Hezbollah’s deepening involvement in Latin America’s narcotics trade poses a growing threat to U.S. national security, lawmakers and counterterrorism experts warned during a Senate hearing Tuesday that examined how the Iran-backed militant group is turning to criminal networks to offset financial losses suffered in the Middle East.

The Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control convened the session, titled “Global Gangsters: Hezbollah’s Latin American Drug Trafficking Operations,” to assess what officials described as the group’s “pivot” toward international crime as a source of funding.

“The Foreign Terrorist Organization known as Hezbollah has posed a significant threat to U.S. national security and to our ally, Israel, since it emerged from the violence of the Lebanese Civil War of the early 1980s,” said Senator John Cornyn, who chaired the hearing. “Hezbollah’s threat to the United States and Israel is not geographically confined to the Middle East. Its activities in Latin America are chiefly focused on raising funds for its terrorist operations in the Middle East and elsewhere.”

Cornyn noted that Hezbollah’s operations in the Tri-Border Area—where Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina meet—include “oil smuggling, money laundering, counterfeiting, and illegal weapons procurement.” He warned that the group, weakened by Israeli strikes and dwindling Iranian support, “may be motivated to look elsewhere for funds to carry out its terrorist attacks.”

“In this critical time, Hezbollah may seek to further expand its Latin America drug trafficking and money laundering networks, and that’s why we are holding this hearing today," he said.

Matthew Levitt, Director of the Reinhard Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, testified that Hezbollah’s finances are under unprecedented strain following heavy battlefield and financial losses.

“In the wake of Israel’s blistering reprisal attacks against Hezbollah, the group is facing a cash shortfall just when it needs more money,” Levitt said. “It lost not only key leaders, fighters, and weapons systems, but also millions of dollars stored in underground bunkers destroyed during Israeli strikes.”

Levitt said Israel also targeted Hezbollah’s de facto financial institution, al-Qard al-Hassan (AQAH), which he described as holding “around $750 million a year in Iranian funding and criminal proceeds.” The destruction of those assets has left Hezbollah unable to pay salaries or compensate residents whose homes were damaged in fighting.

“Hezbollah issued postdated compensation checks to residents seeking to rebuild homes,” Levitt noted, “but payments were suspended before most people saw any money.”

With Tehran facing its own economic crisis, Iranian financial support has sharply declined. Lebanese authorities have intercepted multiple attempts to smuggle cash from Iran, Iraq, and Turkey to Hezbollah, Levitt said, leaving the group with “more severe financial constraints than ever before.”

Levitt described the Business Affairs Component (BAC), a Hezbollah unit managing drug trafficking, weapons procurement, and money laundering. He cited operatives selling weapons to the Taliban and laundering hundreds of millions in drug proceeds through the Black Market Peso Exchange and front companies.

“Hezbollah’s BAC has developed close ties with South American drug trafficking organizations,” Levitt said, citing a FinCEN report that described “elaborate schemes involving the Hawala system and intercontinental bulk cash smuggling networks.”

Under pressure, Hezbollah is “doubling down on its criminal enterprises for quick and reliable infusions of cash,” Levitt warned. These include narcotics trafficking, arms smuggling, and money laundering networks spanning South America, West Africa, and Europe.

He pointed to the Rada brothers, Amer and Samer, sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury in 2023 for trafficking cocaine from Colombia to Belize. Amer Rada allegedly funneled up to 80 percent of his commercial profits to Hezbollah.

Levitt added that Hezbollah operatives exploit Latin America’s free trade zones, particularly in Paraguay, Panama, Chile, and Venezuela, which he described as “black holes for illicit trade.”

Marshall Billingslea, a former U.S. Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing, highlighted Venezuela’s emergence as Hezbollah’s new hub.

“As cocaine trafficking routes shifted from Colombia to Venezuela, Hezbollah traffickers made the same shift,” he said.

Billingslea testified that under former President Hugo Chávez, Venezuela “opened its doors to Hezbollah,” allowing it to establish a “major footprint, including a paramilitary training site on Margarita Island.” Under Nicolás Maduro, he said, Hezbollah’s presence “dramatically expanded” alongside its ties to the Cartel de los Soles, a network of corrupt Venezuelan officials involved in drug trafficking.

Tareck El Aissami, a senior Maduro aide and former head of Venezuela’s passport agency, “was instrumental in furnishing passports and citizenship documents to Hezbollah operatives and others from Lebanon, Syria, and Iran,” Billingslea said.

Between 2010 and 2019, regime officials issued more than 10,000 such documents, he added.

“With its Lebanese infrastructure in shambles and Iranian financing uncertain, Hezbollah will make a hard pivot to Latin America and the drug trade in particular,” Billingslea warned.

Ambassador Nathan Sales, former U.S. Counterterrorism Coordinator, called Hezbollah “an international terrorist organization and the Iranian regime’s most capable terror proxy.”

“Hezbollah has long been the tip of the spear in Iran’s ‘ring of fire’ strategy,” Sales said. “But today, Hezbollah may not be able to count on the same level of support from Tehran.”

He described Venezuela under Maduro as “a key enabler of Hezbollah’s malign activity in the Western Hemisphere,” adding that the group “uses Caracas as a base for its criminal activities in the region.”

Sales noted that Hezbollah’s role in drug trafficking dates back decades.

“In the early 1980s, a Hezbollah cleric issued a fatwa approving the sale of drugs to non-Muslims in the West,” he said. “The group has taken full advantage of this decree.”

He cited Operation Titan, a 2008 joint U.S.-Colombian investigation that exposed Hezbollah’s collaboration with Colombian cartels. The probe led to 130 arrests and uncovered evidence that Hezbollah-linked traffickers paid the group a 12% tax on their drug profits.

“Operation Titan is just the tip of the iceberg,” Sales warned. “There are countless more examples of Hezbollah running drugs to finance terror.”

Robert F. Clifford, a former FBI official who pursued Hezbollah for three decades, recalled that Hezbollah’s criminal activity extends to the United States itself. An FBI undercover operation in Charlotte, North Carolina, from 1997 to 2000 dismantled a Hezbollah cell that had raised millions through cigarette smuggling, tax evasion, and insurance fraud.

“These were full-time criminals and part-time terrorists,” Clifford said.

Hezbollah’s network, Clifford added, stretches from Latin America through West Africa to Europe.

“Members and associates ship cocaine from Latin America to West Africa, where it’s moved through countries with large Lebanese communities, then into Europe,” he said.

Officials have also begun referring to Bolivia, Paraguay, and Brazil as a “second Tri-Border Area,” citing growing concern about Hezbollah’s expanding footprint.

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Witnesses called for stronger international cooperation to disrupt Hezbollah’s global crime networks.

Sales urged Latin American countries such as Brazil and Mexico to follow Argentina, Colombia, and Paraguay in formally designating Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. “Half-measures that only sanction Hezbollah’s ‘military wing’ ignore the reality that Hezbollah is a unitary group,” he said.

Experts also called for tighter border security, enhanced intelligence sharing, and renewed cooperation through the 3+1 Framework, which is a joint counterterrorism initiative among the U.S., Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay.

“Hezbollah is adapting to survive,” Clifford warned. “If we do not act now, we risk allowing a terrorist organization with global reach to entrench itself in our hemisphere under the cover of organized crime.”