Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro’s partnership with Hezbollah has increased the risk that Iran will sponsor terrorism in Latin America, according to an envoy for the socialist leader’s chief rival.
“We don’t have to wait for tragedy to strike to act,” Carlos Vecchio, opposition leader Juan Guaido’s ambassador to the United States, told the Washington Examiner. “We need to come together with a tougher stance on terrorism.”
Maduro’s relationship with Hezbollah and other violent groups has taken center stage in Latin America. Venezuela’s neighbors fear terrorism emanating from the country, especially given Maduro’s support for a left-wing group that bombed a Colombian police academy last year, while Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has tried to rally allies to reinforce U.S. maximum pressure campaigns targeting both Maduro and Iran.
“We all know, too, that the Iranian regime’s top terrorist proxy, Hezbollah, has found a home in Venezuela under Maduro,” Pompeo said Monday at a counterterrorism ministerial in Colombia. “This is unacceptable.”
That denunciation found an echo in a trio of countries that in recent days termed Hezbollah a foreign terrorist organization. Among those is Colombia, which has worked closely with President Trump’s administration throughout the Venezuela crisis. Honduras and Guatemala also blacklisted the group, which last year was branded a terrorist outfit by Argentina and Paraguay.
“Taking these designations through the prism of max pressure, it’s imperative that Washington evict Iranian proxies from the Western Hemisphere as well as try to build on the designation of Hezbollah to try to get these countries to downgrade their bilateral relationships with Iran,” Behnam Ben Taleblu, an Iran expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the Washington Examiner. “It’s worth noting, Washington has several max pressure streams … Are the Iran and Venezuela threads converging? And is the missing link Hezbollah?”
Hezbollah works primarily in Lebanon and is known to have raised money for decades through smuggling operations in Latin America. Maduro and Tehran could be motivated to work more closely together, as U.S. sanctions have deprived both regimes of other revenue streams. Vice President Mike Pence accused Maduro of giving Iran “a safe haven for its terrorist proxies,” which raises the specter of Iran striking the U.S. from the south.
“You talk to counterterrorism people through the years and [ask their] nightmare scenario, they would always say, ‘Hezbollah decides to move from selling counterfeit cigarettes to organizing terrorist operations,’” Heritage Foundation Vice President James Carafano told the Washington Examiner. “This administration seems to have taken it particularly seriously.”
The Trump administration hopes the spotlight on Hezbollah will deter Maduro from giving the Iranian proxy free rein in Venezuela, the Washington Examiner understands. And Vecchio, who hailed the Iranian proxy designations as “a major turn” in the Western Hemisphere, suggested that the Latin American coordination could signal additional regional pressure on Maduro.
“It’s a collective decision that tells the world that Latin America will increasingly deal with the situation in a multilateral way,” Vecchio said.
