DANGER NEARBY

Iran's proxies are still operating in South America, and they've struck before.

This week, Washington was consumed with evaluating the impact of the U.S. strike on Iran’s three principal nuclear sites last weekend, and the wider toll that the conflict with Iran may have had to degrade its capacity to threaten Israeli and U.S. interests. While Democrats and Republicans have sparred this week over the details of the U.S. bombing raid, the wider analysis points to the ineffective military response by Iran against Israeli strikes and the collapse of its air defenses as signs of Iranian weakness. The Israeli destruction of the leadership structures of Iran’s principal proxy forces in the region — Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon - is seen as having debilitated Iran’s main strategic advantage in striking soft targets. Markets recovered on greater confidence that the threat of further conflict has subsided.

However, experts have also raised concerns this week about the longstanding presence of Iranian proxy networks - including branches of Hezbollah - still operating openly in parts of Latin America, far from the eyes of those watching current events here in D.C.

What is underneath?

In late March, the RAND Corporation published a new report on Hezbollah’s networks in the region which was designed to raise alarm in Washington about the “significant knowledge gap in existing assessments” during a period of rising tensions following the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023, the outbreak of war in Gaza and the Israeli decimation of Hezbollah’s leadership and fighting forces in Lebanon.

Only weeks after that conflict erupted, Brazilian authorities thwarted a terror plot allegedly being organized by Hezbollah which would have involved attacks on Jewish religious and community sites in Brazil. It brought back painful memories of the deadly terrorist bombings in Buenos Aires in the 1990s which were perpetrated through Iran’s proxies, targeting the Israeli embassy and the AMIA Jewish community center.

I was in Brazil in October 2023 and wrote from São Paulo about how most of the region’s governments struggled with condemning Hamas after its attack on Israel. Some openly cheered them on. What’s more, I was struck by the cultural advances that vehemently antisemitic voices had made in Brazilian society, particularly from elements of the Lebanese and Syrian diaspora that has now spent more than a generation in the country.

Young Brazilian men driving taxis and Uber cars in multiple areas of the city throughout my time there were listening to internet radio programs featuring antisemitic lectures and discussions of conspiracy theories by self-described Brazilian “sheiks” and “imams”. Friends and acquaintances of mine, many of whom are highly educated, were repeating false information to me over lunch or coffee about “Jewish conspiracies” at the heart of Brazil’s organized crime problem, or sharing faked reports over social media that were transparently designed as disinformation tactics created in Portuguese and Spanish for the region, all promoting Hamas’ false narratives about its own attack.

Later in 2023, I noticed a disturbing rise in social media posts pushing into my feeds from Brazil which glorified the Hamas guerrillas who stormed into southern Israel, including by hang-glider, in order to slaughter and kidnap Israeli civilians. They were being amplified or supplemented by a well-established network of anti-American and antisemitic influencers on digital broadcasts (terrestrial and digital radio, podcasts, YouTube shows) who habitually portray every violent, upsetting world event as part of a broader narrative where the U.S. and its evil allies are dominating and enslaving a unified “global South” while “freedom fighters” (Hamas, etc.) heroically resist. I was amazed at how pervasive and unchallenged these narratives were and how they bled into mainstream media discussions.

Doug Farah, a former United Press International bureau chief in El Salvador and a well-known expert on Hezbollah’s history and operations in the region, gave an interview this week in Argentina. He argued that the proxy army’s decades of experience and operations in the region have increased its expertise in spreading local disinformation and leveraging the large and well-established Arab diaspora communities in many countries there.

Iran’s proxies have long collaborated with Russian propaganda outlets in the region like the local language broadcast networks of RT which are carried on basic cable systems and gained an early foothold on social media platforms there. RT energetically amplifies the anti-American and antisemitic disinformation narratives which arise from these sources, as they mirror RT’s own stories of Russian “heroism” in fighting “Nazis” in Ukraine and President Vladimir Putin’s promise of a “multipolar” world.

In addition, Iran and its proxy allies have the full-throated diplomatic, political and logistical support of the governments of Venezuela and Nicaragua; the loud and vocal moral support of President Gustavo Petro of Colombia; as well as close ties to vital factions within the political movements of Evo Morales in Bolivia, Cristina Kirchner in Argentina and President Lula da Silva of Brazil.

These realities on the ground show how successful the efforts have been, penetrating wider communities and finding allies and fellow travelers for these narratives within elements of the political mainstream. This points to a segment of global Iranian proxy power that was not touched in the recent conflict and appears to have real potential to exert pressure. Apart from the government of President Javier Milei of Argentina, which counts itself as an ally of both the U.S. and Israel, no government in the region has sounded a public alarm.

Our take:

I wrote with great frustration over a year ago that the United States had surrendered the strategic communications battle within our own hemisphere to our adversaries. The forces of malign disinformation were increasingly winning, harming U.S. national security in support of the aims of despotic, anti-democratic regimes like Russia, China and Iran.

The RAND report and Doug Farah’s words of warning should act as an alarm bell for the Trump Administration, which not only has senior brass expertise in Latin America but harbors a robust and all-terrain approach to strategic communications in defense of U.S. interests. The evident success of anti-American and antisemitic disinformation throughout Latin America in recent years is the most glaring anecdotal evidence that Iran’s proxy arms in the region are, at best, welcome or, at worst, fully embedded and operational in the sphere of public influence.

The intelligence community, along with the national security apparatus, should heed the warnings from RAND and fill those information gaps on what Hezbollah and its affiliated networks are doing today in Latin America. Previous efforts to break up Hezbollah operations in the Tri-Border Region between Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay have apparently not eliminated their presence so much as dispersed it. The increasing echo of their voices in Brazil’s urban centers are an indication of that.

Furthermore, Latin American governments need to be more effectively challenged on the threat that many of them have been welcoming into the region with open arms. It isn’t just Chinese infrastructure money or Russian broadcast networks in Spanish that are playing at this game. There are terrorist networks that have struck before whose state sponsor has embassies in every Latin American capital, and whose dictatorial leaders are embraced at summits. The threat has proven real for decades, and recent events can only make it more important to Iran to maintain or strengthen as it nurses its wounds on its home front and looks to its next battlefield.

Note to Readers:

I will be taking time off next Friday - which is the 4th of July, of course - so we won’t be publishing an edition next week. Happy Independence Day, U.S.A.