US national peace and security in its immediate geo-political sphere of influence is increasingly at odds of being breached by a network of anti-American and proxy insurgents founded and connected to the Iranian regime. Iran has been increasing its network of influence in Latin America and is currently using Venezuela as a sanctuary for Hezbollah and high-ranking regime operatives.
Venezuela has been the main state that Iran has focused its resources to influence for the past years and consequently it is the country in the region that is more of particular concern when it comes to Iran’s power in the region, even though it also has built strong relationships with Cuba, Mexico and Brazil.
It should be taken into account that this is but a continuation of the non-alignment foundation of Iran´s foreign policy which has created the impetus for seeking economic and political relationships with states that it sees as being committed to the improvement of south-south relationships.
The gradual political shift to the left in multiple relevant countries within the region in the latter part of the 1990´s and particularly in the first decade of the new millennium has allowed Iran to become more successful in its attempt to improve relations in the region.
The concerted and determined effort on the part of the US since 1995 to isolate Iran internationally has created also a strong impetus among the Iranian leadership to become increasingly more active in its foreign policy in order to effectively prove wrong the asserted claim regarding its supposed isolation as a result of the sanctions by the US.
It should also be taken into account that the Iran’s perspective on its relations with Latin American states has always been more moralistic, rigid and quarrelsome than most other significant non-aligned movement states such as India, Brazil or China.
Since the time of the Chavez government, Venezuela and Iran initialized a series of cooperative steps with Iran that have allowed it to strategically evade some of the international sanctions on its regime and national economy with the activity between both states lying beyond the normal scope of relations between two nations, and with the strategic goal from the start being the establishment of an anti-US coalition with a strong base in Latin America.
One of the most important strategic assets developed within this plan by Iran in its relationship with Venezuela has been the founding of Venezuela Banco Internacional de Desarrollo (BID), an international banking institution that was established in September 2007 and that is owned by Toseyeh Saderat Iran bank, an institution of the Iranian regime.
The bank has been designated by the US Treasury Department´s Office of Foreign Asset Controls (OFAC) in October 2007 as a financial vehicle of the government of Iran to fund Hezbollah, Hamas and other Iran controlled and financed terrorist groups and help the Iranian state evade the international financial sanctions that it has suffered and been targeted by the US government.
Additionally, the bank is also used to further spread the Iranian network in the Latin American region and is also under a set of UN sanctions to were put in place as an effort to cut off Iran´s access to international banking institutions to fund its nuclear program.
The official purpose of the bank has been to finance various strategic areas of industry and trade however this is only a façade for what the true purpose is in which the bank serves as a means of flow of revenue that escapes the sanctions.
Currently, as civil unrest continues in Iranian society with anti-regime protests, the Iranian state has been actively seeking to arrange multiple asylum grants for high-ranking officials and their relatives to take refuge in Venezuela as well as obtaining Venezuelan passports for Hezbollah connected members of the regime, with the intention of relocating them there should the situation of unrest gets extreme or there is a civil war in Iran.
Additionally, Western sources located in the country have discovered that the Islamic Republic has also started negotiations in the last months with the Venezuelan Maduro regime to accelerate the move of multiple operatives to Venezuela in order to further its influence operation in the region.
There have been in the last months an average of 3 flights a day from Iran to Venezuela, caring cargo that is suspected to be possibly equipment for personnel to assemble for the establishment of a greater network.
Latin America is a critically opportune region for Iranian covert operations that target the US and its allies and that is ultimately the greater goal of Iran.
This can also be proven by intelligence leaks such as the ones CNN journalist managed to obtain in 2017, with the leaked intelligence documents linking Venezuela new Vice President Tarec El Aissami to 173 Venezuelan passports and ID´s that were issued to Iranian and Iranian affiliated Middle Eastern individuals connected with Hezbollah.
In addition to the security threat that this represents to democratic open societies in Latin America, this represents a direct threat to the US since these passports allow these Hezbollah Iranian regime operatives to travel across North America and to Western Europe and possibly launch attacks from there on regime dissidents or even terror attacks.
Maduro has thus extended a safe harbour to a number of terrorist groups, which is not new in the history of the country under the control of this regime. Ultimately the plan of Iran to effectively expand its presence in the region has been a strategic goal of the Islamic Republic foreign policy strategy since the 1980 under the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as part of the regime´s agenda of exporting the revolution.
In addition to its network of Hezbollah and regime operatives, Iran has further financed to spread its Islamist propaganda its Spanish-language television station- Hispan TV and grown the size of its Spanish programs for Latin Americans in its International Al-Mustafa University. All of this effort as resulted in the growth of terror cells in Latin America that are either directly or indirectly related with the Islamic Republic.
However, as a strategic result of the Ukraine war, Venezuela is currently looking to diversify its connections and longs for the re-establishment of trade and cooperation with the US on oil industry, with Caracas having in the past months made the most out of the increasing need for alternative sources of oil from the Western and Asian countries and Maduro being on a Euro-Asian diplomatic tour to make more trading partners.
Iran´s current President- Ebrahim Riasi has furthermore issued a public diplomatic warning to Venezuela´s Nicolás Maduro against the normalization of its relations with the US, after Caracas recently got closer to the US over the interest by the US government on buying Venezuelan oil in order to balance the lack of oil it has been getting from outside sources as a result of the Ukraine war.
The warning on the part of Raisi’s came as President Maduro said in a televised interview on Sunday that Venezuela was ready to take steps for the “normalization of diplomatic, consular and political relations with the current administration of the US and with administrations to come.”
In conclusion, although it cannot be taken as a strategic certainty if Iran will manage to maintain at the same pace the growth of its influence in the region as of now, strategically speaking the Iranian challenge will in Latin America become greater to the US if it fails to take action to impede the growth of its influence in the Latin American region.
By The European Institute for International Law and International Relations.
