Hezbollah's Presence in Latin America

From the American Enterprise Institute's new report, "The Mounting Hezbollah Threat in Latin America":

• In 2007, one member of the network plotting a terrorist attack at New York’s JFK International Airport met with radical Iranian cleric and Western Hemisphere point man Mohsen Rabbani in Iran; he was subsequently arrested in Trinidad en route to Venezuela, where he planned to board a flight to Tehran.

• In a September 2009 speech, then–District Attorney of New York Robert Morgenthau identified Hugo Chávez’s two principal interlocutors with Hezbollah: Venezuelan Interior Minister Tarik El Aissami, who was suspected of having issued passports to Hezbollah operatives, and Venezuelan Ghazi Nassereddine, who has been sanctioned by the United States as a terrorist financier of Hezbollah.

• In 2010, a sensitive source confirmed that two Iranian Hezbollah operatives were conducting terror training on Venezuela’s Margarita Island for people brought there from other countries in the region.

• In July 2010, Mexican authorities arrested Jameel Nasr in Tijuana, Mexico, for attempting to set up a Hezbollah network in Mexico and throughout the region.

• On August 22, 2010, Hugo Chávez hosted a terror summit of senior leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Caracas.

• In April 2011, Venezuelan drug kingpin Walid Makled confirmed in an interview that Hezbollah operates cocaine labs in Venezuela with the protection of the country’s government.

• In August 2011, the Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera reported that Hezbollah had established a cell in Cuba to expand its terrorist activity and possibly facilitate an attack on Jewish targets in the Western Hemisphere.