U.S. allies in Latin America cracked down this week on Hezbollah, designating the Iranian proxy force a foreign terrorist organization.
“This is all part of a concerted effort on Hezbollah that we see these outcomes right now,” a Middle East official told the Washington Examiner. “Hezbollah is very active in Latin America, so the impact is very, very significant in that sense.”
Colombia and Honduras blacklisted the Iranian proxy in conjunction with a Monday meeting of the Western Hemisphere Counterterrorism Ministerial in Bogota, Columbia, just days after Guatemala took the same step. The three designations, issued one year after Argentina commemorated the 25th anniversary of a Hezbollah terrorist attack in Buenos Aires, broadens the reach of President Trump’s maximum pressure campaign against Iran.
“We have the threat of Hezbollah not only in the Middle East but in South America as well,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Monday on Columbian radio. “It poses a real challenge to the people of the country, and today, you had gathered a dozen-plus leaders from all across Central and South America and from the Caribbean all working together to develop systems and processes and intelligence-sharing operations such that the threat not only from Hezbollah but all other terror groups can be mitigated.”
The foreign terrorist designations could make it harder for Hezbollah to gain access to banking systems in Latin America, where the group historically has conducted smuggling operations to supplement funding from Tehran. The announcements provide a Latin American backstop to an American sanctions campaign designed in part to starve the regime of the resources needed to finance paramilitary operations throughout the Middle East.
“When you sanction the Iranians, not only do they have less money coming out the door to go to the surrogates, they then turn to the surrogates and say, ‘you guys are going to have to raise your own cash,’” James Carafano, a foreign policy expert at the Heritage Foundation, told the Washington Examiner.
“When you squeeze the money that’s coming out of Iran and you squeeze the incoming cash that they’re getting from other sources, that puts a real crimp in the surrogates,” he said. “And that is a real problem for Iran.”
While at the Bogota summit, Pompeo made clear that he hopes the crackdown on Hezbollah will extend throughout the region. “We call on all of our neighbors to adopt legal frameworks that enable them to sanction terrorists,” he said. “We must increase information sharing between our intelligence and law enforcement agencies as well, and we must work together to make our institutions designated to combat terror more transparent and more effective. And we must rally other nations in the hemisphere to join the more than 20 of us who are here today.”
