Hezbollah’s Long Game in Latin America

Sasha Ingber: Welcome to Spycast, the official podcast of the International Spy Museum. I'm your host, Sasha Ingber, and we are in the midst of a month of episodes on Latin America, crossing borders and decades to explore clandestine activities that have shaped our world.

A 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Argentina opened the world's eyes to Hezbollah's presence in Latin America. But the Iranian proxy, a US designated terrorist group, has operated in the region since the 1980s. It started in the Trior area of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. Earning the nickname the “United Nations of Crime” and the Drug Enforcement Administration has said Hezbollah's revenues in Central and South America fund their terrorist plots overseas.

West Tabor, a former DEA agent, knows all about it. He was part of a landmark case that exposed their ties to drug cartels and financial institutions. Now he takes us into the present. Describing how the US' removal of Nicholas Maduro in Venezuela impacts Hezbollah's presence in the Western Hemisphere today.

Hey Wes, thank you so much for flying in from Florida. 

Wes Tabor: Yeah, it's quite the trip. 

Sasha Ingber: So let's start by talking about how a Hezbollah came to build roots in Latin America. 

Wes Tabor: Sure. So when you look at what Hezbollah has done over the last 50 years it's, it's gone crazy. You started Civil War in 1975, then you had diaspora groups that kind of moved out from the Civil War until 1990.

Right? So you have that 15 year range before the truce is called with within Lebanon. But then you have these groups that have gone out, these Lebanese group of people, and they find in the trans-border areas. In Paraguay, Brazil, so forth, and they start spreading out. But the important thing to understand is why are they doing this?

Well they're looking for places that they can go to with weak governments to exploit what they want to do, and they've leveraged the Lebanese and Shiite diaspora, that community in Latin. 

Sasha Ingber: Is this to fund their overseas terrorist plots? What is the ultimate point when they started doing this? 

Wes Tabor: Well, their whole goal is against the west, against Israel, and they need money to fight.

Right? Even though Iran is gonna fund them, they still have to make their own funding. I mean, they're not wholly and totally funded by Iran, right? But they want to create their own. Income. Income. So they've been in Latin America for decades. 

Sasha Ingber: What exactly are they doing with the funds? 

Wes Tabor: So if you're gonna have Hezbollah operations that are gonna affect the motherland to fund terror operations, you need money to do that.

You need training, you need to move people around. You need equipment, you need all these things that cost money. That's what their goal is. And you just can't go into these different parts of the world and just say the money's clean. And all the nature of money laundering is not that. You could just go in and say, here, I have all this money.

There's rules, there's banking regulations. Things of this nature. So you have to find weak structures, weak governments that you can go into and try to launder the money, create the money so that you know you can implement it into a clean environment so you can use it at a later date to fund what you need to do operationally.

Sasha Ingber: You were a part of Operation Titan, which was a collaboration between the United States and Columbia to target Hezbollah's Financial Networks in 2004. Tell us more about that operation and its revelations. 

Wes Tabor: So I had a very small part in this. Okay. I was working in Central America. I was running the operations where the undercover would come in and we'll call him Frank.

Frank was the undercover, he's uh, fluent Arabic speaker, French speaker, and he was doing all the undercover. So all the other agents were supporting him, the analysts and so forth, working with special operations division. And the goal was to identify as many Hezbollah financiers as we could and players within that game and the Colombians as well.

And then take it down at the end. After we laundered $10 million worth of funds. 

Sasha Ingber: What was the ultimate result of Operation Titan? How do you measure that? 

Wes Tabor: Well, we measure in law enforcement by arrests and seizures. So in this case, I believe they, they seized. Upwards and laundered upwards of $10 million worth of money.

A little bit more than that maybe, but we seized, we seized upwards of $23 million. So they bring the money to you. You launder the money, you give them some money. That's how it starts, right? And then eventually you work it up where they're gonna drop off millions of five, six, $8 million, $10 million, and then you do a takedown.

You start arresting. They arrested hundreds of people across the globe. They had done wiretaps, they had done a whole myriad of investigative efforts all around the world. With Operation Titan, and they provided leads to friendly governments and law enforcement and other countries. So in that way, yes, it was very informative because we identified bank accounts, banks that were maybe not doing what they should have done.

They should have been much more legitimate and they weren't. And we identified those as well. So we had peripheral discoveries as well as the actual criminals themselves. 

Sasha Ingber: Were the criminals, low level criminals, or are we talking about the leadership as well? 

Wes Tabor: No, no, no. We had, we had some very high level people within Hezbollah that were identified.

They had identified individuals that were tied at the highest levels, uh, in Lebanon, and, and they were obviously a trickle down effect as, as it spread out over the map in which they were operating and investigating. 

Sasha Ingber: Were they extradited? 

Wes Tabor: No. No, some of them weren't because how are you gonna going to Lebanon and get some of these players?

Are you gonna get someone that's in Iran or you know, some of these countries that they hired in Safe Haven and you're never gonna get 'em? Right? But those who aren't in those countries, oh, they arrested a lot of people and some really good targets as well. 

Sasha Ingber: So then why is Hezbollah still such a problem?

Wes Tabor: It's like saying, why are Colombian cartel still a problem? I mean, we cannot eradicate all crimes. And I, I have a lot of people tell me this all the time, they'll say, well, the war on drugs, it's not a war number one, but it's a struggle against crime, right? The war on drugs. We're never gonna win the war on drugs.

Why don't you just give up and legalize it? We don't do that for domestic violence. We don't do it for robbery. We don't do it for all the other crimes that are out there either. So we just don't give up. We're still gonna fight against the crime that's occurring. It's our laws that we have to enforce.

And so to say, why are they still in existence? Well, Al-Qaeda's still in existence and we've been fighting them for what, three decades. Right. Yeah. Right. They can't be fully eradicated. We cannot root them out fully, but we can keep them at bay. I do believe we can keep them at bay and keep them at a point where they're somewhat manageable, where they're not endangering or killing the people that they were prior to us attacking them, for example, with like Al-Qaeda or, or Isis.

Sasha Ingber: There was a report from Politico in 2017 that said that the Obama administration had essentially put Project Cassandra the larger mission of going after Hezbollah financing aside in pursuit of a nuclear deal with Iran. What effect did that have in Latin America? You have to realize that, you know, obviously geopolitics are gonna trump a lot of narcotics investigations.

Wes Tabor: It happens all the time. So when I spoke to people that were doing these types of investigations, they felt that they were stifled. When you have an investigation like Titan, even though it was very successful, it was a great investigation, we might launder $10 million. So we just don't have the manpower and the bandwidth to do everything to, to accomplish the mission that we really need to accomplish.

And that's eradication of these types of, of operators in the country. It's just almost impossible. 

Sasha Ingber: So let's move into the present. How have Hezbollah's operations evolved from when you were working Operation Titan? To today, here in 2026.

Wes Tabor:  I think they have stayed pretty consistent. You know, you have Captagon, which is a, a, a narcotic that they, they sell by the hundreds of millions of pills in the Middle East.

They send that money around to fund we have groups, for example, hiding in Venezuela, there was a very large uptick, according to my sources that we had in Venezuela. They were going there because they wanted to get into the fight. And it's basically a geographical displacement where, you know, you might have in the tri border area.

Before you might have had a lot of people and you still do, 'cause you have embedded people. People go there, they develop their lives, they develop their businesses, their families, and so forth, and they continue their criminal conduct. And those things stayed the same I think in the end. Things have stayed basically the same.

Sasha Ingber: You mentioned Venezuela specifically? Elite Delta forces seized Nicholas Maduro and his wife from a military compound in Caracas that came from orders from President Trump. Will a Venezuela that no longer has Maduro at its helm diminish Hezbollah's presence, will it be less likely to give refuge to this group?

Wes Tabor: So that's a loaded question because right now we've removed the malignancy, but remember there's like 14 or 15 other indictments of the top echelon within that, that government that are still there. Diosdado Cabello . You know, this guy has control of the military. You have Vladimir Padrino. You have Delcy Rodriguez, who was the vice president.

Now she's the president and she is the same problem that they just got rid of. So what's gonna happen with this vacuum, with the removal of Maduro? And I know when Trump had his his conference and he was talking about it, he said, well, we're gonna make sure that we support what's going on in that country so we can take the oil and all these other things, right?

Which led to a myriad of, of comments coming from the Press Corps and so forth and other people around the country, right? It's all about the oil. But the fact of the matter is that we had a convergence of several, uh, bad non-state actors and proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah both converged in Venezuela. They have a permissive environment in Venezuela.

I mean, they can do whatever they want in Venezuela. 

Sasha Ingber: Well, the Trump administration believes that there can be a level of pliancy with his inner circle that Delcy Rodriguez, the interim president, is now expressing some willingness to work with the United States, even though she had called for his release. Explain what the Maduro regime, even without Maduro, has to gain from allowing Hezbollah to operate in Venezuela. 

Wes Tabor: Mm-hmm. So they have like-minded efforts that they want to accomplish, and that is how can we overthrow the United States? How can we work together? Because remember, the Middle East has had Americans in it fighting against the Iranian efforts.

Hezbollah efforts. We have everything that was going on in the Middle East for the last 30 years, right? So they want a shot at us in our hemisphere. And how are they gonna do that? Well, they need safe haven. They need more than a permissive environment. They want a supportive environment, and that's what they found in Venezuela.

So you have a symbiotic relationship between a government, Venezuela, who is the emerging over the last 30 years, socialistic change to dictatorship, fighting with the Cubans, embracing the Russians, embracing the Iranians because they all had this common enemy, which was the United States of America and the Western, obviously England, Canada, and so forth, even though they try to remain somewhat more neutral, right?

But we've also seen Hezbollah try to conduct terrorist attacks in South America, which is destabilizing. Yeah. So think about this. They're not doing attacks in Venezuela. Why are they not doing attacks in Venezuela? Because they need Venezuela for their safe haven and their, and their safe passage and to protect their assets and so forth.

So that's not gonna happen in Venezuela. So that's the importance of a country like Venezuela and the regime like Venezuela. So they in a way, are also protected from the threats that Hezbollah presents. 

Sasha Ingber: Can you speak specifically about Margarita Island? This is Venezuela's largest island, and it has also been described as being Hezbollah's most important foothold in Latin America, even having a paramilitary training site.

Wes Tabor: So with Margarita Island, one of the things is it used to be a pristine park. It's known for gorgeous waters and things like that. People can look at it on YouTube and see just beautiful. But what the Chávez government did was, and we don't know if this is at the behest of Hezbollah, we don't know if this is a behest of Iran.

We don't know where this came from, but they took a lot of property from the National Park system and they turn it into a government area. They turn it into their own little government piece of the pie. And I know on that area of the island, they have different military aspects that you can go to. For example, military families can go and actually be in certain parts of these little base houses and things like that.

And according to the reporting, they have Hezbollah training camps there where they go and they train and they're free to do whatever they want. They can do maritime operations, they could do air operations, they could do land operations, things like that. So all that's out there. And I think when you're looking at the remoteness of the islands, it's, it's important strategically, but Venezuela has vast jungles in the South that can accomplish almost the same thing, but a little bit differently.

Obviously, you're not in more of a Caribbean kind of environment. You're more in a jungle environment in the south, where in the north. So they get the best of both worlds by moving back and forth potentially. And, but the isolation there is a lot more in Margarita on the Caribbean coast side. So that gives them an advantage in continuing to plan more operations to, well, I wouldn't say like an advantage, but what I would say is it gives them an a different environment that they can go to and they can do whatever they're gonna do in a water operational environment.

So if you're gonna plan for a water operation, where would you want do it? Well, you wanna do it on a coastal, whereas if you could do marine, river operations, repeat operations, whatever it might be, and you're going to the south and you're in a river. For certain specific operations you might do, right? So you want to have a, a different playing field for whatever you want, whatever operation is mountain snow and cold jungle ocean. So that's probably what they're doing is they want the different types of environments that they can go and train in. 

Sasha Ingber: When we come back Wes weighs how a weakened Iran influences its proxy group in Latin America.

Beyond the terrorism threat that Hezbollah poses and drug trafficking, the crime, there's also a major intelligence vector when it comes to Iran. Do you see Iran relying more heavily on Hezbollah at this time, especially now that the United States has removed Maduro and is going to be more involved in the country.

Wes Tabor: In my opinion, it goes in a different direction, right? So. It's not just reliance upon Hezbollah or a proxy to do what they want to do there. Right now, the priority for the Venezuelan government is who is gonna be in charge, who is going to replace Maduro and all the other elements of that at peripheral, including Hezbollah, Hamas.

Don't forget, we have Colombian terror groups over there, narco terror groups. You have the FARC. Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia. And they are the basically the revolutionary forces of Columbia. And they are one of the largest, if not the largest drug trafficking organization in the world with cocaine, right?

'cause they're the source country for cocaine. And then you have other organizations, paramilitary organizations that went to Venezuela as well. So you have all these elements that are there originally to support. Venezuela, because they don't wanna lose that sweet spot that they have, right? Because they can do whatever they want there.

Well, now what's in flux is who's gonna be mandating who comes in, who does what, what we're gonna do within Venezuela. So it's not in my view right now, because this is obviously right after Maduro's been plucked out, Iran, Russia, China, all of these power sources are gonna say, how can we influence to get what we need in these countries?

Right? And that's gonna be a play too. But I think right now you're gonna see a real, real barrier put up by the Venezuelan power plays, whether it be military or civilian. They have to get their house in order first. They're worried about first survival, primal survival right now, rather than what are they gonna do with all these other individuals from the outside?

Right? 

Sasha Ingber: There is this shadow game of who can influence who and who gets to stay on Venezuelan soil. When we're speaking specifically toward Iran, let's remember when Mossad conducted that operation where the pagers and walkie talkies exploded. This was a very bold attack on Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon, in Syria.

Did that have a secondary effect in Latin America? 

Wes Tabor: I don't think it did for the Latin American elements, per se. It certainly, I don't think it had much of an effect when it comes to the people, for example, in Colombia, the Colombians, the Venezuelans, actual Venezuelans. But when you have the reverberation of what they did.

Because it was extremely successful and the people were maimed and killed and so forth. I mean, if you're a terrorist and you're operating, it doesn't matter where you are and you're part of that organization, you're gonna start thinking like, man, I don't want a pager. They don't wanna make that mistake again.

But I think in, in the minds of a lot of these people that are moving and shaking in different parts of the world, they're thinking of other things rather than that, you know, especially for the people native to those countries. I, I don't think seriously that they, they are considering what happened back with that operation.

You know, in President Trump's first term, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Panama, they declined to designate Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. Who would you say the US' most important partners are when it comes to fighting Hezbollah in the region? It depends on where, what we're talking about, right? Whether it's northern and region, Southern Indian region in South America.

But you don't get any better than Israel's partnerships around the globe. Their intelligence structure, what they do, the relationship that we have with them from a United States perspective. And I worked with them when I was with DEA, uh, on other things and, and their source networks are fantastic. So I mean, number one, in my view, anywhere in the world when it comes to Hezbollah is gonna be Mossad or another agency within the Israeli government that might be doing whatever they're out doing anywhere around the world.

It just doesn't get better than those guys. 

Sasha Ingber: The situation on the ground in Venezuela is changing really quickly now, day-to-day, new developments after Maduro was taken, what will Hezbollah be doing to try to ensure its own survival there? Who would you say that they are trying to get closer to in terms of gangs, cartels, the Venezuelan government itself?

I think they're gonna draw close to whoever they think's gonna win. I mean, this is self preservation. We'll have to wait and see. But you know, they were on different military bases within Venezuela and that comes from their relationship with the mil military elements. So my bet would be that's what they're gonna kind of back, but I think they're gonna be playing both sides of the fence until they really know what's gonna happen.

Right now, I think they're kind of waiting to see who's gonna take charge, right? So when we talk about Venezuela, you hear the term Cartel des los Soles, right? Or the cartel of the suns, because that comes from the generals that have little suns on their epaulettes, right? And here in the United States, we have stars, right?

So they call it the Cartel des los Soles, but it's not just military people, it's civilians. It's president like Nicholas Maduro. It's different element like Hugo Carvajal Barrios who was the spy master and like number three or four in the government that ran all the military intelligence. And he's currently in jail in New York.

Right. Uh, and, and then you have other people that go all the way down to the private on the street to the police officer. They're all part of the Cartel des los Soles. 

Sasha Ingber: And the Trump administration has said that this is a network that traffics in drugs. Some say it's a loose network. Others say it's theoretical.

Wes Tabor: Yeah, well we can see from the indictment, right? So it's not just narcotics, but it's weapons. So we have narcotics, we have weapons, we have potential terror acts or material support for terrorists like the FARC coming outta Columbia. 'cause they're a terror organization. They kidnap people, they kill people, they blow things up and they move narcotics to fund all their activities.

So the Cartel des los Soles goes from A to Z, everyone involved, right? Including, I would include the Vice President Delcy Rodríguez in that as well, even though she's technically the president and may stay there. But the problem that these groups are facing and Hezbollah is facing is who are they gonna trust within the cartel Des los Soles? Who are they gonna know in the end who's gonna take charge? Is it gonna be the military or is it gonna be Delcy Rodriguez and and her whole crew? And here's another big earmark. Who is the United States gonna back because if the United States is gonna back someone, they might say, Ooh, we, we have got the fight even harder to make sure we eradicate that effort.

Because if the United States actually succeeds in planting the flag, in the shadows, of course, behind another figure, then they have no chance to win that fight. 

Sasha Ingber: I know that you served as the DEA attache in Venezuela from 2010 to 2013, and you say that you met with generals and politicians from the cartel des los Soles. What were they like?

Wes Tabor:  So I've probably met upwards of seven members of the cartel des Los Soles. Out of the 15 that have been indicted, I've met about five of them. One general specifically who later was arrested by me, and his name is Hugo Carvajal Barrios. Okay. He was the military intelligence chief. He was the, what they called the spy master.

We actually did the effect of the arrest and an island called Aruba, which many people have heard 'cause it's a great vacation spot. He was subsequently released by the Dutch government under pressure from. Some countries, and you could see the reporting on this, especially from Russia, and they returned him to Venezuela where he had a hero's welcome.

And so we had everything we thought wired up so we'd be able to take him to the United States. And we didn't have 32 ships out at sea and the Marines and, and the special forces and so forth to do this. This was just me and some other people doing the operation with the locals. And uh, it was successful, but in the end geopolitics took place and they put him back in Venezuela, but he was subsequently arrested in Europe at a later date, and then he was brought to New York where he pled guilty. He's currently awaiting sentencing, right. In New York. Right. 

Sasha Ingber: What were your impressions of him? 

Wes Tabor: So when you sit down with someone who is accustomed to being in charge.

He was in charge of thousands and thousands of men. He was a high level, general, very close friend and associate of Hugo Carvajal, more so than he was of Nicholas Maduro. But he still was an institution. I mean, he was known as El Pollo, and he was feared because he was a brutal man. 

Sasha Ingber: So known as the chicken?

Wes Tabor: Yeah. Known as the chicken pollo. Yeah. When I met him, the first time I, I realized that he was. Like two feet shorter than me, and it was like such a feared guy, was such a small human being, and I was kind of shocked at first. But then as we sat and talked, I realized he was very intellectual, a very intellectual person, very into art, very into language, very into many things as sophistication.

So it was really something that surprised me in a sense because I pictured this monster and he was everything but that on its face. Right? But I knew what he was deep down because obviously, and you can read about this guy, the things that he's accused of doing, and I knew that going in, so there was a lot of, uh, anticipation of him trying to manipulate me and so forth.

But I, I knew this going in. 

Sasha Ingber: What, what did he do? 

Wes Tabor: Well. If you look at his in indictment, you'll see that he was working with the, the FARC, Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombias to move cocaine. He was working with the Russians, he was moving weapons, he was doing all kinds of things. He's accused of homicide, he's accused of a bunch of things.

He wasn't charged with some of that stuff. In the United States, but in other countries, especially Columbia, they accused him of killing some intelligence officers that were in Venezuela. They had sent some intelligence officers into Venezuela to gather evidence on him, and then they were subsequently disappeared and later found to be killed, and they believed that he's the one that did it.

Sasha Ingber: And which country were those Intel officers from? 

Wes Tabor: From Columbia. Okay. From Columbia. 

Sasha Ingber: Did he work with Hezbollah? 

Wes Tabor: We believe that he had relationships with everyone and anything that moved in Venezuela. 

Sasha Ingber: You had also previously described to me how Florida is really on the frontline for Venezuelan operatives, that they maintain deep networks in Miami, that billions of illicit dollars get funneled through the financial system.

And we have seen the Justice Department make arrests of suspected Hezbollah operatives in the United States. Some of those cases unfolding in Miami. Is there a Hezbollah financier quotient or component in Florida that we need to be thinking about? 

Wes Tabor: I, I wouldn't say that there's a node of Hezbollah that is, is planting itself or has planted itself in South Florida per se.

But what I will say is the relationship between Miami and Latin America is something that is just. Known throughout the world. It's called the capital. Miami's called the capital of Latin America. It's not even in Latin America. They call it the capital of Latin America because you have everyone coming to Miami from Latin America.

It's like the centric kind of point in the globe for Latinos in Latin America to come to. But what does that do? Because you're talking about cultural relevance, you're talking about the weather, you're talking about the foods, you're talking about all the myriad of things that go along with Latin America in Miami, and families and migration and all these things culminate to something special within Miami.

And that extends to the criminal element as well, because as you have the flow of migration to Miami. As you have more businesses that are working and networking legitimate businesses throughout Latin America to Miami, you have everything pointing to Miami, you're gonna have more crime and more criminal elements.

And remember, they always say Miami was built on cocaine money. Look back in the eighties in the cocaine cowboys, what happened to Miami? Miami grew. By bounds, leaps and bounds. In the 1980s with the cocaine trade, people were investing money in real estate. Where was that money coming from? It was coming from the cocaine trade.

So to think that stopped or, or there's like a recession in a sense of that, and Hezbollah is not operating there, or Cuban intelligence is not operating there, Venezuelan intelligence is not operating there. That would be a notion that just wouldn't be supported. 

Sasha Ingber: So what would ultimately erode Hezbollah?

Wes Tabor Tabor: Ultimately, I, and I'm speaking specifically about the Western hemisphere, if we could mount the kind of necessary actions to seek them out, hunt them out. To utilize some of the laws and augment the laws that would be a little bit more productive and still maintain the disciplines we need in accordance with our constitution and laws and all the things we need, and the funds were unlimited.

We could really almost eradicated almost. You're never gonna get rid of every element of Hezbollah within even the Western Hemisphere, but we can suppress it like we did with the far in Columbia because we pushed them so hard from the 1990s where there was surrounding Bogota and they were gonna take the country over to these remote jungles.

They were still producing cocaine, still making cocaine doing it, but then they had a lifeline in Venezuela where they could go and hide when the heat got on, where they can move the cocaine through and have this permissive environment. The same thing for Hezbollah. How are we gonna reach into Venezuela?

That's gonna be the key in the coming months. There has to be a decisiveness. There has to be action. 

Sasha Ingber: Wes, really appreciate you spending the time to talk about this. 

Wes Tabor: No, thanks for having me. 

Sasha Ingber: Thanks for listening to this episode of spycast. If you like the episode, give us a follow on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and leave us a rating or review.

It really helps if you have any feedback or you wanna hear about a particular topic, you can reach us by email at spycast@spymuseum.org. I'm your host, Sasha Ingber, and the show is brought to you by N2K Networks, Goat Rodeo, and the International Spy Museum in Washington. DC.