooks what Hezbollah has built. This is not a haphazard criminal sideline. It is a strategic redundancy network—a deliberately constructed system that enables Hezbollah to replicate key elements of its logistical, financial, and operational architecture outside the Middle East.

In engineering, redundancy is the backbone of resilience. Critical systems—airplanes, power grids, even satellites—include backups not because failure is likely, but because failure must not be catastrophic. Hezbollah has applied this principle to its global infrastructure. In South America, it has established a parallel network that functions as an insurance policy. When borders close in the Levant, when sanctions bite into banks in Beirut, when surveillance escalates in Damascus or Baghdad, Hezbollah’s South American infrastructure absorbs the shock. It keeps the lights on. Quietly. Hezbollah’s footprint in South America must be reinterpreted in light of this logic. Its operations are not merely about funding jihad, nor do they reflect simple criminal diversification. Rather, they represent a strategic adaptation: a forward-looking response to growing constraints in the Middle East and a model of globalized insurgency capable of surviving geopolitical disruption. By embedding itself in regions with weak enforcement, complex diasporas, and pliable state actors, Hezbollah has created a system that mirrors and supplements its core operational capacities in Lebanon. The implications ripple outward to multinational corporations, humanitarian NGOs, diplomatic missions, and financial institutions operating in the Western Hemisphere.

More Than a Militia: A Low-Burn Threat with High-Stakes Implications for South America

Most strategic planning in the Americas does not seriously account for Hezbollah. But Hezbollah includes the Americas in its strategy—and has for years. Reports by the U.S. State Department, regional intelligence agencies, and investigative journalists have traced its fundraising and logistics operations as far back as the 1980s. The group’s involvement in the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy and the 1994 attack on the AMIA Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires shocked the region and revealed its operational reach. Yet even after those attacks, Hezbollah’s local infrastructure remained largely untouched. Over time, it adapted—becoming quieter, less kinetic, and more commercially embedded.

Today, Hezbollah’s presence in the region extends beyond Argentina. Its operatives and facilitators maintain networks across Paraguay, Brazil, Venezuela, and increasingly, Panama and Chile. In some areas, the group benefits from corrupt municipal officials and overburdened law enforcement. In others, it leverages familial ties within Lebanese diaspora communities—many of which have resided in South America for generations and engage in wholly legitimate commerce. This duality allows Hezbollah to move seamlessly between legal and illegal domains, between visibility and invisibility. What is more, Hezbollah’s activities in South America illustrate a critical shift in how non-state actors pursue durability. The post-9/11 focus on active cells, kinetic operations, and centralized command has obscured the ways in which militant groups evolve under pressure. Hezbollah’s Latin American strategy reflects not just persistence, but future-proofing. It prepares the group to operate, fundraise, and survive—even if Lebanon’s political landscape collapses or U.S. and Israeli countermeasures grow more precise. This is what makes Hezbollah’s Latin American footprint so consequential—and so misunderstood. It does not need to launch attacks from Buenos Aires or Caracas to matter. Its function lies elsewhere: in logistics, in mobility, in backup planning. Its value is latent—until it isn’t.

This article reexamines Hezbollah’s presence in South America as a strategic redundancy network—a global infrastructure designed to insulate the organization from volatility in its home region. It maps Hezbollah’s key nodes across the Tri-Border Area, Brazil, and Venezuela; analyzes how this network blends ideology, crime, and strategic depth; and assesses the risks these structures pose to multinational companies, diplomatic missions, and local governance. By shifting the analytical lens from terrorism-as-attack to terrorism-as-infrastructure, we gain a more accurate understanding of Hezbollah’s evolution. We also sharpen our ability to assess long-term risks that don’t always announce themselves through violence. The threat is not just in what Hezbollah does—but in what it has already built.

To understand Hezbollah’s long game in South America, we must stop treating its regional footprint as a patchwork of illicit side hustles and begin seeing it for what it is: a modular system, designed to flex and absorb pressure. Its parts do not function in isolation. They interlock—geographically, financially, and politically—to provide resilience against external disruption (Fanusie and Entz 2017). The Tri-Border Area and Venezuela anchor this network. One provides operational depth; the other, state-enabled sanctuary. This networked approach reflects a deliberate organizational logic: decentralization without disintegration. Hezbollah doesn’t need to command every operation from Beirut to exert control. Instead, it builds regional capacities—trusted facilitators, revenue-generating enterprises, covert logistics—that can operate semi-autonomously while remaining ideologically and financially tethered to the core. The value lies in the system’s adaptability. South America’s legal pluralism, infrastructural gaps, and uneven political allegiances allow Hezbollah to embed itself in multiple jurisdictions, each contributing to a broader architecture of operational continuity. The redundancy isn’t accidental—it’s engineered to allow Hezbollah to absorb disruption without systemic collapse.

At the confluence of Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina lies the Tri-Border Area, a notorious gray zone where Hezbollah has operated with continuity for over three decades (Marinides 2021). Since the 1990s, the group has leveraged this region’s smuggling economy, its cash-based transactions, and its thin rule of law to generate income and obscure its footprints (Giambertoni March 2025; Singh & Lamar 2024). More than a staging ground, the region functions as a logistical twin to Hezbollah’s Levantine infrastructure: cash businesses, hawala systems, safe houses, and a deep bench of operatives linked by blood, marriage, and communal identity.

The Lebanese diaspora, concentrated in cities like Ciudad del Este and Foz do Iguaçu, provides both legitimacy and opacity. While most community members engage in legal commerce, Hezbollah operatives exploit social and familial networks to build financial pipelines and conceal movement. Individuals like Assad Ahmad Barakat—an alleged financier whose web of import-export businesses stretched across Paraguay and Brazil—reveal the sophistication and scale of these operations (BBC 2018). But what makes the Tri-Border Area especially valuable is not just what Hezbollah can do there—it’s what it can replicate. This zone mirrors the group’s operational core: informal financial tools, plausible cover, limited state oversight. It offers a plug-and-play platform that persists even when international pressure tightens elsewhere.

If the Tri-Border Area is Hezbollah’s logistical limb, Venezuela is its political lung—a place where the group doesn’t just operate despite the state but, increasingly, through it. Under the leadership of Hugo Chávez and now Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela has extended cover to Hezbollah-linked actors in ways that surpass tolerance and verge on partnership. Evidence abounds. In 2015, reports emerged that Venezuelan authorities had issued passports, national ID cards, and even birth certificates to individuals with suspected ties to Hezbollah and other extremist groups (Humire 2020). These documents grant mobility across Latin America and even into Europe. Meanwhile, direct flights between Caracas and Tehran—often operated by Iran’s Mahan Air, a U.S.-sanctioned airline with alleged ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—further illustrate the depth of coordination. Financial networks also interlace. Venezuelan state-owned banks, particularly under Chávez, were reportedly used to move funds on behalf of Hezbollah-aligned entities, sometimes in cooperation with Lebanese banks later implicated in terror financing (Testimony, U.S. Congress 2011). This alignment is less ideological than pragmatic: Hezbollah gains security, access, and mobility; Venezuela gains a partner in sanctions circumvention and international leverage.

Crucially, Venezuela adds a layer of strategic camouflage to Hezbollah’s hemispheric model. While the TBA offers discretion, Caracas offers impunity (Berg 2022). The group can move assets, people, and ideas through Venezuelan channels under the guise of diplomatic exchanges or dual-national transactions. This is state-enabled redundancy: not merely a lack of enforcement, but the active insulation of Hezbollah’s operational flexibility. Together, these zones demonstrate that Hezbollah’s South American presence is not improvised—it is layered. When Argentine prosecutors expose a cell in Buenos Aires, networks in São Paulo remain untouched. When Brazil clamps down on a hawala chain, cash still flows through real estate deals in Caracas. The system is designed to endure partial failure, the way cloud computing routes around downed servers or insurgent groups retreat into sympathetic terrain.

The architecture matters because it reveals the logic behind Hezbollah’s global adaptation. This is not a franchise operation outsourced to disconnected local actors. It is a strategic mesh that functions like a second operating system: invisible unless you’re looking for it, vital when the primary network goes offline. And increasingly, Hezbollah seems to assume that its primary network will face pressure—from war, collapse, sanctions, or surveillance. Its bet on South America is a bet on resilience: that geography, corruption, and complexity will give it space to breathe, to rebuild, to persist (Vianna de Azevedo 2018). If Hezbollah’s operations in South America offer strategic redundancy, then its model of action is what enables that redundancy to function. Hezbollah is no longer simply a militant group with a sideline in organized crime—it is a criminal-security complex, able to blend ideological loyalty, transnational finance, and illicit commerce into a coherent infrastructure.

This hybridization is not an accident of globalization. It is an intentional adaptation: a convergence of warfighting, financing, and shadow governance designed to give the group longevity across regions and regimes. The group’s operations across South America exemplify this logic. Hezbollah traffics in cocaine not because it is drifting ideologically, but because narcotrafficking enables financial independence (Cengiz and Pardo-Herrera, 2023). It launders money through construction firms, front charities, and black-market trade not just to enrich itself, but to diversify revenue streams that are otherwise vulnerable to sanctions, asset freezes, and regulatory scrutiny. The criminal activity is not peripheral—it is integral. It funds social services in Lebanon, underwrites salaries, and maintains Hezbollah’s standing as both a state within a state and an actor without borders.

Although Hezbollah’s operations in South America often emphasize logistics, finance, and redundancy, this does not mean the group has abandoned violent ambitions in the region. It has a bloody legacy. In more recent years, several planned attacks have been foiled. In 2023, Brazilian police stopped a Hezbollah-linked plot to assassinate Jewish community members in São Paulo (Ottolenghi 2024). In 2024, Peruvian police arrested Majid Azizi, who was linked to Iran’s Quds force and a plan to kill Israelis (Associated Press 2024). These incidents reinforce that Hezbollah’s South American presence is not merely infrastructural—it remains strategically capable of violence, should conditions allow or directives come from the group’s central leadership.

Critically, Hezbollah’s integration into South America’s illicit economies also offers another layer of camouflage. In regions like the Tri-Border Area or peri-urban zones of São Paulo and Caracas, Hezbollah-linked actors look indistinguishable from the broader ecology of criminality—traffickers, smugglers, forgers, corrupt customs agents. This horizontal integration into shared logistics chains, financial systems, and market ecosystems makes it harder to isolate and disrupt Hezbollah’s footprint without simultaneously challenging broader organized crime structures. The result is a kind of strategic opacity: Hezbollah disappears not by hiding, but by blending in.

For multinational corporations, humanitarian NGOs, and diplomatic missions operating in South America, this criminal-security complex presents a growing, if largely unacknowledged, threat. The risk does not lie in direct targeting—there is little evidence that Hezbollah seeks to attack Western firms or consulates on South American soil. Rather, the danger lies in proximity and entanglement (Giambertoni April 2025). Financial institutions may unwittingly process laundered money that ultimately funds Hezbollah’s activities. Logistics companies may contract with Hezbollah-linked freight operators (FinCEN 2024). NGOs operating in diaspora communities may encounter pressure, coercion, or exploitation.

Extractive industries—especially in energy, mining, and infrastructure—face particular exposure (Chehayeb 2023). These sectors rely on subcontractors, regional supply chains, and informal agreements that can overlap with Hezbollah’s facilitation networks. The opacity of ownership structures in some Latin American business environments makes it difficult to know where one entity ends and another begins. A subcontractor in Brazil with access to port logistics might also be part of a shell company system that channels funds back to Beirut. A bonded warehouse in Ciudad del Este may function both as a legitimate import hub and a conduit for hawala-based financing tied to Hezbollah’s broader network.

For diplomats, the risks are different but no less concerning. In states with fragile institutions or politicized security services—such as Venezuela or parts of Paraguay—Hezbollah-linked actors may enjoy informal protection from scrutiny. Intelligence-sharing becomes inconsistent. Local officials may be compromised. Embassies may be surveilled—not just by hostile governments, but by non-state actors with access to state resources (Giambertoni March 2025). In these contexts, the lines between criminal enterprise, political patronage, and extremist logistics begin to blur. These risks remain under-assessed. Most private-sector risk management strategies focus on regulatory compliance, physical security, and reputational threats. Few include Hezbollah in their risk matrix—particularly outside of the Middle East. Similarly, many Western diplomatic missions in Latin America treat terrorism as a foreign concern, rather than an embedded dimension of local security dynamics. This leaves a strategic blind spot: a low-visibility, high-impact network capable of exerting pressure not through acts of violence, but through slow, systemic infiltration of commerce, finance, and institutional space.

Hezbollah’s strength lies not only in its weapons, but in its ability to move undetected through legal and illegal spheres (Realuyo 2023). Its South American network functions because it is underestimated—because it doesn’t look like a threat until it’s too late. For governments and global businesses alike, failing to recognize this hybrid model is not just an analytical error. It is a real vulnerability.

Policy Recommendations

If Hezbollah’s operations in South America represent a strategic redundancy network, then our policy responses must move beyond traditional counterterrorism frameworks. We can no longer afford to treat Hezbollah as a regionally bounded threat or assume that the absence of direct attacks in the Western Hemisphere equates to the absence of risk (Williams & Quincoses 2019). What’s needed is a recalibration of threat assessment tools—across intelligence, diplomacy, and corporate risk management—that recognizes Hezbollah’s global infrastructure as a durable, layered, and often latent system of power. Four policy recommendations are set out below.

(1) Reframe Counterterrorism to Include Redundancy Networks. Current counterterrorism paradigms often emphasize active cells, plots, and kinetic capability. But Hezbollah’s South American presence thrives in the space between categories—not as an imminent military threat, but as a strategic platform for financing, mobility, and long-term resilience. Intelligence agencies and regional policymakers should explicitly include redundancy mapping in their threat assessments. This means tracing not only individual actors but also financial pipelines, logistics corridors, and diaspora-based facilitation networks.Tools developed to combat transnational organized crime—such as financial intelligence units, sanctions compliance structures, and asset-tracing software—should be integrated into counterterrorism workflows. This is particularly important in countries with weak institutional capacity. Regional partnerships, including within the Organization of American States, should prioritize shared methodologies for identifying overlapping illicit economies that enable both criminal and extremist actors to operate with impunity.

(2) Build Strategic Partnerships with the Private Sector. Hezbollah’s infrastructure often intersects with legitimate commercial activities: shipping, construction, hospitality, real estate. As such, private sector actors—including banks, insurers, freight companies, and law firms—are essential stakeholders in any meaningful containment strategy. Governments should expand existing public-private initiatives, like those managed through financial transparency task forces and corporate compliance alliances, to include modules specific to extremist logistics and terrorism-financing risk in the Americas.This also means equipping multinational corporations with the right conceptual frameworks. Current risk matrices focus on political instability, cyber threats, and reputational harm. Few companies assess whether their contractors, vendors, or local partners may serve as inadvertent facilitators of a terrorist redundancy system. Governments can assist by anonymizing and sharing case studies, refining due diligence protocols, and funding third-party investigative work through credible local partners and NGOs.

(3) Close Gaps in International and Interagency Coordination. Despite ample documentation of Hezbollah’s activities in the region, international coordination remains ad hoc and episodic. U.S., European, and Latin American enforcement agencies often operate on different threat models, timelines, and political sensitivities. For example, while the U.S. Treasury has sanctioned several Hezbollah-linked individuals and entities in Paraguay and Brazil, host governments have sometimes been reluctant to pursue follow-up action due to domestic constraints or regional geopolitics.To close these gaps, threat fusion centers and regional counterterrorism dialogues must prioritize cross-agency and cross-border approaches. This includes better integration of customs, immigration, and financial enforcement authorities—not just traditional intelligence bodies. Multilateral cooperation should also include non-traditional allies, such as financial technology platforms, compliance software firms, and investigative journalists, all of whom bring unique capabilities to mapping and disrupting Hezbollah’s hemispheric infrastructure.

(4) Recognize the Role of State Complicity and Use Diplomatic Leverage Accordingly. Where Hezbollah has flourished, state complicity or neglect has often played a role. Venezuela’s documented provision of false identification documents and banking channels illustrates how strategic partnerships—whether ideological or transactional—can deepen terrorist networks’ resilience. The United States and its allies must tailor their diplomatic messaging and aid strategies accordingly, making clear that support for terrorist-enabling behavior comes with long-term costs.Sanctions regimes must be selective but targeted. Blanket restrictions can alienate host populations and drive illicit actors further underground, while targeted designations—such as those aimed at specific facilitators or entities—can disrupt network nodes without provoking state backlash. Where possible, quiet diplomacy should accompany enforcement, ensuring that pressure is matched by the offer of capacity-building or reputational incentives for cooperation.

A smarter approach to Hezbollah’s South American infrastructure doesn’t require new tools so much as a new lens. This is not a traditional terrorist threat—it is a system of persistence, one that blends into markets, moves through paperwork, and grows in spaces where governance is uneven (Biersteker 2016). If left unchallenged, it will not just endure. It will adapt.

Conclusion: The Quiet Power of a Backup Plan

Hezbollah’s presence in South America is not incidental, improvised, or peripheral. It is engineered. For decades, the group has invested in a hemispheric infrastructure that does not rely on violence to assert its importance. Instead, it does something more dangerous in the long run: it endures. By embedding itself in transnational supply chains, black-market economies, diaspora communities, and state-permissive jurisdictions, Hezbollah has constructed a strategic redundancy network—a system designed not for visibility, but for survivability.

This network operates on a different frequency from the one to which most counterterrorism frameworks are attuned. It does not seek attention. It does not announce itself through spectacular attacks. It functions in latency—ready to fund, shelter, transport, or regenerate Hezbollah’s central operations when other routes are disrupted. Like any sophisticated backup system, it exists precisely because failure elsewhere is assumed to be inevitable. The danger lies in underestimating this architecture. Policy models that focus solely on immediate threats—explosives, plots, active cells—miss the strategic significance of a group that is thinking in decades, not news cycles. Hezbollah has learned to operate across borders, sectors, and enforcement regimes. It has turned globalization into a defensive perimeter. And it has done so largely beneath the radar of both policymakers and corporate risk officers.

To respond, we must broaden our conception of what constitutes a threat. Hezbollah’s South American operations do not simply reflect a terrorist group looking for cash—they reflect a networked actor preparing for disruption, building flexibility into its geography, financial systems, and political alliances. This demands more than sporadic sanctions or headline-driven crackdowns. It requires an integrated strategy that sees terrorist groups not only as fighters or financiers, but as strategic planners. The lesson of Hezbollah in South America is not that terrorism has gone quiet—it’s that it has gone infrastructure-first. If we continue to ignore the scaffolding in favor of the storm, we will continue to be surprised not by what Hezbollah does—but by how ready it is when the time comes.

References

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Vianna de Azevedo, Christian. 2018. “Venezuela’s toxic relations with Iran and Hezbollah: An avenue of violence, crime, corruption and terrorism.” Revista Brasileira de Ciências Policiais 9(1): 43-90.

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